Culture

I wanted to write about our culture. I'm motivated to because I do a lot of interviews for my open roles and people want to know what type of organization they are joining, which is a reasonable expectation. Candidates want to know if they will be treated like drones, devoid of agency and incentive to work long hours, or if it will be a wonderful place to indulge in all their professional fantasies.

Well, the short answer is neither. Instead, we built a culture around 

, high-performing individuals and teams, 

, quality of interactions and outcomes, empathy and something we call Axia. It might sound loaded, but it does not mean there's no levity around the office. In fact, working at Flint is the most fun many of us have ever had.

It sounds like chaos off the bat, but like Netflix, we think there is a greater upside in inspiring people to make the correct decisions for the good of Flint than there is in putting in place controls and policing the staff.

Because everyone in the org is incentivized to do good work and act in the interest of this community, we yield better outcomes for ourselves and our customers. This intrinsic sense of responsibility that comes with providing our people with freedom, power, and information in support of our decisions engages us in promoting our values within our work.

Doing the right thing takes empathy and a lot of it. Empathy for the customers, colleagues, and partners, empathy to understand.

What happens with an organization like ours filled with carefully empathetic people is that we are more attuned to what people feel and want. We listen more and pay more attention. It creates a place where people are heard, where we get the incredible benefit of hearing out everyone's ideas, creating a community of thought where no matter your job, you have the same opportunity to contribute.

Because of our collective empathy, we become better at building a better product. We understand what jobs the customers are hiring our product to do. We do this independently of our ideas and biases. This capacity to listen and better understand becomes a superpower for everyone and in all spheres of the organization.

With a culture of freedom and responsibility, we promote a high-trust organization and shared goals. With our empathy for our customers, we yield better customer outcomes, which drives us to continuously deliver value to our customers. For which we must make good tradeoffs between what we choose to work on next and how much we do so that the experiences are excellent yet not wasteful, a Lean approach.

Axia is the ancient Greek word for figurative value, merit, and worth. But we made the meaning broader. 

We create a safe place to be humble and empathetic, caring and critical when enacting Axia. It encompasses all our cultural values; our culture is Axia.