Onboarding

Welcome to Shorebird! We’re extremely glad you’re here.

This guide is here to walk you through the onboarding process. If you have any problems, please reach out to the team or your manager on Discord to get unblocked.

Getting Started

Our goal for your first days/weeks is to feel up-to-speed. Since we’re still small, you represent a large percentage of the total company. Us helping you get up to speed is the most important thing the company can do these next few weeks. Please don’t hesitate to lean on others for help. In a remote workplace it’s hard for one of us to see if you get blocked (we all do at times), so we depend on you to ask!

A letter from the CEO

How We Work & Values

I try to lead from values. What are we trying to achieve? Why?

What’s most important to me:

1. We focus on delivering customer value (which in turn will lead to profitability).
2. We feel increasingly productive over time with increasing personal velocity.
3. We enjoy working here.

That’s pretty much it. I don’t care where you are in the world, when you work, or precisely what you work on so long as you believe it’s moving the company forward.

My mission in starting this is to make multi-platform the default. Flutter is the vehicle to such. We’re all here for our own personal reasons (growth, excitement, customer connection, potential upside, fun people to work with, remote work, etc), but the value I hope we can deliver via our time here is having made the whole world better by solving the “everybody writes everything twice” problem. Platform vendors want you to build for Platforms. I want people to build for users. And as a user I want businesses to build for me, regardless of what hardware I happen to be in front of at the time.

Point 2. above about velocity is something I learned from my time in my past startup and from onboarding many at Google. I care that team members are trying to make value for users, and that they’re getting better at it. I care less about any specific point-in-time output/velocity, and more about our ability to produce value increasingly over time. Just like our company, I try to work on my rate-of-improvement for the compounding effects over time.

On Being Remote

I enjoy being remote. I enjoy hiding in my study in my home in Menlo Park and being able to be in flow for much of the day. I love being able to work with people all over the world and not care where they are, only that they get stuff done. I enjoy getting up and walking the neighborhood when I need to, doing the dishes when I need to and just generally balancing work with my life.

But it’s also harder in many respects. In particular it can be harder for onboarding.

I try to check on folks regularly, but I will also depend on our new members to ask for what they need. We’re all just a discord message away (e.g. a DM or post in #inc) but you need to reach out when you need help. Try to err on the side of reaching out too much, rather than ever feeling stuck by yourself!

As a company, we’ve gone through various different interaction styles. Currently the team mostly works separately and communicate via text in one of our channels. Sometimes a couple of us are working together via in a voice room, or just using it for shared/background presence while we work on things. Often I am connected to a voice room (but muted) to be reachable. At past phases of the company we’ve spent all day in the same voice room. It will depend on how you feel most productive. You should optimize for your productivity and we’ll figure out our group patterns together.

We use our private voice rooms for lots of things, from socially chatting with others, asking for help, or “rubber duck debugging” a problem with someone. Even when I’m working on things I’m very much not an expert in others have been very helpful to just have listened to my rambling thoughts and occasionally ask questions back. I’d want you both to feel like you have as much of our live support and camaraderie as is useful to you. One of the lessons I’ve been (re-?)learning of late is how easy it is to get stuck when working remote, having easy access to coworkers hopefully helps make getting unstuck easier.

We have few scheduled meetings outside of ~monthly scheduled 1:1 check-ins and the occasional customer support call. I don’t know how your days will break down, but I encourage you to try and protect your make time as much as needed: https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

On being a public project

We use Discord for everything (you’re welcome to use other things to communicate if needed, but Discord’s chat and VC is pretty easy). In part just to make it simple to have one app. You’re welcome to use your company card to buy Discord Nitro (or anything else that makes you productive and thus moves the company forward).

Public is the company default, but employees are generally not required to engage publicly, period. I fully recognize not all people feel comfortable doing such and we hired you for your contributions to the company not your presence on discord. 🙂 I used to post everything in I can in #birder (public) instead of #inc (private) — other than pictures of our kids, discussions of specific customers, etc. — but that’s changed some as we’ve grown. I still encourage folks to work as much publicly as they’re willing to.

You will also have admin powers on Discord and should feel empowered to use them. We don’t get a lot of spammers (and see few DM abuses), but that doesn’t mean we won’t. Our public presence should be maximally supportive to our employees and furthering our work, when it’s not, we should choose to be private.

One of the unfair advantages that we have is that we get to hang out with our customers all day. It can let us know them so much better than other companies can, and lets us do a better job of serving their current needs and “skating where the puck is headed”. Investors have sometimes been confused when I discuss this with them as they ask me about what cadence I talk to customers, etc not realizing we just chat with them all day. At our stage in our product lifecycle good support also matters much better than a bullet-proof product. We don’t have to go through months of approvals or reviews, we literally change and ship a thing, if it breaks someone our customers scream on Discord and we check in a new thing. They love it, we love it. We get stuff done quickly with little fuss. This won’t always be possible (we do have 1000s of customers already), but we should bias towards action when possible.

