Our values
Transparency
What it means:
At Front, being transparent means making relevant information and context easily accessible so that everyone can be more efficient and effective. We default to transparency and inherently trust employees to not abuse their access to information. We believe that by eliminating the power that can come from being one of only a few with access to information, we reduce internal politics and strife. The line is drawn, however, when information is about an individual (i.e. salaries, terminations) or when access to that information would just be a distraction from daily work.
How we do it:
We share goals and openly report on progress:
- OKRs are set on a quarterly basis. The company OKRs are shared and inform team and individual OKRs. Results of the company OKRs are reported on and shared at the end of every quarter.
- We have an All Hands every week where the most important company metrics (revenue, opportunities, CSAT, uptime, DAUs, etc.) are shared and discussed.
- Dashboards around the office display each team’s results in real-time. Each department sends out a monthly recap on their performance.
- At the end of each quarter, Mathilde and the leadership team go into depth on the quarterly results, what went well, and what we can learn from.
We share and discuss the good and the bad:
- We conduct a post-mortem after issues and send a company-wide post-mortem outlining what went wrong and how we’ll improve.
- After every board meeting, the deck is shared with employees and Mathilde shares candid feedback from the board members.
- Via shared inboxes in Front, everyone has access to customer feedback and customer NPS results so it’s always clear what we’re doing well and where we need to improve.
We encourage questions:
- Every other week, Mathilde hosts an AMA-type session that all employees are welcome to attend.
- Each week, employees are invited to ask questions, anonymously if they choose, and Front leaders candidly respond to these questions at the end of All Hands.
We give colleagues access to our work:
- Everyone’s calendars are default public so you know how everyone spends their days.
- Notes from meetings where strategic company decisions are made are accessible by everyone.
- Front the product enables us to share inboxes and individual conversations so we can collaborate efficiently.
- Also via Front the product, employees can grant their managers or colleagues access to their individual inboxes to provide visibility into what they’re working on and/or to ensure all work is handled when they are out of the office.
From day one, we’ve made our product roadmap public and encourage customers to post and upvote features they’d like us to build.
To help other entrepreneurs, Mathilde shares her fundraising decks publicly.
When something goes wrong, we tell our customers what really happened and how we’re working to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
We are honest with customers about what our product does and what it doesn’t do. We don’t overpromise or sell to roadmap.
Collaboration
What it means:
Fronteers are inherently collaborative. We make a conscious effort to bring together different skills across different teams to create an outcome that’s bigger than the sum of its parts. And helping out for the greater good comes naturally to everyone. As a result, no team is considered “better” than another. The interests of each team and individual are given the same weight. That said, collaboration does not mean involving everyone all the time and moving slow as a result. Collaboration must still be efficient.
How we do it:
Thanks to our product, collaborating is second nature. We efficiently bring people into conversations via comments and provide visibility into work being done via shared inboxes. Because we collaborate with Front at Front, we model efficient, email-based collaboration for our customers too.
Once a year, the entire Front team gathers for a multi-day offsite. These offsites are intended to encourage cross-department and cross-office collaboration.
When a new hire starts at Front, they are assigned a buddy from a different team to help introduce them to the company and build relationships outside their immediate teams.
The engineering leadership at Front encourages engineers to be available during regular business hours and the Paris team adjusts their schedules so there are a certain number of hours per day when cross-team and cross-office collaboration can happen in real-time.
The Account Executives regularly get together for deal teardowns in which they discuss the deals they’re stuck on and brainstorm ways to unblock them.
We have employee-run committees that bring together people from various teams to plan social events, manage the Front Foundation, and foster relationships across the SF and Paris offices.
High Standards
What it means:
We are all passionate about our work and strive for greatness every day — both in our work and in how we treat each other. This means we diligently track towards goals, aim to exceed expectations, and always look for ways to improve. But we aren’t striving for perfection. We understand that building Front is often a zero-sum game: focusing on one thing means taking resources away from something else. So we always strive to maximize the impact of our work.
