What’s working at Wiredcraft like?

2019 is a big year for Wiredcraft. We’ve reached our 10th year as a company. (Bravo!)

Wiredcraft started in Shanghai in 2009. For a while, we worked with international development and non-profit organizations, creating the software for the South Sudan referendum, rebuilding the Open Data platform for the World Bank and running the elections of Myanmar.

Along the way, we also built several SaaS products. At the end of 2014 we turned down investment offers in order to focus on creating digital products for some of the largest brands in the world. We’ve been at it ever since, growing at a rapid pace.

What we value

We follow a specific set of values while doing our jobs. And since we like to have everything written down, you can check our playbook to learn more.

Our core values:

• Get sh*t done

Our entire team is aligned behind a single goal: shipping.

• Tell the truth

We believe transparency and honesty help us succeed faster.

• Give a damn

We want to work on things we care a great deal about.

• Keep it simple

We keep things simple and try and make them even simpler when possible.

Working at Wiredcraft

Marketing

Data - The top three words you hear the most in our Marketing team are no doubt “data-driven”, “conversion” and “KPI”. Not just because we are CRAZY about data, but also because we love the objectivity it brings, as well as the weird insights into user behavior.

Content - We value content and take every opportunity we can to turn something into a blog, an event or an Ebook. It sounds like a lot of writing for us, but we actually have support from other teams on providing good content. For example, the DevOps team has contributed many pieces to our blog.

Event - We love events, and anybody who has been to one of our events would know that. We are a regular meetup host, and organize large conferences too. The reason we are a huge fan of eventing is that we believe that sharing knowledge helps to bring like-minded people together, and out of these connections come endless possibilities to share, learn, and collaborate.

Design

First things first, this piece will help you understand how we work in design. It summarizes our work flow and the core principles we follow in the design team.

Building digital products means seeing the product as a whole, not breaking the product into simply UI or UX. This also means that we expect our designers to be competent on both UI and UX, and many of them already have rich experience in web development and a decent amount of product sense.

Our designers work closely with developers, and it’s normal to see members of both teams sitting next to each other discussing user flow or wireframes.

We are a big fan of Figma because of the collaboration and flexibility it brings us, our CEO has a talk about it. We still use other tools when a project requires it, but the goal is to ‘collaborate with everyone, at every phase’, as Figma says.

Development

Our tech team is huge, almost half of our team members are developers. No, it is not as boring as you might think if you come from a non-technical background. However, we admit that we are pretty nerdy, which means we have a Slack channel that’s dedicated to nerdy memes 🙂. We are big supporters of open source too. Because of that, we have been the organizers of JSConf China since 2012.

Since we are nerdy, we will lay out all the nerdy stuff we do here. GitHub is our daily tool, we work asynchronously through GitHub issues and we invite our clients to work with us on GitHub too (fun, right?). Our developers are either coding, scrumming, or building automations. Check our latest internal automation project here.

Scrum is in our blood. On top of that, our development team likes to work together with everyone, and Quality Assurance is part of that. We integrate QA on multiple levels including unit testing, integration testing, performance testing and manual QA. Think you’ve written awesome code? Wait ‘til you get approval from our QAs.

We organize not only regular JavaScript meetups, but also internal lightning talks. If you are interested in our main tools, check out here.

Project Management

Want to find where our Project Managers are? Check our meeting rooms, or client offices. They are the scrum masters, as well as product managers if they are owning the product design and strategy.

Organized and smart as our PMs are, they rely on processes and tools to keep everything on track, meaning that they try hard to make sure each team updates their progress and key decisions/alignments on GitHub or centralized Paper docs.

Project management is more than managing timelines and pushing for results. It’s also about keeping your team members productive, and that means knowing your team inside out - understanding their capacity and technical feasibility when receiving new requirements.

What’s also worth mentioning is the ability to manage expectations. We think our PMs should be able to keep their minds clear while being responsive, maintaining transparency and leveraging their project experiences. While interesting, it’s a tough role to be in, because they’re the captains sailing the ship, essentially.

Operations

While the behind-the-scenes work that the operations team do to keep the office running smoothly isn’t always obvious, we do love everything they do for us. They keep us happy and full by organizing monthly birthday/anniversary celebrations, regular team building events, and always keeping the snack bar full.

Although they’re a small team of three, they’re always looking for opportunities to surprise us, like finding a new free Friday lunch restaurant or adding a sweet note to our birthday/anniversary presents.