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Startups are some of the most amazing organizations on earth. You come together with a group of people to create something from nothing. It’s stressful, insanely difficult and it consumes you completely. Maintaining momentum and focus, as well as keeping it all together during the good and the bad, is the role of culture at your company.

I’ve worked at a lot of different companies over the years and have seen a lot that has worked and quite a bit that hasn’t. I wanted to take a chance to talk a little bit about the culture we’ve created at Urban Airship.

In the Beginning

When Adam, Michael, Steven and I started Urban Airship we knew we wanted to build a company that promoted transparency. Where people worked hard because they love what they do and they have a fantastic time doing it. Our first office was a shared space with other startups and we occupied two desks. Yeah, that’s four people and two desks. To this day we don’t have any private offices and it’s one of the reasons we moved into the wide-open space of our current office last year.

Urban Airship founders Steven Osborn, Scott Kveton, Adam Lowry and Michael Richardson

Meetings: Stand and Deliver

I hate meetings just for the sake of meeting, but they are necessary. We have a couple of standing meetings but my favorite ones are the weekly Monday morning stand-up and the Friday Happy Hour.

On Monday morning at 10am the entire company gathers together for a five minute stand-up meeting. We talk about the week ahead, introduce new people, mention guests visiting the office, etc. This is a great way to set the tone for the week.

An engineering standup meeting at Urban Airship

On Fridays at 4pm we have Happy Hour (you have a keg at your office, right?!). Friday is a chance to look back at the week. We do this with ad hoc presentations from different parts of the company with video conferencing linking our PDX and San Francisco offices. Engineering might share how they are scaling push on iOS. Sales will talk about a specific deal and what it took to get it closed. Marketing might preview the latest campaign to drive new leads. It’s also a great time to talk about any general issues that might be surfacing. There isn’t a better time to share with each other than over a good Portland beer…or a PBR, as is often the case.

Open house party at our new San Francisco office

Transparency…for Real

I’m going to say it even though I realize it’s beyond cliche. We’re pretty damn transparent. Tell me this, do the people at your company know about the different parts of the business and how they work together? Do they understand how leads fill the pipeline? The relationship between marketing and sales? The challenges with scaling infrastructure? Current revenue? Burn? Cash on hand? Outstanding shares? From day one we worked hard to do just that and I share all of this and more during our weekly Happy Hour meetings.

There is No Fence

I’m sure you’ve worked at companies before that have a fence. Maybe it’s a fence between product and Q/A. Sales and marketing. Finance and the rest of the company. Yeah, we don’t really do that here. A really good company knows that all of those parts of the business have to work together in order to be successful. There’s no “well, that’s not my job” attitude at UA. You roll up your sleeves and get done what needs to get done. If something is broken like a process or we have an outage, we address it in a way so as to learn from the mistake.

How do we accomplish this? I think we make it clear across the board that we’re working as a team here. While I may be the CEO, I still take direction from the board, our advisors and the rest of the team. Same goes for product, marketing, sales, business development, ops, admin and finance. A well-oiled team that collaborates effectively and move mountains and we do everything we can to continue that trend.

Free Friday

Once a quarter we do something called “Free Friday.” Steven saw Atlassian’s success and we decided to mimic it.

Free Friday starts on Thursday at 4pm and employees are encouraged to work on anything they want. Seriously. Anything. The only requirement is that you have to be prepared to share what you worked on starting at 4pm the next day (and yes, this maps conveniently to Happy Hour). You can work individually or in groups. The entire company is invited to participate and we witness everything from building games to building out new features for the platform. Some of our best new ideas for features came because of a coding spike done to prototype something. My personal favorite was what I worked on during the last Free Friday–the Urban Airship BBQ. That totally counts.

Know the KPIs

What are the real Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your business? For a long time we thought it was the number of notifications we were sending. While interesting, and certainly an indication of growth, we view the total number of pushes being sent as just one of the KPIs.

We have a big board in both of our offices (inspired by the one at Panic just down the street) that displays our real-time KPIs across the entire company. This is more than just up-time and number of notifications, but metrics like revenue, pipeline, incoming leads and average time to close that show we are on target with our plan. These are real KPIs and they live on our big board which everyone passes by several times a day.

As a joke back in 2010 I got a custom engraved bell that hung near the sales team. It says “Urban Airship – ring in case of sale.” We put it up and rang it from time-to-time but then it actually became something that we did for big deals. It was about closure for a sometimes hard-fought deal or one that was really going to move the needle. Now when people hear the bell ring the ENTIRE company knows that we just won a significant deal that will continue to move the ball forward.

