Teams were formed. I had extremely talented folks, Vipul Patil and Aadil Hasan as my teammates and super amazing Chanda Sethia leading us. I was assigned some bootcamp tickets to get my hands dirty. Projects started flowing in. All of us got indulged into producing high quality code. Yet, we always made sure to Have Fun! For instance, we had weekly Chai-Time (Tea-time) where everyone in Coinbase India gathered to play games, have random conversations and most importantly to have a tea together. This helped creating the bonds in this virtual world due to the Covid-19 outbreak.
I gained a decent pace in learning more about Coinbase tech and at the same time executing the problems in hand. There were Engineering Bootcamps that helped me a lot to understand the technologies being used, best practices being followed, the Do’s and Don’ts and most importantly the culture at Coinbase.
At Amazon (my previous company), we had 14 Leadership Principles which every Amazonian followed diligently Being an Amazonian myself, I began to read more about the cultural tenets of Coinbase. These are set of guiding principles that explains the cultural philosophy and the operating model of Coinbase as a company.
We deeply believe in Clear Communication for sharing information by collaborating. I love the documentation habit of every Coinbase engineer. Writing down elaborate TDDs (Technical Design Documents) and also providing a crisp TLDR amazes me.
We have a bias for action. Completing high quality work with speed. We focus on the 20% work that will get us the 80% of the impact showing Efficient Execution.
Taking 100% responsibility for achieving the mission proves that we Act Like an Owner. Catering to customer pain-points is supreme in making any key decisions.
Hiring the best candidates is another tenet called Top Talent. I love interviews (both personas, interviewer + interviewee). Ansuman Behera, the Director of Coinbase India, volunteered with me to develop new interview questions to be used across Coinbase. This was an amazing learning experience to learn the thought process and effort that goes into developing a real-world enjoyable hiring prompt.
At Coinbase, OKR model is very heavily adopted. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. We set ambitious OKRs and try to achieve 70%+. This helps in building a Championship team that pushes their limits and improves the productivity long-term.
We are heavily customer obsessed. Our core mission is deeply focused to solve customer problems and we strive to be the easiest to use, most trusted and most secure platform. This is our Customer focus tenet.
One of the best tenet that is close to my heart is Continuous Learning. Learning helps you improve and makes you humble. Valuing learning over being right is very important. Inspired from this tenet, I also initiated a Friday Learning Series for folks to share their learnings with wider audience, get a chance to connect with like-minded people and also discover new problems.
Finally, another cultural tenet that I really love about Coinbase is Positive Energy. Being optimistic and creating moments of play at work is highly encouraged here. Let’s step into the next month to see it in greater detail.
I was busy in multiple initiatives. Delivering projects, contributing to process improvements, reviewing TDDs, mentoring folks, refining the hiring, helping people and enjoying the learnings had become a routine for me. And then! One fine day there was a message that became the highlight of this month.
Offsite was announced. We were all finally going to meet!!!
The offsite was extremely entertaining. Actually meeting the people in-person was such a memorable feeling. We took all the Covid-19 precautions to make the offsite a huge success. It was very refreshing.
I was awestruck to hear my name for the Shining Award. It is awarded for exceptional contributions in various streams. This was a very sweet gesture by the leadership and I am very obliged to be selected for it.