“Do the right thing.” “Move fast and break things.” “Think different.”
Do any of these iconic slogans — from Google, Facebook and Apple, respectively — ring a bell? Odds are, you’ve heard one or more of these phrases before, even if you’ve never worked at a global tech organization. But each of these phrases is more than a pithy catchphrase: They define the enterprise of an engineering team aiming to change the world.
Why do tech companies love sharing their values, and why do they matter so much for engineering teams? Excellent team mantras are often equal parts identity, aspiration and rallying point all in one. In a world where tech is the future, tech slogans tell us where we’re going and how we’ll get there.
Take Scythe Robotics, an organization dedicated to building cutting-edge landscaping technology that makes the world — and our lawns — a better place. To get there, their engineering team embraces a set of values that defines a cross-functional, collaborative and trailblazing team.
About Scythe Robotics
Scythe Robotics is an automation machinery manufacturing company. Its latest product is the fully-automated, fully-electric commercial lawn mower, the M.52.
Engineering teams look to company values to work better together, make quick decisions and unite towards a common goal, and new hires look to values to get a snapshot of company culture and how they might fit in. In fact, the vast majority of candidates consider an organization’s mission, purpose and culture before they apply. 56 percent of candidates rank company culture over salary regarding work satisfaction, according to Glassdoor. Whether it's a set of values, a catchphrase or a mantra, the right principle can be a major game changer for a team of engineers.
What makes a good team mantra, and what does it look like in practice? Built In Colorado sat down with Scythe Robotics’ Chief Engineer Davis Foster to talk engineering ethos, the importance of culture and visions for a better, greener future.
Scythe Robotics is reinventing how people care for the outdoor world by building intelligent, all-electric machines.
Does your team or engineering org have a central ethos or mantra that drives how you develop and collaborate?
Constant learning and improvement are the most crucial pieces of the puzzle when designing and building a product like M.52. Creating something relatively close to the limit of present-day technical viability means that the problems we’re encountering can be quite novel. They often require a dozen failures before finding a robust solution. This necessitates constant learning and team effort to push development on the things that make M.52 more valuable to our customers.
Three Core Values That Drive Our Engineering Team
- Kaizen: constantly improving
- Gestalt: cross-functional collaboration
- Focused Ambition: concentrate efforts where they matter.
It also takes a village to raise a robot; very few other products require collaboration from so many different, talented people. We’ve found enormous benefits in embracing this interdisciplinary nature of our team — amazing things happen when the computer vision engineers sit down with the mechanical engineers to architect the sensor suite. Or when the experienced ex-landscapers on the customer team work with the motion planning and controls engineers to devise turning and navigation strategies that will work in the real world.
How do you put that ethos into practice?
The process of bringing our latest generation M.52 to life exemplifies our core three values. After releasing our previous generation of mowers, we gathered extensive feedback from our stakeholders, including current customers and our manufacturing, autonomy and test teams.
It takes a village to raise a robot."
This comprehensive, collaborative input led to major upgrades such as a new battery system, enhanced user interface and totally redesigned electrical architecture. The result? A robust, customer-focused and technically superior M.52 ready for mass production, highlighting our team's emphasis on constant improvement, interdisciplinary collaboration and focused ambition.
As engineering teams imagine possibilities for their culture, how can they ensure that the shared vision is inclusive, inventive and future-proof?
At Scythe, our vision is about the impact we want to leave on the world. At our core, we believe that nature and technology are not at odds and that human-machine collaboration can multiply our power to care for the planet. Our core values are who we are as environmental innovators and allow us to create technology that better cares for green spaces and help grow the businesses that maintain them.
At our core, we believe that nature and technology are not at odds. Human-machine collaboration can multiply our power to care for the planet.”
Our cross-functional organizational structure allows us to break down silos, collaborate more effectively, and innovate at higher levels. This unique team structure allows us to think holistically, remain nimble and move quickly as we pursue our ambitious goals.
We’ve got a long way to go to pull this off, but the Scythe team is committed and focused to making the world a better place, and know that our values and ethos will help propel us there.