Don’t Skimp on your Office Manager

We have Barb. Barb kicks ass. Barb joined the company early on (employee #7, I believe) and she came in to handle all of the little things. That’s pretty early considering it was me, one inside sales guy and a handful of engineers. I know people that wait much longer to make this hire but I’d never recommend that.

Akasha and Barb keep the airship flying high

A good chunk of the executive team travels and having someone that is there every single day with their finger on the pulse of the team is critical. There are countless times when Barb has said “the boys look a little stressed out, we should do something nice,” which then leads to an off-site, a scavenger hunt, impromptu parties and a general continuity that is so important to stress-heavy startups.

When we acquired SimpleGeo, Barb migrated to SF for two months to get the office in order and to help integrate the new team members into our culture.

DO NOT SKIMP ON YOUR OFFICE MANAGER. Sure, you could get somebody cheap, fresh out of college to help with AR/AP, keep the fridge stocked with drinks and greet people at the door, but don’t bother. Go the extra mile and pay a little extra to get someone that knows how to run an office. Your office manager should be the right-hand person to whoever is running Ops or to the CEO.

Perks Don’t Cost You All that Much

We started catering lunches over a year ago. We did two days a week to start and now do three days a week in the office, which still leaves time for our team to explore their love for the PDX food cart scene. Meals are healthy, diverse and always include a vegetarian/vegan option. Sales mingles with marketing, who mingles with engineering. This is a good thing, and while it costs us $10/head/meal it’s well worth it. Let’s do a little math.

UA Lunch Timelapse @15fps, sound from Steven Osborn on Vimeo.

In our Portland office we have 53 people. Lunch is served promptly at Noon and people are usually back at their desks by 12:40pm at the latest, and they aren’t rushed at all. Twenty minutes x 53 people is 17 hours of saved time a day. The cost for that meal? $530. For the week we get:

$530/day x 3 days = $1590/week
20 minutes x 53 people x 3 days = 53 hours saved/week (or 1 hour saved per employee per week)

That adds up and while this is a “perk” for the team it happens to turn a fantastic ROI for the company, both in real dollars and especially culturally.

We don’t have a vacation policy. It’s something we borrowed from Netflix. You take the time that you need when you need to take it and you put it on the shared calendar for the entire company to see. People know when you’re going to be gone and we can plan accordingly around gaps and releases. If people abuse this policy (and no one has) then there are bigger issues to be dealt with.

Play Just as Hard as You Work

Luau party. The People of Walmart party. The all-day scavenger hunt scouring Portland for all things geeky or otherwise. Hiring a choreographer to come in and teach the team the Thriller dance to do during our Halloween party. Getting a REAL Santa to come in for the kids of the company. They are fun, they create culture and they bind the team together.

Urban Airship Zombie Ball Dance from Jason Grigsby on Vimeo.

The blueprint for our day off in PDX

Airshippers on the road

You’re going to spend a full third of your life working. Why not do it at a place that challenges you with hard problems, let’s you have an insane amount of fun and has a real business model in a burgeoning space? While these are the tactical elements that make up the Urban Airship culture I think the ethos of “work hard, play hard” is at the root of who we are. If you get a chance to stop by the UA offices in SF or PDX I’d be happy to show you what it looks like in practice and you’ll see for yourself that Urban Airship really is a special place to work.

Oh, and we’re hiring.

Perhaps you and your phone were roaming, or you downloaded a new data-hogging app and forgot to use WiFi, but if you’ve ever gone over your smartphone data plan limit it’s likely a pain you won’t soon forget.

Our customer Onavo has gained a lot of attention and venture funding for its compression utility app for smartphones and tablets that puts users in control of their data plans by compressing data, tracking usage, and saving them money. However, the benefits delivered by the app were not being recognized as its magic simply happened in the background, whether users were actively engaging with the app or not.

Onavo turned to Urban Airship to power push notifications and after a few A/B tests decided to message users when they had saved certain amounts of data. Onavo’s push notifications are easily shareable anecdotes, which not only increased retention and app opens, but drove a 30% increase in shares and mentions across social networks. So now, when friends see friends save money, Onavo’s right there to welcome new users. Download the full case study.

Download the free Onavo app for iPhone/iPad or Android.

The crew is on the ready, the flight plan is set and the blueprint for a SXSW experience you won’t soon forget is coming to life. Over the next month you’ll be able to follow along in our journey as we bring Urban Airship’s Mobile Roundtable to the streets of Austin for SXSW; it’s beginning to take shape.

Last week you learned that we really are planning a mobile, mobile leadership event. With round-trips jumping off from The Screen Porch at W Austin, and a secret, ultra-cool way station, a few of you will have the opportunity to mix and mingle in small group discussions led by mobile, marketing and developer luminaries.