How we do it:
We strive to understand our customers’ problems so we can prioritize their needs. Through weekly customer spotlights in All Hands, inviting new hires to shadow customer calls, and quarterly NPS surveys, we are constantly learning about our customers and how our product can better suit their needs.
We have ambitious goals and we hold ourselves accountable to them. We’re rigorous about setting and honestly reporting on our OKRs.
For product development, we might strategically dedicate a lot of resources to shipping something that will improve the lives of 90% of customers today, and deprioritize the things that only serve 10%.
From code reviews to email tests, we always look to our colleagues for input, reviews, and new perspectives — because two (or more) brains are always better than one.
We hire slow and keep the bar high, only extending offers to people that strongly fit the job requirements, have passed rigorous back channel reference checks, and align with our values.
We are selective about our investors and extensively reference check our board members.
Care
What it means:
Our vision is “work happier” and we take that literally. We want everyone — colleagues and customers alike — to be happy at work. We encourage each person to take care of their mind and body so that they can bring their best selves to work. And by approaching situations from a caring perspective, we strive to have tough conversations and make tough decisions without being hurtful or judgmental.
How we do it:
Radical candor:
- Front abides by the principles of “radical candor.” When you practice radical candor, you are encouraged to challenge colleagues directly while at the same time showing them that you care personally. A common example is rather than ignoring a colleague’s bad habit, such as overusing “like” or “um” when presenting, you would point out what he is doing, explain how it makes him sound, and offer suggestions for how he could correct it.
Work & life happiness:
- Managers conduct regular check-ins with employees to determine what is making them happy at work, what is making them less happy, and to discuss fixes that can ensure better balance.
- We offer flexible PTO and encourage employees to take at least two weeks off per year so they have an opportunity to disconnect and recharge. Mathilde models this behavior by taking 25 days of PTO per year and regularly disconnecting while she’s gone.
- We offer a monthly $100 health and wellness reimbursement so employees can join a gym, take a class, do some guided meditation, whatever gets them active or calms their mind. We also host an annual health and wellness week where we bring in speakers and plan activities that promote physical and mental health.
- Mathilde challenged employees to disable notifications on their phones and computers to reduce distractions and take back control of when you switch to new tasks.
- We opened an office in Paris in part to avoid requiring people based in San Francisco to be on call or working overnight.
Customer care:
- All employees are regularly invited to spend 15 minutes in the Support queue helping Front customers with their questions. With Support team members on hand to make sure responses are accurate, this exercise exposes all employees to the customer and helps them connect with their use cases, challenges, and opportunities with Front.
- We’ve set up a system so that when bugs are fixed or features are shipped, all customer messages with that bug or feature tagged are re-opened and assigned to staff who follow up letting the customer know that their request has been fulfilled. For the 2018 holidays, we decided to have a little fun with this and created videos about the latest features and improvements we shipped.
Low ego
What it means:
Fronteers have egos, everyone does. But when it comes to making Front decisions, we put those egos aside and think first about what would be best for the company or the team. We trust each other to make the right decisions and we support each other in pursuit of our goals. But, we know we’re not perfect, and things won’t always go to plan. So when things go south, we talk about it and learn from our mistakes.
How we do it:
Each week in All Hands, a Fronteer shares his or her Stumble of the Week. By encouraging employees of all levels (even our CEO and other leaders) to openly discuss their mistakes, we create a culture of humility and continuous improvement.
When we spot a problem, we don’t complain or pass it along to others to fix. We focus on solving it, even if it’s not our job to do so.
We rarely have large meetings. We are thoughtful about who needs to be involved and trust each other to make the best decisions for the company’s success.
We keep our job title structure relatively flat. For example, all of our engineers’ titles are “Software Engineer” regardless of level or experience.
We are quick to help each other out — whether it’s to help another team brainstorm how to overcome a challenge or simply emptying the dishwasher. No task is too small for anyone.