Hello dear reader and welcome to the InfiniSwiss blog, nice to have you!

Since this is the first post on our new blog, it’s only fitting to introduce ourselves and explain a bit about our motivations in starting a blog…in 2020.

You can also read more about us on the website proper https://www.infiniswiss.com

Fair warning: bit of a long post incoming…

A short history of us

My name is Adrian Hara and I co-founded InfiniSwiss in 2015 together with my friend Mihai Coros.

Why? Well, after having worked in the industry for more than 14 years we decided to give it a shot of building something that’s maybe a little different. If this sounds like a cliché it’s because it is, though our intentions were pure ;)

We started out by having a product idea and a vision. After quickly building a prototype to validate the idea technically, we unfortunately hit a wall when it came to go to market and put the project on hold. So, to put bread on the table so-to-speak, we started a collaboration in the software services domain, where we were very lucky to have Coresystems AG as our first customer.

Coresystems is an awesome startup company with some truly outstanding people. I highly encourage you to check out their website, especially as there’s a surprise waiting for you on the other side of that link.

During the next years we slowly but surely grew our team (now numbering 15) as well as our customer base (which includes both well known companies such as Sunrise or Mitsubishi Hitachi, as well as high-tech startups such as Houzy or Mila). We’re very proud of the team we have as well as our customers and partners and while we’re still working on different product ideas in the background (on which we iterate and fail fast) we look forward to further offering our expertise and growing our software services business model long-term.

Ok, but why “different”?

So far we sound just like every other software agency out there, right? Well almost, I think we do have some things which make us stand out.

We like to think that our key differentiators rest on two base pillars:

  • company culture
  • business mindset

Our company culture

While culture is an overloaded term and put together with company might even ruffle some feathers, we define it as who we are, what we believe in and what we concretely do about it in our daily lives. Said succinctly (cliché warning):

We put people first.

Now surely you’ve read this platitude many times, so let’s see how we concretely achieve this.

Technical empowerment We offer our colleagues the best environment for technical growth! We hire the best, but we also know that in our field it’s hard to stay the best. So we support learning in every way that we can, such as:

  • 4-day work week: 1 day per week is allocated for learning. This time is freely available to be used at everyone’s discretion. We don’t mandate what people do with it. The only condition: there is some measurable output (e.g. prototype, technical presentation, improvement on thing X etc). This is not a small effort for the company, as we effectively bill 80% instead of 100%, but we put our money where our mouth is and feel it’s entirely justified to actively help people grow instead of relying on them to do it in their own free time.
  • Access to any learning resource: any physical or e-book, subscriptions or on-demand online courses (either established platforms or one-off courses), participation in conferences etc. You name it.
  • Constant knowledge-sharing: we organize a lot of internal knowledge sharing sessions. They come out naturally out of the learning time or project experience or personal side-projects. Whatever it is we encourage it and record it for posterity.
  • Challenging technical work: we’re lucky to work with customers and partners who are on the cutting edge, so we’re able to work with newest (often latest) tools and technologies. We’re also lucky to have a large latitude in choosing the tools of the trade, from the architecture and design of the solutions to the actual frameworks used. With great power comes great responsibility, so we’re careful (read picky) in who we hire and value self-drive, independence and technical prowess greatly, but reward them with an environment where they can be expressed in full.
  • Flat hierarchy: we don’t have managers. In fact, we don’t have any levels at all (i.e. no Junior, Senior, Lead etc). We’re all engineers! We feel that having levels would introduce unnecessary mental barriers between us, so we are all on the same level. Of course, different people have different expertise in different areas and we acknowledge that. We also have a concept of “project lead” for product ideas which is a role people can take to just “drive” an idea forward (with the help of others of course). Barring that, everyone works hand-in-hand, including the founders, day in and day out.

Workplace empowerment Simply put, this means having a workplace that frees you up of other “worries” and allows you to concentrate on the “fun”, both professional and personal. We do this by:

