The quilt team at METYCLE — Product, Engineering and Design working together to create the scrap metal marketplace of the future
My name is Camila Santos Matos de Freitas Ribeiro and I am the Head of Product, Engineering and Design at METYCLE. This is the place to go if you want to see a bit of my very colourful CV — most of my experience lies in marketplaces and product management, but this is only a part of my story.
METYCLE is a young company with a very promising business model and quite a particular team of product managers, software engineers and designers. I have the honour and privilege to lead them daily towards building the product to achieve our ambitious business goals, but the reality is that most of the time they are the ones leading me, challenging me and taking me out of my comfort zone.
Our team is:
- Markus Oligslagers, on product management;
- Nassim Raeesi, on design;
- Jorge Miranda and Sufyan Afzal, on backend;
- Alejandro Aragón and Peeyush Singla, on frontend.
Together we have built, in the last six months, the complete (and in progress) product offering of METYCLE.
At METYCLE, we have developed our ways of work and values over the past few months: we are a distributed team split between Berlin, Köln, Düsseldorf and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. This means that most of us are usually annoyed about the miserable weather, while some of us have constant sunshine in the beach; some of us start working earlier than others; some of us have breakfast while others are having dinner. As we hail from Germany, Iran, Pakistan, Brazil, India and Spain, our symbol could be a handmade quilt: diverse pieces of fabric carefully sewn by experienced hands, coming together to create something beautiful.
Our secret sauce is based on six principles:
1. Focus and intention above everything
In my previous experiences as both an individual contributor and a manager, I’ve seen teams starve and dry out due to lack of focus, constant pressure and lack of resources to achieve their goals. I strongly believe that there will always be lack of resources when priorities are unclear or unstructured. A realistic view of what can be achieved with the team that you have is essential for a successful company to thrive: overworked teams will be demotivated and burned out in no time.
Simplification and focus on the essential are mandatory to get results: there are many possible solutions to obtain outcomes, and the choices on which solutions the company should move on with is a key ingredient to keep a team focused, motivated and productive. This should be gospel but somehow seems to be an underrated principle.
At METYCLE my goal is to have our team working smarter but not longer — that means being intentional about everything you do. Is this decision going to bite us in the future? If yes, how? What would we need to do now to avoid those consequences, and, if we can’t do it now, where do we register this information? How do we reduce the need for maintenance? How do we minimise breaking points and boilerplate? Those are questions that guide us when we are discussing solutions or next steps.
2. Culture matters
When a team is distributed, remote and often working asynchronously, culture happens on Slack. Culture happens in meetings. Culture happens in person. And culture also happens on our focus time. At METYCLE we value trust above all: but with great trust comes great responsibility. That means, for example, that no one is having their hours controlled or being micromanaged: instead, we focus on agreements and outcomes. We agree what we need to achieve and by when; we agree on communication channels and follow ups; and we apply the principle of “trust but verify”.
Part of our culture lives on our “random” channel: we say good morning, we post gifs, we complain about the train system in Germany, we exchange a bit about our lives and keep proximity within our own boundaries. Every two weeks we have an hour in which we all come together to (so far) play Gartic.io — the worse the drawings, the more fun we have. Another part lies on our “rage” channel: dealing with anger is a normal part of being an adult, and that shouldn’t be repressed, but, instead, handled in a respectful way. Angry at your internet provider? This is where you can vent.
We make a point to meet regularly, according to our resources: at our stage we can’t afford fancy retreats, but we spend two or three days together every month either in Köln (where we are headquartered) or in Berlin (where a large part of the team resides) working together. Those encounters are not mandatory but heavily encouraged, so that we can strengthen our bond as a team.
3. Together alone
Part of the product management function involves facilitation: helping teams to achieve decisions and outcomes using everyone’s powers is an art, and sometimes an undervalued one. A few years ago I participated in a session of the Design Sprint Masterclass conducted by AJ&Smart: there I learned many facilitation techniques and principles, big and small, appropriate to small gatherings or to big meetings. They opened up to me a world which was later expanded by the book The surprising power of liberating structures from Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless: in my view this is the best leadership book which is not about management.
One of those principles is called “together alone”. The aim is to create a structured space for individuals to reflect about a problem, formulate their thoughts or recommendations and bring them to the group in a radically inclusive way. Often introvert voices are silenced during meetings because the environment becomes emotionally charged for those individuals: I fall into this bucket. The principle of “together alone” values people like me but includes people who are not like that.
