Name: Great company with supportive colleagues!
Item: Carousell
Rating: 5
Author: Anonymous User

Carousell

Claimed

Carousell Group is the leading multi-category platform for secondhand in Greater Southeast Asia on a mission to make secondhand the first choice. Founded in August 2012 in Singapore, the Group has a leading presence in seven markets under the brands Carousell, Carousell Media Group, Cho Tot, Laku6, Mudah.my, OneShift, REFASH and Revo Financial, serving tens of millions of monthly active users. Carousell is backed by leading investors including Telenor Group, Rakuten Ventures, Naver, STIC Investments and Sequoia Capital India.As a team of passionate individuals working together to solve meaningful problems, there is so much more for you to discover in a career with Carousell. Our culture is made up of hiring, developing, and promoting people who embody our values of HEART, which is an acronym for Humility, Empathy, Accountability, Relentlessly resourceful and Teamwork. Together as an organisation, we make magic happen.

We celebrate big or small wins to appreciate the winners and inspire people to want to win more. When we get the high of winning, we just want to win more and more. We do this through various ways, such as Slack #kudos, recognition initiatives such as Tech Toasts, in-person, Town Halls etc.

Every team member, regardless of tech or non-tech, is included in our internal dogfooding process. We also encourage our teammates to flag issues and bug reports. It is all hands on deck to ensure our user gets the best product experience.

We conduct user research both regularly to get a pulse and also on a specific-needs basis when we want to give our users some early prototypes or drafted ideas. It's a very rewarding process everyone is willing to join, engineers included, as it's the closest we can get to our users and we can learn quickly whether things could work.

We start from the fundamental belief that our people are talented, passionate, and hungry to learn and act in the best interest of the company.

With this starting point, we take extreme ownership of what we do. Extreme ownership means that everyone, as a team member, will be part of various phases of the lifecycle of each feature or improvement, from ideation to post-launch results. The impact of what we do highly depend on each person's contribution. Extreme ownership means also taking the necessary steps to ensure that the people we work with have absolute clarity about what we do and our progress.

This extends to our career as well - we take an active interest to clarify any doubts about our scope or role and check how we are doing from our managers through 1:1 sessions.

The “sudo rm-rf” mistake was the legendary mistake our co-founder Lucas made. He accidentally deleted all our photos 2 weeks before our official launch after promising media that we will go live on that day with a bang. Instead of being demoralised, finger-pointing and angry with ourselves, we learned from that setback and solved it. It is now a famous case study in computing school.

We view setbacks as opportunities for learning and problem-solving. We are more interested in the value of the lessons than hiding or being right or blaming or criticizing when there is a setback. What is not okay is to repeatedly make the same mistakes without learning.

We believe in engaging in regular and open communication, which includes celebrating wins and learning from mistakes.

One of the ways we do this is through our regular town hall meetings at the Carousell Group and Carousell brand level, which we have been holding since the start. We share important business and market updates from both country and team function perspectives, any key organisation changes, and celebrate achieving our must-win battles. The teams have the chance to share about the projects they’re working on, and can also ask any question during our Q&A session. Senior leaders and founders will answer every top-voted question no matter how difficult the question is.

The various teams, regardless of tech or non-tech, share regular updates on a monthly/quarterly basis on their work. Internal communications are also uploaded on our intranet for all teams to reference.

We started because we believe in using technology to solve problems at scale. We continue to anchor every opportunity and challenge around problem-solving to deliver a bigger impact to our users and to stay ahead.

We hope our teammates can adopt this belief: You can do anything as long as you are relentlessly resourceful. We are determined to work around constraints and find creative ways to solve challenges to find step-change 10x solutions.

Culture QnA

On top of our individual and team L&D budgets (which is the same amount across markets, teams and job levels), we also created several programmes across various teams to address different needs and provide more tailored L&D training to individual teams/jobs levels.

For example, we have an Engineering Manager Academy for new managers that comprises 13 weekly one-hour sessions that cover diverse topics around people and stakeholder management, operational information, delegation and team management.

The Data team also conduct various data training for teammates across the organisation to equip them with basic data literacy, and more in-depth training for stakeholders requiring more skills for their work.

Whenever there are projects or areas that engineers are passionate about, they can coordinate with their manager or other team members on how to best organise their time to work on projects they like, even when they are outside of the typical team scope.

Half of our current engineering managers were previously senior engineers. We don't consider this a promotion but a lateral move to a new role.