To enjoy work and get things done, you need to be able to focus. Unlike many startups we decided against an open space office. Open space looks cooler at first, and it certainly makes for hipper office shots, but the noise even at our initial studio just wore us down.

We want to encourage team communication that doesn’t disturb the next team, so we chose an office with many doors. It balances team rooms (for 3 to 5 people), meeting rooms, and shared space like a living room and two kitchens. Take a tour of the office here.

We love our work, we share updates on our tech blog and on our product blog, and we also love to travel and enjoy life in general. Check out the video about our last company trip, the slideshows about some of our recent company events and excursions below, or visit our Flickr stream.

We’re working hard at building the greatest feedback tool on the planet. And we’re standing on the shoulders of giants! Check out our tools page to learn more about our tech stack. Hint: React, Google Cloud, and more! Also, learn more about us on our tech blog!

Our greatest pride is our amazing team, which counts 16 nationalities for less than 30 employees. We love working with people coming from different backgrounds, and you will be welcome at SI whatever your origins, gender, lifestyle or quirks!

We don’t do overtime. One day a week of home office is totally fine. The occasional remote work (say for a few weeks a year) can work really well. Everyone can take time off at short notice, and it’s clear that family is more important than work.

At the same time, we love our work, and we’re passionate about what we do. We hire people who share our love of creating value for our customer. We assign projects based on employee’s preferences, and balance the fun with the necessary tasks. Sometimes boring work can’t be avoided, but afterwards we’ll improve processes until boring work can be automated. Which in turn also helps with work-life balance.

True revolutions rarely go as planned. And when it comes to actual improvements, most work best when applied incrementally. Small improvements are an important cornerstone in lean manufacturing like for example Kaizen (Wikipedia).

The name was inspired by Per’s time at Atlassian. There were always tons of big projects and important mission critical features on the product roadmap, and there was little time for all the small things. Ultimately only the intern’s time could be spared, and to make it sound more glamorous, he was named the “Small Improvements Team (of one)”.

We have rarely gotten a better return on investment!

Important-sounding company values and ethics manuals don’t stop a company from tanking. So our mission and vision document is fairly short and sweet.

Beyond our long term goal of helping people get better by way of feedback, we believe that transparency is important. We share our financials, product decisions, and hiring plans internally all the time, and sometimes even externally.

A common sentence you’ll hear a lot inside SI is “be the change you seek,” which we gleaned from Atlassian’s values. Rather than complaining about things that suck, we expect everyone at SI to fix problems wherever they run into them. Build server is too slow? Improve the code, or buy a faster one. Website looks ugly? Find a designer who can help. Customers complain about bugs? Propose reshuffling the roadmap to address the bugs first!

We also avoid working with clients who have a bad reputation, or whose business causes more problems than it solves. For instance, we routinely reject companies with ties to gambling, porn or risky financial products (“loan sharks”), and we’re often double checking potential buyers if we believe they might have a bad track record regarding environmental issues, gender inequality, corruption, etc. We’re not pretending to save the planet single-handedly this way, but if everyone pulls their weight, all these small things do add up.

Learn more in our mission and vision document!

Got any questions? Need help? Found a bug? Want to schedule a live presentation? Arrange a phone call? Inquire about anything else?

Send a mail to support@small-improvements.com, or check out our contact page for more options.

And if you’d like to send us your application, you can visit our careers page for more information and contact details.