  • Fair, 100% merit-based compensation: we are super-careful that the compensation we offer is fair and directly proportional to the contribution someone brings. Notice I said contribution not output or hours or whatever else. Contribution can be measured by business factors such as project success, customer satisfaction or revenue generated, as well as internal factors such as knowledge sharing, drive/ownership on projects or generally helping around. In general, in InfiniSwiss the more you contribute, the more you earn, which combined with the fact that we have a completely flat hierarchy means there is no glass ceiling for technical people to hit compensation-wise. I.e. you don’t have to become a manager in order to earn more. You can continuously hone your engineering skills while moving up the payscale.
  • Unlimited home office: though many companies recently realized that home office can be a good thing, partly forced on by the realities of 2020’s Coronavirus, for us this has been true since 2015 when we started. We allow home office at any time, for any length of time, without restrictions.
  • Flexible working hours: we define a standard of 40 hours a week. How they are achieved is largely up to everyone. Theoretically speaking one could work nights and sleep days (especially if affected by vampirism), though practically we tend to be aligned more or less with the customers’ working hours. We’re lucky to have customers who adopt the same approach, which means that in practice one can work e.g. 4 hours today and 12 tomorrow or one hour extra for the rest of the week or whatever. We don’t have time tracking in place and we work exclusively on an honor system.
  • Workspace setup: we offer a top-notch and customizable workspace. One can choose between a Mac or Windows laptop, 1-to-N displays, adjustable/standing desk, any peripherals (i.e. mice, keyboard, phones etc) and ergonomic office chair. We even support a home-office setup in a similar way.
  • Comprehensive misc items: …such as health insurance, team events etc.
  • Open-door policy: though listed last, this is by no means least. We feel it’s important that everyone in our team feels “safe” to approach anyone else at any time. Communication is key, whether professional and personal, and we’re proud to have a team in which each person, besides being technically top-notch is also a “mensch” :)

While the list above is not complete, it captures the most important items we feel make us live up to our promise of putting people first and granting them lots of technical freedom while supporting them to learn and focus on what really matters in the workplace.

In return we ask for integrity, a strong work ethic and a desire to learn and improve, while also helping others do so. Of course technical skills are a must, but that’s taken care of by our hiring process, which will be the subject of another blog post :)

Our business mindset

The second pillar of our approach to being “different” is our business mindset.

Both myself and my co-founder Mihai worked in outsourcing companies for most of our professional careers before InfiniSwiss. While we loved most of what we did, we felt that in building our own company there are some things we could improve on.

The number one thing which defines our success in working with our customers is learning their business.

I can’t stress enough how important this is both for us and the customer and ultimately for a successful collaboration. This approach means that instead of the customer viewing us, the software agency, as a black box, with some input (the project requirements) and some output (the finished project/product), the customer views us as a business partner. By doing this, the relationship between us fundamentally changes from a supplier relationship to a partnership.

This change might seem small at first glance, however it has a number of essential benefits that dramatically improve the chances of success:

  • It provides agility out of the box: it’s been widely and empirically demonstrated that agile project have higher odds of success than classic waterfall-based ones. Yet, agility is more than a collection of rules, it’s a mindset. The fundamental change that needs to happen for agility to enshrine itself is for the work to move away from a frame of requirements-deliverables (or handoffs/gates) to a frame of continuous collaboration, where all parties work together, all the time, towards the shared goal. By making the mental shift to a partnership relationship we automatically change to a mode where collaboration between us and the customer is “baked in” thus bridging the biggest gap to agility from the start.
  • It leads to closely-knit teams: in all of our projects we are part of the customer’s team! While maybe not physically co-located, we share all steps, meetings, knowledge and ultimately work with the customer’s people (be they technical, domain experts or otherwise). This means that the individuals within the team interact often and delegate more formal processes and tools to a background, supporting role. This in turn means higher communication bandwidth which leads to better results.
  • We course-correct together: while in a supplier relationship a plan (often called The Plan) and deliverables are defined up-front, after which the customer enters a “waiting phase”, in a partnership relationship we’re all in it together. Since we’re partners we think about the project/product every day (or better said, all the time) and are able to change direction as often as needed. This could be due to some technical reasons (e.g. technical input from us, InfiniSwiss) or business reasons (e.g. the customer’s business pivots). Whatever the reason, we are flexible and can adjust on the fly, thereby saving time and costs later.

This approach has helped us to have exactly 0 failed customer projects since we started in 2015 and, on the other hand, often deliver value above and beyond what we set out to.

Of course, this approach only works as long as both parties in the partnership adhere to it and again (this is becoming a mantra by now) we’re lucky to have the customers who believe in it as strongly as we do.

Fine, so why a blog?

If you’ve managed to read so far, thank you!

In getting here, you might’ve asked yourself why we started a blog after all. Part of the answer lies already in what’s written above. We’ve been doing some things a little differently since 2015 and it looks like it’s working. So, we thought we might share it with the world so maybe it helps someone else too. Stay tuned for more posts on company culture, customer collaboration, project management and agility.

Of course, us being a software company, this blog will feature plenty of technical content. We plan to write on technical topics about software architecture, best practices, new technologies, gotchas and bugs as well as tools of the trade.

Finally, we’d love for this blog and its posts to be the start of a conversation. So please do engage with us by:

Thanks for reading!

Written by:
Adi.jpg
Adrian Hara

Managing partner and geek wannabe