Haplo Retrospective

Table of contents

About Haplo
To put everything in context, it’s useful to understand a bit about the company.
Diversity and inclusion
Diversity was very important to us, as a necessary part of our wider values.
Recruitment
Our recruitment process aspired to be bias-free and respectful. It was very effective.
Words
The words you use shape your organisation. We were deliberate in our choices.
Leadership
We saw our role as removing all the obstacles to people doing their best work, and supporting emerging leaders from our team.
Change
Continuous change is good, but you need to know if the changes work.
Early career developers
Almost all of our colleagues were in their first job, and Haplo was structured so they could progress really quickly in their career.
Onboarding
We set our new colleagues up for success by starting them off well.
Security
We had a very lightweight ISO27001 certified approach to security that allowed us to create applications that passed pen-tests with ease.
Meetings
Let’s just say we were not a big fan of meetings.

Future topics

This document is a work in progress, and I intend to add pages on further topics soon:

Teaching and learning — TODO
Everyone should learn continuously, and everyone has something to teach.
Lunch — TODO
35% of our office space was devoted to lunch.
Working hours — TODO
I think there were two exceptions to our strict working hours rule in the entire company history.
Incidents — TODO
When things go wrong, it’s a failure of process and nobody’s fault.
Company structure — TODO
We had a very flat hierarchy, and organised our team around our four products.
Consider part time — TODO
Sometimes the best people don’t want to work full time.
Open source — TODO
We released the core Haplo technology as open source.