thoughtbot

We are a team of designers and developer who work with startups and companies of all sizes to design, build, and grow great web and mobile products. We have been in business 14 years, are entirely bootstrapped and profitable, and are now a team of 100 designers and developers working face to face with clients in 7 different cities.

When we're not working on client work, we work on our own investment projects, our own products, and more.

Guiding Principles

We regularly eliminate and simplify policies. Our most important policy is "use your best judgement".

We strive for few job titles, few departments, and few hierarchies. We prefer composition of roles necessary for projects and company objectives over inheritance of bosses and direct reports. We are at thoughtbot primarily for our design and development skill, and want to apply it, rather than creating company overhead.

We avoid having private conversations about each other or clients. Instead, we talk in person, and use tools such as Slack, Basecamp, and GitHub to communicate openly within a project, within thoughtbot, and publicly.

While we should be cognizant of people's feelings, and seek to work with each other constructively, we cannot let those concerns get in the way of our happiness and the success of our work. We'd rather be too honest than too polite.

Our standards are very high, and bringing on a new team member requires a "yes" from everyone who participated in the interview process. Therefore, we expect the best from each other, give each other the benefit of the doubt, and encourage each other to take initiative to improve ourselves and the company.

We recognize that we can always be better. Therefore, we have strong opinions, loosely held, and take initiative to improve ourselves, the company, and our community.

Investment

We work a sustainable pace. We work four days for clients on
consulting and one day on "investment time." We typically spend Monday-Thursday
on client work and Friday on investment.

Investment time is time for investment in ourselves, our company, and our community.

Ideas for Fridays and in between client projects:

• Contribute to open source software.
• Write a blog post.
• Pick from or contribute back to dotfiles.
• Explore change to tools and process on our "Research" Trello board
• Work on conference and meetup talks and proposals.
• Volunteer as a mentor

Learn much more about what we believe and how we work in our Playbook.