In February 2022, I left my job at Splunk to take some time first to relax then to focus on finding a fantastic next job. I managed to do both during my three months of funemployment, landing a job at Stripe in the Atlas team in May. I was laid off in November 2022, along with most people who were hired during this time.
Despite it being a very short stint in my career, what I learned at Stripe was nothing like I had experienced in more than 20 years in the industry. The intent of this post is to capture those learnings, both to organize and solidify them in my own mind and to spread these ideas to more people, since they really worked to build an exceptionally high-functioning environment. So here we go with the big things that I think made my team at Stripe run better in certain ways than any team I've been a part of: Gratitude built-in Stripe installed or built an extension to Slack where if a person types /++ @teammate Some nice words in a public Slack channel, the mentioned teammate and their manager receive a notification of those nice words. This is also stored in a central system and shows up on the employee's company profile page, and is also available to managers during annual performance reviews. This is a great low-friction way of promoting a positive, grateful culture in the company. The Atlas team also reinforces this in their Friday wrap-up meetings in a segment called "Mad Props". The /++ feedback is collected by the meeting DRI (see below) into a meeting doc, and others from the team can add their own kudos and mad props to that section. The person doing the thanking reads or mentions their items for the team to hear in the meeting. This practice normalizes gratitude in the team, and sets a mild expectation for recognizing the people who helped you that week. It builds community, camaraderie, and warm feelings in the team, which contributes to a high-functioning team. One thing I was surprised to see on my first day at Stripe was the default "thank you" emoji in Slack is the Ty Beanie Baby heart. I was initially afraid to use it (sending hearts to coworkers?!?!?!), but in time I learned to see it as a tool for elevating the good vibes. Once I got over the initial shyness around using it, I felt more liberated to share my gratitude in this very strong…