As I was originally typing up this doc (fall 2023), I was also chatting with one of our customers as they designed a pricing model for us. 🤣 Customers are often “wrong” in their proposed solutions, but their data/opinions is much more useful than flying blind. You will have fellow Discord contributors sometimes offer to help you with patches, offer to talk at events, ask questions about some article they’re writing on Shorebird, etc. You can also use other chat, etc. to connect you with other experts (Flutter contributors discord, Flutter Slack, Dev Marketing slack, etc). So many people want you/us to succeed and are here to help. (Shorebird even now has volunteers now on Discord “Community Experts” who help with the support questions while we sleep!)

It does have potential downsides. It can be distracting (we wake up every morning to tens of support requests across all our channels, not all of them useful/helpful), and eventually we will have bad actors (although we have a lot of tools on Discord to combat that). But overall it’s been great for us so far and I hope you find it useful too.

We even have a few Discord bots which are helpful at times. E.g. Translator (speak any language with a customer), or Craig (record any voice call for later review). Happy to add more if you know of good ones. (I’ve thought about adding something for auto-threading, like Needle, but haven’t yet.)

Some of our customers have private channels on Discord. We don’t yet have formal policies around creation/management of such, but we will likely write them soon. We should assume that all private channel communications on Discord are NDA’d even though only a tiny minority of our customers have NDAs with us.

No sacred cows 🐮

We have the privilege of working with many smart people. However, you should assume that none of what we’ve produced so far is set in stone. All of it can be changed. Not that you have to re-write things on site, but you should feel empowered and welcome to change things you find. We will need more division of duties and more clarity of ownership as we grow, but I think we’re still small enough that most things can be easily changed (or rebuilt entirely) when needed.

“The doer decides” was a mantra from my time at Apple. I agree with it. If you’re taking responsibility for doing something towards our shared goals, you get to decide how. Just because any of us have been here longer than you does not make us right. You should understand the problem and solve it the way you think is right. This aligns with my belief that the “future is bigger than the past”. In most cases I’d rather get to “better” now, than worry about breaking the past.

We do now make significant revenue, and have thousands of customers, so we’re in transition from the phase from “making the business possible” to “making the business grow”. But it means we still haven’t found product market fit, and most of what we’re doing as a team is identifying a problem, dividing responsibility, trying lots of things (often being wrong) and trying again. We have things that have worked for the current team for the last 2 years, but I’m excited to figure out what this new team does together and how we figure out how to serve our customers together.

None of us are experts in all the areas we have to touch. But we’re all here to help each other. Even if that’s just being a “rubber duck”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

Nuts and bolts

Signing and Sign-ups

• As part of your decision conversation, we will provide you an offer summary.
• Shortly there after, we will also provide you two contracts to sign to formerly accept the role. One is the formal offer contract, and the second is the confidential information and invention assignment agreement (CIIAA). (We currently handle these separately from Rippling.)
• After signing those, you’ll get an email from Rippling (manually triggered). This will include instructions on how to set up your Rippling account and thus begin the digital parts of the onboarding process.
• Rippling will also walk you through electing benefits based on your physical location and thus setting up payroll deductions for your first payroll.
  • We mainly operate in the US which includes medical, dental, vision and life insurance as well as 401k.
  • As we expand out to other locations we will work to provide the needed benefits given employment regulations.
• Your manager will reach out to set up a meeting where we walk through this doc and also order you any hardware you might need on day one.
  • Our customers tend to use many different devices to develop on including Windows, Mac, and Linux. We can supply you with any hardware that you prefer, given the business need for it, so to start please pick an operating system that you feel the most comfortable and productive with.

Start Week

While most of the items here will be completed on your first day it is required that they are completed by the end of your first week.

Employment Forms/Paperwork

There are a few tax forms required to fill out on your first day. This will be different based on the country you are employed in.

United States

Rippling will help you take care of this process for you and typically includes your W-4 and I-9. Please review the Form I-9 Acceptable Documents and be prepared to show these, typically via video call, to your manager during your first week.

Account Setup

Given that we are a remote first company we rely on many cloud services to conduct business operations. The main ones to have setup on the first day will be Google & Discord. Other services will depend on your business need.

We keep an up to date list of all of our vendors as part of our Privacy Policy. If you have a business need for a new service please work with your manager to get it added to this list before signing up.

All Employees

• Rippling should have offered you a chance to pick your Google Workspace username as part of your offer paperwork. That account should be enabled as you start on your first day. You should get an email to your personal account with your temporary credentials to login and get everything setup.
• If you have an existing Discord account you are welcome to use it. If you don’t have one you can create one at https://discord.com. You can join our discord server at https://discord.gg/shorebird. Message your manager and they will will be able to add to the “Birder” role which will allow access to our internal channels.
  • This can be found at Server Settings > Roles > Birder > Add Member.
• We utilize Ramp for our expenses. Work with your manager to determine the needed level of permissions and they can help get you setup there.

