Motion Company Culture

Our company culture, or why you may or may not be excited about joining us:

We can rely on each member of the team to get their work done. When we say we'll do something - we get it done without anyone checking in on us. This way, we can establish a culture of trust and not micromanage each other. When something takes longer than expected and we think we'll miss the deadline, we communicate that as early as possible with the rest of the team and figure out a solution. There should never be a scenario where we only find out after a task's due date that it wasn't completed (except emergencies, of course).

We communicate in a direct manner. If there is something you disagree with or are unhappy about, let the team know. We don’t tolerate passive-aggressiveness or company politics. When one of us makes a mistake, it should go: 1) admit we made a mistake 2) agree on a solution to prevent it from happening again 3) move on. A lot of times, this process should only take a few minutes.

We can disagree and commit. Not all of our ideas will be implemented, and sometimes the group will decide to do something one of us disagrees with. Even if we disagree with the decision, we commit to getting it done. It's counterproductive to keep arguing and slow down implementation efforts; better to get it done quickly and see if it actually works instead of speculating otherwise.

As a startup we are trying to change the world and take on many large competitors. If this were easy, everyone would be doing it. Raw hours make a huge difference when facing overwhelming odds. We believe that having a strong work ethic is a competitive advantage, and we expect everyone at Motion to put in their best effort when they’re at work.

We are not afraid of taking risks. We should not over-index on failures. A lot of features we build and strategies we try will fail - that is expected. A lot of times, it was the right thing to do with the available information, and it's important to realize when that's the case. We should be maximizing the expected value of our actions, not minimizing the number of failures.
Motion is far from being a perfect product today, so we need to keep iterating. With any change in the product direction, there will be some unhappy users. We recognize we can't make everyone happy, and are not afraid to lose a few users if it means significantly improving our product and expanding our user base.

We are a small team with a user base and revenue that are exploding. Every mistake we make has a direct revenue impact. Operational excellence for a company at our stage means having a well-thought procedure for every operational task we perform, including QA, merging code, releasing, support, email campaigns, sales process, and many more. It covers all areas of the business and applies to everyone. Note that operational excellence is different from bureaucracy, which we don’t tolerate here at Motion.
Attention to detail is a state of mind that can be learned. It doesn’t come naturally, and often even the brightest people lack attention to detail. Examples of it include “always taking that extra time to think through edge cases and consequences”, “not making fat-finger mistakes,” “always be double-checking your work”…etc. It’s really a habit instead of a skill and requires a mentality shift to master. The ROI of having attention to detail is massive: spending that extra few seconds or minutes to “think-through everything” could save you from losing many hours and thousands in revenue.

We often have to sacrifice quality for speed to validate new ideas. It is important to know the balance between the two and to find good tradeoffs. For new ideas, we want to quickly test a hypothesis, instead of building the most robust feature that no one wants and having to discard all the code anyways. Once a hypothesis has been validated, we can make it more robust. As the company matures, this tradeoff will need to adapt with the stage of the company.

We are an early-stage startup. Our product, roadmap, strategy, and goals constantly change. We should not be scared of a rapidly changing work environment. Things may feel unstable, or even desperate, at times. We believe we'll overcome the challenges (as we have each time in the past), but there will be times when things can get really, really tough.
We encounter a lot of hard problems, most of which don't have obvious answers. We aren't constrained to any particular solution, and sometimes the best solution may sound crazy at first. We want an environment where every member of the team feels excited sharing new ideas, which will be respected and challenged by others.

We are looking for team members who aren't just checking off tasks, but are thinking about how to push the business forward and increase their impact. We want you to look for new opportunities that we aren't taking advantage of, and go for it!