Published
Thursday, July 06, 2006 10:35 AM
As Red Gate grows bigger, I’m concerned that the culture will change. Some change is inevitable but I’m keen that it changes in a good way rather than develop into a corporate dystopia. In software companies a them and us mentality often develops. The development team view the marketing team as woolly-thinking powerpoint bunnies; the support team think the developers are arrogant nerds; the developers and testers fight battles over trivial points. Nothing ever ships. And when it does, it doesn’t work. And everybody blames everybody else. We’re trying to prevent this happening at Red Gate in several ways.
A lot of the tension can be avoided if people know each other. If the marketing department becomes not just ‘them’ but a set of individuals whom a developer knows then the developer is more likely to understand, and respect, their actions. We’ve got a dedicated Red Gate Feel Good Fund – a pot of money used to organise regular small scale social events such as pub quizzes, punt trips and wine tasting. Every Thursday everybody is invited out for a pub lunch, paid for by Red Gate. We also do larger scale events – a couple of days ago we had our summer event and all went to London for a cruise along the Thames, a trip in the London Eye and a meal on a boat.
We use technology to aid communication as well. This ranges from the low-tech such as whiteboards with ship dates, marketing schedules and a list of banned words and phrases (synergy, social media and thought leadership, for example) to the more high-tech. We have a wiki where people can write about products they’re working on and post competitor profiles and product analysis. We’re going to set up internal instant messaging, blogs and message boards.
As we grow, we’re going to need to pay more attention to these areas. If you’ve got any ideas for what we could do, have examples of what works and what doesn’t, or want to talk about your horror stories, then please post your comments here.