Engineering Team

• You will use your existing GitHub account, but you will be added to the Shorebird organization. This is currently manual a manual process. Submit your GitHub username to your manager to start this process.
  • Owners of the GitHub organization can add new members via the People View.
• There are roles as part of our Google Cloud setup which you will need to be added to manually after joining based on your business need.

Operations Team

This list will change based on the business need your role has. Please work with your manager to determine and get onboarded to the systems you believe you need.

Business/Sales

• Attio - Sales CRM
• Stripe - Payment Platform

Finance

• Stripe - Payment Platform
• Pilot - Accountant
• Mercury - Bank Account
• Sphere - Tax Platform
• Ramp - Expense Tool

ISO Compliance

As part of our ISO Compliance we have certain procedures that we need to follow during your employment. This is maintained for us via Oneleet. All employees will be added to Oneleet and your department/role will determine if the following policies apply to you.

Set up Oneleet Agent

The Oneleet Agent is a small application that works on the background of your machine to ensure that it is following our compliance guidelines. This is typically checking that things like the system firewall is enabled, your screen will auto lock after a given time period, and that your disk is using encryption. You can see the full list of data collected on their documentation. It checks these and other items periodically and reports them back to Oneleet.

You can download the agent from the Oneleet Portal and will need to follow their setup document.

Accept Policies

As part of our ISO Certification you are required to review and “sign” the policies that apply to your department/role. These can be found in the Policy section of the Oneleet Portal. These policies are kept in sync with our compliance section of this handbook so you can review them in either location at any time.

This is a one time process when becoming a new employee and will be reviewed on a yearly basis for updates and signatures.

Security Training

Upon starting and on a yearly basis you are required to go through our internal security training. This can be found in the Security Training section of the Oneleet Portal.

Use The Product

Please try the product, if you haven’t already. We are here to build something people want. What have you seen customers need in trying to use Flutter/Dart? We should build that.

While your eyes are still fresh, you are encouraged to write down any frictions you encounter in the product. Anything you see, likely was seen by 100s of customers and ignored, but we should fix it. You’ll find a folder in Google Drive where others have written friction logs if you wish to feel inspired.

Day to Day Operations

If your used to a remote first way of working most of this section may be known to you already. If this is your first role in this way of working please read the following sections carefully to get an understanding of how we work on a day to day basis. As usual, these are ever changing and evolving as the team grows so if you see something that doesn’t make sense or could be improved please work with your manager to do so.

Communication

We use Discord as our main communication channel. This allows us to have an open forum with our customers and community members and still have private areas for internal only discussions.

Please keep in mind that Discord is completely public. So far that’s been great, but the public internet also has a long history of not always being a great place. You should not feel any obligation to accept DMs on Discord, or use your real name or likeness. Although so far most of our communications default to public if you prefer to communicate in our private channels that’s also fine. Similarly, unwanted attention and spam on Discord are violations of our policies, please do not hesitate to ask in private channels for assistance removing Discord visitors.

• All employees will be added to the “Birder” role on Discord which will also allow you to have moderation capabilities.
• You should consider muting Discord, except for @mentions, if the amount of notifications is bothering you.
• Current patterns have involved a most-days sync over VC and brief end-of-day updates in #standup. We expect these to evolve over time as we grow.

Email & Calendar

You do have an email address and calendar provided via Google Workspace, but so far we haven’t needed them much internally and is mostly used as an external communication tool.

Storage

We use Google Drive as our main storage provider. You are supplied with a personal drive for your own documents and we utilize Shared Drives for any company wide information that needs to be shared.

Please do not keep documents only on your local disk and instead default to using Google Drive.

Pay Periods

• For US employees, paychecks are delivered every 2 weeks. Rippling should have offered you direct deposits. Let your manager know if you have any trouble getting set up.
• For EOR employees, paychecks vary according to the country you are in. Check Deel’s FAQ to check the specific payment schedule for your country.

Engineering

Planning

So far we’ve been working out of GitHub projects for our planning. This is extremely useful given that we can easily pull in tickets filed by our customers into our projects boards.

For longer term discussions and design documents we typically store and work on these in Google Drive.

Code

All of our code is stored in GitHub.

Once you’ve been added to the Shorebird organization on GitHub, the best way to get started would be to clone the internal _shorebird repo. It will automatically clone the public repo shorebird for you as a submodule.

git clone git@github.com:shorebirdtech/_shorebird.git
cd _shorebird
git submodule init
git submodule update

Manager Checklist

This checklist is surely incomplete, but is offered here as a starting point.

Week of Offer

• Reach out to the team and candidate to congratulate on their joining.
• Start their personal (private) onboarding materials which should link to these shared ones, but include details specific to their role.
• Check if this is a new state or country of operation for Shorebird. If so, work with the operations team to make sure we’re registered to do business in that state. Registering for a new state currently involves emailing both our lawyers (Orrick) as well as our insurance (Next Insurance), otherwise Rippling will handle the rest.
• Order SWAG to be delivered to their home. Currently we send some sort of plush sandpiper off of Etsy, depending on availability.

Week before start

• Purchase an appropriate device for them, shipped to their house. Typically a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air.