People like Andrew Mager, Chief Listening Officer at Spotify, and Chris Messina, Developer Advocate at Google, will spark a wide variety of discussions, from how mobile is changing content, marketing and consumer behavior, to how industries can adapt to seize new opportunities.

Head on over to our event site and submit your email address to get updates on how you may be able to hitch a ride with us in Austin.

This is the first in a series of posts that explores some of the things we’re doing behind the scenes in Urban Airship Engineering. Over the next few months, members of the engineering team will offer insight into how we operate, lessons we’ve learned, open source projects we have created and some of the challenges we face serving hundreds of millions of instances of apps connecting to our services every day.

Culturally and from a process standpoint, Urban Airship Engineering is focused on learning and adapting through continuous improvement. We wish we were smart enough to have invented these techniques, but luckily we didn’t have to. The way we conduct product development day to day is an adaptation of ideas in various books including the Poppendieck’s books on Lean Software and David Anderson’s Kanban.

“Value Stream” is a term that originated with Lean Manufacturing meaning to analyze and design the flow of materials and information required to bring a product or service to a consumer. The whole idea is to drive out waste, deliver fast, build quality in, and engage all of the people involved in the value stream so that great products emerge. Urban Airship has had a lot of success with Kanban and Kaizen. Don’t let those words scare you off if you don’t speak Japanese, they just mean “billboard” and “change for the better,” respectively. This post explores our high-level history in applying these concepts and how we’ve begun to scale our process across our SF and PDX offices as necessitated by bringing Urban Airship and SimpleGeo together as one company last October.

Model What’s Happening Now and Let Improvement Emerge

We started with Kanban and Kaizen when I joined Urban Airship in October 2010. The engineering team at the time was following an adaptation of Agile/Scrum and while it was producing results, it wasn’t working as well as we wanted it to in serving all the needs of a venture-backed startup. We adapted our operating model to a starter version of what is described in Anderson’s Kanban book. A great thing about Kanban is starting is easy; you just model the value stream as it is and define work-item types that are meaningful to the team (e.g., Bug Pack, Minimum Marketable Feature, Business Enablement, Refactoring/Technical Debt). Each work-item that is in process, planned, or recently completed gets hung up on a physical board with lanes that indicate the current value stream.

Every morning we have a Product Development Boardwalk. This is a standup style meeting where we walk through every work-item on the board in no longer than 15 minutes. We rotate the facilitator of this meeting every day to keep it fresh and make sure that everyone knows the process well enough that they can lead the team through it. This establishes shared context for everyone on what is happening in the value stream. It’s amazing what smart people can achieve together when they have the same context! Physical Kanban boards are still unrivaled for enabling this.

We tweaked our value stream a bit here and there as we learned from successes and failures. We introduced new work-item types, changed WIP limits, added exit criteria, added lanes, split lanes etc. We broke out a separate board right next to Product Development for Customer Development & GTM (Go-to-Market). We made these changes based on insights from our monthly Operational Review & Retrospective and from 5 Whys from production incidents and other defects.

A Year Later: SimpleGeo Acquisition, Investment and Development Partners

In October of 2011, Urban Airship acquired San Francisco-based SimpleGeo, took on a new round of financing and executed some major business agreements that would cause the company to grow even more quickly than it was already. In order to keep work-items flowing, it was time to begin to scale our value stream.

Urban Airship is a very in-person company. In order to make our value stream work across offices, we decided to replicate it in both locations. To achieve the same feel we had when it was just PDX, we now alternate facilitating offices every week. Individuals in the facilitating office also rotate every day. We’re still working out the kinks to be sure, but it’s working and is a lot of fun.

Our Kanban board was showing it’s age even before these events occurred. We had grown engineering four-fold and with that it was getting harder to see everything and achieve shared context. In order to address this and begin to scale into small sets of focused teams, we introduced horizontal lanes for each major part of our product line. We have kept the meeting wide open to anyone who wants to participate or observe, but now just the engineering leadership team (leaders of functional areas, program managers, product managers, tech leads, team leads, etc.) attends the Product Development Boardwalk every morning. Many of these leaders maintain what we refer to as a “Zoom In” Kanban board, which is focused on a specific functional area or work-item that rolls up to the main Product Development board.

The Product Development Kanban board in PDX (left wall) and Polycom unit with the replica board in SF

The SF Polycom unit displaying the PDX Kanban board

A real live Product Development Boardwalk meeting with Wade Simmons from SF facilitating via Polycom

The SF Product Development board (notice the glare from the warm California sun)

An example “Zoom In” Kanban board (far wall) in our Messaging Feature Room in PDX

Looking Forward

Change is constant at Urban Airship. As we continue to grow our team, scale to a billion devices using our services and build new features and products, we’ll keep making adaptions to how we operate in Urban Airship Engineering.

