A few weeks ago I joined the Intridea team; I knew enough about Intridea through various conversations at local meet-ups to know that I would be joining an incredible team of designers, developers and innovators. I was excited about what this new chapter would bring to my life.
At Intridea everyone works remotely, so my new office was right around the corner (in the next room). If I thought I might miss those friendly water cooler talks, I was mistaken. On my first day our managing Director of UX Jurgen and I had a Skype date. We talked for nearly two hours about everything Intridea-related, from regular administrative duties to our Friday afternoon Design Meetings, to our design processes and current projects. It was a good start to my first day at Intridea. Having Jurgen there to get me primed was a huge help and a great ice breaker for me.
That day I was inundated with messages from other Intrideans welcoming me to the team. Many of them asked questions about my past, about my design process, my hobbies, etc. We delved into deeper conversations about progressive web technologies and design methodologies. What I learned immediately was that there is no shortage of communication on this team, despite being distributed. We have many outlets to communicate with each other, one of which we built in house called Socialspring, an internal social enterprise platform to connect you with your coworkers.
I was new to Ruby on Rails and git but my team members took time out of their schedules to help me one-on-one to get projects setup, and even gave a couple quick lessons on git and Ruby so that I would be able to work faster in the future. I was amazed at this, since I was admittedly a little nervous about how I would get up and running as a new Intridean. But the process was so simple and my co-workers made me feel welcome.
My second observation as a new Intridean was that this team is all about helping out and doing things right from the start; they understand that taking the time to pay attention to the details and do things right sets us all up for success. They make sure that everyone on the team has enough support to get the job done. Each week we communicate about team resources and discus whether we feel we need to spend more time on something else or whether we need additional resources to get a task completed. Our project managers and team leaders are adept at communicating with their developers and designers and understanding the resources, limitations, blockers, etc across all of the projects.
After my first two months here I can say that Intridea is focused on creating great products, while enabling their developers and designers to succeed and feel challenged. I am happy to have joined this team of smart, hard working individuals who want to see their company succeed.
