How We Work
This is how the team behind JotForm works.
What you do without thinking makes your company culture. It’s things you believe in as a team. This is the story of how we work and what we believe in.
Design is Essential
We work in small teams and we assign each team an amazing designer. We make sure all of the work we do is touched by a designer from the very beginning to the very end. Design is not only about aesthetics. It is creating the user experience. It is how the product works.
We will sit down all together and watch three usability tests every week. We test the usability of every single change we make on our product.
Engineering is at the Core
We are a product company. We hire great engineers and give them freedom to build great things. Just like many other companies with engineer founders, engineering is the thrust behind everything we do.
We do code review meetings and follow latest trends and use the most exciting new technologies in our work. Engineers can go to conferences anywhere in the world, all expenses paid. They get most poweful macbooks pros and 27" apple monitors. We have free snacks, drinks and all kinds of coffee machines in our offices to fuel our engineers.
Move Fast and Continuously Deploy
We work in small batches and continuously deploy our work. When we start on a new project we deploy it to the live site from the first day. Not all changes are visible to our users, but we’ll still push them live. That’s why releasing a new feature is very simple: Make it visible to our users.
How can we work like this and still have a stable product? We write automated tests for everything. If you commit a code that breaks a feature on the site, it will get caught by our tests and your commit will be rejected. We have recently took this to another level. If you commit code to the Form Builder, it will be rejected automatically if it lacks testing coverage.
Data is Our Eyes and Ears
We track user behavior anonymously. We track clicks. We track how many people use a feature successfully and how many fail at it. We review the data every day and make sure things get better every day.
When we redesign a feature, we will release the new version to 50% of users. We then compare the success rates and improve the new version until it is better than the old version.
Small Cross-Functional Teams
Our teams are small. Usually around 3 to 5 people. They sit together in the same room and work closely with each other.
The teams are cross functional. A typical team has two developers, a designer and a CSS developer. They breath the same air, talk to each other all the time and function well together.
Some of the teams such as support team, maintenance team and widgets teams are completely remote. Other teams sit together in the same room. We don’t mix them. A team is either all remote or on-site.
Support without Limits
Our support team is completely remote and global. This allow us to provide support to our users 24/7.
One of the unique things we have at JotForm is that we provide support publicly. You can request support privately, but by default the support is public. Everyone can see the quality of our answers and even join the discussion with their opinions or questions.
We provide quality support to free users as well. Every free user is a potential future customer.
Every new employee does support on their first month. It is a great opportunity to learn the product and understand our users.
Everybody Writes
I encourage each employee to write on our Medium publication. We accomplish great stuff, why not share the stories with the world? It is a great opportunity for each employee to improve their personal brand. It is also great way for our users to know what goes on in our kitchen. Do great stuff and tell it to the world!
It is an amazing pleasure for me to work with such an unbelievably good team. Watch out for more amazing things on JotForm because we have recently doubled our team and we have more great things in the pipeline.
