Our Structure

Our most relevant “unit” is the project team, and we’ve developed the entire company around this essential component. We are trying to develop high-performance teams to build and deliver world-class technology products to our clients. As such, our structure includes the following:

• Project teams
• Management and support teams

Instead of organizing team members into departments depending on their job titles, we strive to create high-performance teams based on a unique combination of people attributes and the Agile mindset, as follows:

People Attributes

• Love for tech
• Resilience & grit
• Adaptability & low resistance to change
• Self-development & drive
• Humor
• Courage
• Enthusiasm
• Altruism

Agile Mindset

• Satisfy the customer's needs through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
• Welcome changing requirements, even late in development.
• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
• Work together daily throughout the project with business people.
• Convey information to and within a development team through face-to-face conversation.
• Promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
• Pay continuous attention to technical excellence and good design.
• Reflect at regular intervals on how to become more effective, then tune and adjust behavior accordingly.

We don’t like to formalize things too much. We’re not the kind of people that like to build high walls between ourselves. We are all one team and our success is dependent on our collaboration.

Thinslices Playbooks

The Thinslices Software Developer understands and adheres to the Software Professional Manifesto. They are T-Shaped Software Developers, Responsible Engineers, Software Craftsmen.

The Software Professional Manifesto

Know what you are building

You should understand your client, their needs, their environment and always try to give them the best solution that you can think of.

Don’t be a code monkey!

Don’t deliver bad products

Under no circumstances will we ship something that doesn’t work. No schedule will make us do this, no yelling manager will make us do this.

If it is crap we will not ship it!

Write clean and maintainable code

When you write code you should take into consideration possible scenarios that will change requirements of the product. These changes shouldn’t end up into a rewrite or impossible estimations.

You must not give horrible estimates and you must not let the system reach a point where redesign is a must!

Don’t be afraid to tackle any challenge

When you see something in the code that is wrong, clean it instantly without fear, without hesitation.

You should clean and refactor the code with fearlessness and competence!

Quality should be your goal

You should go home every night and look in the mirror and say: “Man, I did an awesome job today!”.

You should always know that you did the best job that you could do!

Take care of each other

You should learn someone else’s job and know what they are doing. If a team member is absent the team should be able to continue the project.

Team members have each others’ backs!

Give honest estimates

The most honest estimate is I don’t know. You should find out what you don’t know and provide the range of the estimation.

People rely on your estimates!

Learn to say “No”

You were hired because you think before taking action. You are the ones who know and the only ones who have the knowledge to say No.

When you say Yes you make a promise and you will do whatever it takes to deliver on it. The worst is to say “I will try”!

Learning

Learning is a big concept and it means different things to different people. We all have different learning styles, preferences and routines, and that’s ok.

We can’t function without deliberate learning. Without it, we don’t evolve as individuals, we don’t perform as teams, we don’t improve and we don’t innovate.

Regardless of the level we are at or the particulars of the job we’re doing we all need to evolve. Our learning affects:

• our personal performance
• the quality of our interactions and their result
• the need to create a better environment for us to work in
• our satisfaction with our own progress and quality

All in all, we learn so that a year from now our life will be visibly better than it is now.

Learning on the job

As part of the formal learning process or not, one of the best ways to learn is on the job. Especially with juniors, sometimes the most effective way to accelerate their growth is to embed them in a team, even if they are not billable, or for that matter very productive.

The simple fact of being close to a real team, helping with real problems, being guided by experienced colleagues is, very often, a better way to learn than theoretical study and theoretical exercises.

Autonomy

We believe in giving people autonomy. Not just formally.

Every team is autonomous

We encourage every team to think like a business. They have the autonomy to decide how they want to work to deliver a project, how they assign tasks between members and how they onboard new team members.

They choose the tools they want to use and they manage their learning journeys as well.

The context is comprised of the Thinslices vision, values, work methodology, processes, and general meetings.

Every elephant is autonomous

Regardless of the team or project you're on, as an elephant, you're responsible for your experience.

That means contributing with ideas, taking ownership of tasks, making decisions on matters you're accountable for, reaching out to other colleagues who can help you deliver your objectives.

So no "s-a intamplat", no excuses, no hiding behind processes. We're all here to learn, to grow and to deliver quality, to create value.

We're a team, we help each other and we all contribute to maintaining Thinslices an amazing workplace and a great company to work with.