The application of this principle is very wide: meeting-free Fridays which enable the team members to focus on their individual work; concentration of team ceremonies on Mondays to avoid scattered meetings; time-boxing for the team members to reflect in silence with a round of expression; skilled facilitation which ensures that everyone had a chance to manifest their opinions; usage of the “raised hands” features in video communication to avoid overlapping and interruption.
4. Structure to enable freedom and autonomy
At METYCLE we believe solid and simple processes. As an individual contributor, I thrive in simplicity and structured decision making in order to be free to produce my best work. As a leader, I work hard to create for my team the space and conditions that they need to be autonomous and to be empowered to discuss, negotiate and decide.
The secret of success: the DARE matrix. This is the most powerful antidote against inaction, passivity and indifference in a company. In my past I’ve often witnessed teams worn out by excessive ambiguity which created an environment of unhealthy competition and focus on politics instead of on the solution of customer problems. When it is excessively difficult to understand who does what and who disambiguates complex decisions, teams easily get lost in a circle of inefficiency which leads to demotivation.
Requiring absolute boundaries and complete clarity in a working environment in order to achieve results is obviously wishful thinking: humanity is made of grey zones and blurry edges. Healthy conflict is a great instigator of innovation and collaboration. However, what hasn’t worked for me in the past was the total lack of any framework to navigate complexity: I know for sure that an environment of who screams the loudest is not what we want to build. Our team works very hard to provide structure for ourselves, so that we can be free to think, explore, decide, learn and produce outstanding results.
5. Multi-disciplinary motivation
At METYCLE’s product, engineering and design team, most of us are some type of generalists. That means that we have key roles and titles but in reality we use our expertise in various domains inside the company. Developers contribute with and review code for backend, frontend and infrastructure, despite having their core specialties. Some of us have background mixed between product management, design and user research; some of us dribble between product analytics, data engineering and product management; one of us is a chemical engineer who also designs.
The more colourful a CV is, the more interested I am in this individual’s story and experience. I believe that hard competencies can be learned at any time — but character, work ethic and problem-solving approaches are much more complex to improve over time, so that’s where we as METYCLE focus our recruitment. My view on this topic is strongly based on the book Range — Why generalists triumph in a specialised world, by David Epstein.
This is usual in startups, since the teams are small and the depth of complexity might not have yet achieved the peak. However, I really see this as a part of the core identity in our team and I will continue to steer our personnel growth in this direction.
6. Radical transparency, a.k.a. “public before private”
People who work with me know that I am the terror of Slack threads 🧵🧵🧵 I love threads 🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵. I don’t advocate for threads because of personal preference, but because they allow for quick scanning, focus and reasonable involvement in decisions and topics to be discussed. Examples of how we structure our threads:
Threads are not goals but means. They enable my favorite principle: public before private. At METYCLE all the information you need is publicly available and organised in a way that you will find it when and if it’s relevant for you. We use private messages when conversations are private, or when requests are specific to an individual, or when we want to vent and chat. But decisions are made in public channels and displayed in threads: if you start a discussion in private and then you need to involve someone else in it, you would need to repeat everything in order to do that. At METYCLE our public channels are the core of how we agree, disagree and make decisions, while enabling everyone who wants to be involved to have visibility on what is happening.
But threads are just the one piece of our principle of radical transparency. A few months ago, I asked our founders Sebastian and Rafael how we could ensure that everyone in the team knows where we stand with the company, what is happening on the highest level and what is the financial situation. We have then decided to every month in our all hands to open the company’s financials in detail, thus disclosing to the whole team our monthly cash burn, the income from transactions, the company costs and the amount of money in the bank account.
Our goal is to foster financial responsibility and realism in every team member, while avoiding nasty surprises and rumours. It is much easier to know what you can ask for when you have a clear picture of where the company stands: there are no secrets. If we are indeed all adults in the company, we need to be treated as such and treat the company this way as well. Operating in such a level of transparency and trust is my biggest pride in working for METYCLE.
With the principles operating on our ways of work daily, we have been achieving excellence in our strategy and execution, while fostering a sense of community, involvement, responsibility and ownership. The story of METYCLE is just starting — stay tuned for more!