Tools / Technology

We use the following tools and technology to power our Kanban:

1. The biggest baddest magnetic white boards we can find
2. The most powerful magnets we can find
3. Magnet pictures of our people
4. White board markers
5. Colored note cards (indicate different classes of service)
6. Colored markers (to indicate different work-item types (e.g., Minimum Marketable Feature, Bug Pack)
7. Polycom to power the video conferencing between offices
8. Google Hangouts and Skype for Zoom In video conferencing
9. LeanKitKanban – web-based Kanban board we use to help sync the SF and PDX boards. It also produces some great metrics and graphs that we use to understand what is happening across product development (e.g., Continuous Flow Diagram, Cycle Time per lane, per work-item type, etc., Card Distribution Diagrams, Efficiency Diagrams, and even a Process Control Diagram)
10. JIRA – we use it to track details of work-items and as the electronic record we reference in source control, etc.

You know it was a good party when it takes a weekend of recouping to get around to the recap. Last week more than 200 people joined us for an open house at Urban Airship-San Francisco. Among the crowd were current and future employees, customers, investors and partners, as well a large contingent of entrepreneurs from Wieden + Kennedy’s Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) who had meetings in the Bay Area the next day.

For the Urban Airship flight crew, this was a great opportunity to grow relationships and find new talent to support aggressive growth plans, as well as to celebrate our work and progress towards integrating geolocation into the mobile industry’s leading cross-platform push notification system.

Conversations were richly nourished by Bacon Bacon SF and lubricated by a full top-shelf bar and kegs of Anderson Valley Boont Amber. In addition, we got to show off our ultra-cool mural by Alex Pardee that was recently featured by Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine.

Courtesy of www.juxtapoz.com

If you think you have what it takes to join the Airship, don’t wait for the next party to let us know.

It’s official! Generation Connect is here and it’s on SNL. Check out their hilarious spoof on push notifications and please remember to look both ways before crossing the street.

In a world that’s more connected than ever, push notifications can expand our view, our insight and our actions beyond the 3-10 inch screen we religiously carry. Together with leading app developers and partners we are evolving mobile messaging to drive greater value for consumers and brands alike. We have sent more than ten billion push notifications for many of the world’s leading brands and mobile apps. Check out some of our real-world applications here.

We announced the acquisition of SimpleGeo at the end of October 2011. Since then we’ve been evaluating how to proceed in a way that benefits all parties involved: SimpleGeo and Urban Airship customers plus both companies. After many internal conversations and discussions with a variety of clients, we’ve come up with a new direction. To summarize that approach, here’s the email we sent out today to all SimpleGeo customers to let them know about our plans since the merger:

Dear Customer:

As you know, this past October, Urban Airship and SimpleGeo merged to combine mobile customer engagement with location and context-based services. Since then, we’ve maintained the status quo with respect to SimpleGeo’s products: Places, Context, and Storage. In the meantime, the newly combined team here has been busy speaking with customers about what services they would find most useful to deploy from the combined entity.

As a result, during the first half of this year we will introduce significant new features to Urban Airship’s high performance push notification services that allow our customers to take advantage of location and context to better segment and engage their mobile audience. As just one example, customers will have the ability to send push notifications to users on specific device types, in specific geographical areas, during specific time frames, e.g., iPad users who have been in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco within the past 7 days. The ability to fine-tune audience segmentation for push notifications will increase relevancy to users, provide new app capabilities which will lead to higher customer engagement and satisfaction rates, and deliver increased return on investment. We’ll share more with you in the coming weeks and months as we can.

In order to deliver on this aggressive vision in the shortest amount of time possible, we need to focus our product development efforts. So, after lots of internal discussion and customer conversations, we will wind down the availability of the current versions of Places, Context, and Storage over the next few months. We will do everything we can to minimize the impact to customers as we look to end the availability of these services on March 31, 2012. For more details on this change, see our FAQ document.

We have already lined up a partnership with Factual to provide continuity for all customers using the Places service. The folks at Factual are on standby to ensure as seamless a hand-off as possible to their services. We also have an additional list of replacement services in a migration path document on our support site. In addition, we will not be charging for usage of any of the Places, Context, or Storage services for their remaining availability period or for past usage to date, as a thank-you for your patience and understanding during this transition.

Because we want to continue our relationship with every SimpleGeo customer, we are offering existing customers of the SimpleGeo services up to six months of our Urban Airship Pro Plan for no monthly charge (see the offer details in the FAQ document).

We are extremely excited about the future of adding location and context into our mobile customer engagement products. We look forward to working with all of our customers to help them innovate with these new capabilities to make their mobile initiatives even more successful.

Sincerely,
Scott Kveton
Co-founder and CEO
Urban Airship