Company culture is an invaluable asset - often the difference between success and failure. Over the past three years as a part of the ILPT engineering leadership, we’ve worked hard to strengthen our culture. One of the biggest focuses has been transforming engineering from “code monkeys who just do what they’re told” into owners and key drivers of both engineering and product initiatives.

In other words, we are shifting from mercenaries to missionaries. We don’t just execute; we believe in and drive the mission.

Shifting Gears: The Cultural Foundation

Shifting a culture touches many part of the organization:

• Hiring: Clearly defining expectations and filtering for behaviors that align with the culture you want to build.
• Coaching: Through 1:1s and performance reviews, reinforcing the right attitudes and habits.
• Process: Instituting processes that reinforce the desired culture and removing those that conflict with it.

But what kind of engineering culture we would like to build at ILPT?

Perhaps it is easier to describe our ideal engineer and explain how they think and behave.

Let’s call them Alex!

Ownership: From Following to Driving

Alex takes full ownership of a solution, proactively pushing back and seeking clarity if the context does not make sense. They don’t follow instructions blindly.

Alex drives the process proactively, engaging Product, UX, and EM early rather than waiting to be involved. They won’t be sitting on their hands waiting for directions.

Alex treats technical debt as part of the job. Actively identifies issues, consults with the PM on larger tasks, and addresses small tech debt seamlessly without a formal ticket. They don’t complain that the code is a mess without proposing fixes or owning the improvement.

Alex ships production-ready code by default—tested, observable, resilient, and secure (unless an intentional, short-lived experiment). They don’t ship features tested poorly, without considering scale, security, or dependency failure scenarios.

Alex sets up observability and alerting so they know immediately if their product works as expected in production. They won’t find out that something is wrong when users report the issue.

Alex embraces accountability for mistakes, learning from them and proactively sharing lessons to prevent recurrence. They don’t blame external circumstances and move on without setting preventative measures.

Alex is highly reliable, meeting deadlines or communicating blockers and revised estimates early and proactively. They don’t miss a deadline and letting the team find out too late.

The Multiplier Mindset: Scaling the Team’s Impact

Alex actively improves the skills of peers (within and outside the team). They pick up challenging problems and deliberately show their peers how to deal with them, through documentation or pairing. They won’t solve “difficult” problems in isolation without sharing knowledge.

Alex actively documents and communicates business knowledge and the context behind decisions. They don’t hoard knowledge to become irreplaceable.

Alex focuses on multiplying team performance and eliminating bottlenecks, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. They don’t create dependencies or slowdowns for others.

Mastering the Craft: Efficient Ways of Working

Alex breaks work into small, reviewable chunks that are easy for peers to review and accept. They don’t deliver giant, complex contributions that halt the review process.

Alex uses the board as the primary, living communication tool for progress and blockers, ensuring status is always clear to the team. They don’t treat the board as a bureaucratic formality.

Alex focuses on very few tasks at a time (ideally one). They proactively work around team dependencies, ask for help to unblock themselves. They pick up a new task as a last resort letting everyone know very clearly. They don’t juggle many partially-blocked tickets at once.

Alex works with other engineers, ensuring that there is always someone with the knowledge necessary available to work on the project. They don’t work solo, causing a project to halt entirely when they are off.

Organizational Impact: Expanding Our Scope

Alex communicates and coordinates across teams proactively without going through “official channels”. They don’t assume coordination is solely the manager’s job.

Alex submits PRs to other teams’ codebases to resolve blockers and avoid creating dependencies. They don’t simply submit tickets for another team to pick up.

Alex looks for opportunities to improve shared codebases and systems for the benefit of the entire organization. They never say an issue is “not their responsibility” if it impacts the organization.

Alex focuses on their impact on the entire organization, not just their immediate team.

Commitment to Growth

Everyone can become like Alex and work at a sustainable pace. Exhaustion is not a substitute for commitment!

Most importantly: as engineers at ILPT, we know we will occasionally slip from this path. What makes us exceptional is that we notice when it happens and make the effort to correct.

This is a shared journey of growth. By focusing on these aspirational traits, we will continue to build a culture of high-performing, missionary engineers who drive ILPT’s success.

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