Senior Manager of UX Research, Zapier

Even before remote working became the "in thing", freelancers, small business owners, and large organisations have found themselves needing more and more software platforms to serve their operations needs. As people used more software services, Zapier founders saw the need to connect the actions between these softwares and save everyone some time.

• Default to Action - At Zapier, we're building toward a future that does not yet exist. As a result, delivering something real today—and learning from it—is typically better than delivering something of questionably better quality next week. However: action is not an achievement unto itself. Instead, our actions should connect to clear priorities and outcomes, especially what's best for our mission and customers.
• Default to Transparency - We're a growing, distributed team across more than a dozen time zones. We do our best work when we make projects, processes, and systems available to everyone who needs them—inclusive of our customers. Transparency promotes equity and inclusion within our team and customer base. So work in public. Have discussions in the open and document your work. Transparency does not mean consultation or consensus on all decisions. In fact, an important form of transparency is clarity on who is responsible for a decision and who will be consulted.
• Grow Through Feedback - We set ambitious goals at Zapier. We want our customers, people, and company to grow. Achieving these goals requires us to regularly learn and improve. Thankfully, our success has more to do with how quickly we learn than how "perfect" we are in a given moment. Whether it's about how we work or the work itself, feedback enables growth. As such, feedback is one of Zapier's most essential practices. Even so, feedback can be hard to give and hard to receive. We make a point to become good at it anyway—it's just that important.
• Empathy Over Ego - Our customers and teams are part of a global community. To serve them best, we need to understand them. Empathy promotes understanding, curiosity, and humility—qualities that help us connect with and serve our customers. Empathy has similar positive effects on collaboration and belonging within our team. On ego: we all have them, and it's important that we share our perspectives in pursuit of what's right. But sometimes ego can bias our thinking too strongly toward our own views. It's for this reason that we emphasize empathy over ego.
• Build the Robot - No matter your role, you'll find yourself doing repetitive work. Zapier is all about finding ways to work better—whether through automation, simplification, or prioritization—so that we can spend more time doing what humans do best. Note that it's unhelpful to automate or simplify the wrong process or outcome. Manual, less efficient processes are often the right approach early on. We default to action and accept inefficiency when it helps confirm the problems we're solving, and to test solutions for those problems.

Total funding: $1.3m

• As a fully remote company with 800+ team members across 40+ states, 38 countries, and 18+ timezones, we’ve adopted a culture of asynchronous work. This work style allows teams to collaborate effectively across locations, time zones, skills, and each individual’s energy levels, and empowers employees to work in a setting that fits their needs. In practice, we live on Slack, with most conversations in public channels. It mimics the open-office feel and allows everyone to search the chat logs if they need to find something that happened when they weren’t around