R072 - Product Culture at Buffer, with Mike San Román

What would happen if tomorrow at work, you found out that the salaries of the entire organization had been made public? If what you visualize is not chairs flying against windows or flames reaching the ceiling, then the organizational culture in your company probably has a good level of transparency.

What makes a culture transparent? And what advantages does transparency have as a value? What impact does it have on the product? What other values are desirable in a product company? Today we are delighted to welcome Mike San Román, Director of Engineering, Platform, and Technology at Buffer, a product company whose goal is to help generate audiences organically.

What is the real world to you?

I can't help but think that the real world as such, especially in singular, doesn't exist. The real world is something exclusively very individual and context-dependent. I have always been in my professional career surrounded by people who have been doing things that most people said: "That can't be true. It's impossible. It can't be real." So I can't help but reflect that it is something super-malleable because the moment my real world collides with yours, both worlds transform. It's something that is constantly evolving.

R072 - Product Culture at Buffer, with Mike San Román

Management at Buffer

When you talk about managers, do you mean people who are focused on growing people more than on the delivery itself?

It's a hybrid role. For many years we've had management roles that were exclusively focused on people, and we realized that it wasn't entirely aligned with the type of company we wanted to build, which is much more interested in everyone, from the person who just joined two weeks ago to the CEO, being involved in the details and actively working on projects, in different ways but always like that. So, we have engineering managers who are coding, others who are directing technical topics without having to go into more detail. And it's something I actively look for in my role as Director of Engineering.

What challenges do you have today as Director of Engineering?

The challenge we have right now is that we are in a process where we are going through quite a broad hiring phase. We currently have a small team in some areas or smaller than we would like, and we have a very ambitious roadmap. So, it's about managing the execution of that roadmap and continuing to push with that level of quality while dedicating a good part of the time to that hiring. And, on the other hand, also defining the next six months of roadmap strategy and so on.

The way Buffer is managed is not learned in business schools. It's not learned in an MBA or the best universities.

Culture at Buffer

I think in a very marked way, Joel, when he started Buffer, was already operating like this. Something that amazed me a lot is knowing that at the moment he started, when he launched the landing, the MVP testing Buffer, and when he already had three leads and got the first subscription, he published that Buffer had earned 5 dollars. In each of those moments, there was that part of transparency, and I think in terms of operating, also optimism, it was there at that very initiatory moment.

Then, as Buffer grew as an organization, they found and those other values emerged, I think based on seeing what things united us as a team and what things made that match not exist with some people who could have been part of the organization in more initiatory moments and so on.

If you don't have trust, it doesn't matter if you have the best roadmap, the best perks... you won't have the same success, and certainly, you won't enjoy the journey as much.

The part of working remotely, for example, in 2010, 2011 being a very rare thing, after all, happened a bit by accident when the founders were in the United States trying to raise that seed round, and shortly after entering the incubator where they managed to get in, they were kicked out of the United States due to a visa issue. Okay, "we don't want to go back to the United Kingdom, we don't want to go home. We want to continue this adventure." And it was like a movie moment of spinning the globe, pointing a finger, and they went to Hong Kong. And from there, they worked for a few months. When they started hiring people, when it started to grow, taking advantage of that delocalization and making the decision: Do we want to continue there, or do we want to all go back? And curiously, which is something that resonates a lot with what you mention, what I remember from Runroom about the dailies, the stand-ups, doing them all in front of the laptop, at the moment this initiatory team decided: All in, 100% remote, everyone decides for individual reasons to move to Francisco to live. And Buffer opened an office there. But always from the premise that there couldn't be an advantage of being in the office as an employee over not being in it and working as you do.

Why is transparency so important at Buffer?

It's hard to answer after ten years of working like this. At many moments, I consider the shock it could be, in fact, for me, suddenly entering another place. I've even had some encounters as more of an advisor with other companies and so on, where I assume that there is that flow of information within the teams and so on. And of course, realizing from people's faces that it's not like that.

For me, one of the main elements, and even more so if you couple it with the topic of working 100% remotely, not even in the same time zone and so on, is that transparency generates trust. And that's something that for me is something immovable, really, trust as an operational or basic principle in a team. If you don't have trust, it doesn't matter if you have the best roadmap, the best perks, whatever, you won't have the same success, and certainly, you won't enjoy the journey as much.

In what way do you think that directly impacts the quality of the product you deliver?

One of the things that come to mind regarding the user experience is something that happened a lot in those initiatory moments at Buffer where there might be a problem: suddenly, Buffer goes down, stops working, a very curious thing is that Buffer gained fans during an incident.

And I think it had a lot to do with that because this was being shared. Before I joined, Buffer was hacked. There was a very severe security issue one weekend. And I remember seeing both on Twitter, the Buffer team jumping in and talking to people who were writing, everyone, seeing engineers, seeing that along with customer support people, along with the founders and so on. But also a blog updated minute by minute with how that mitigation was progressing. And of course, it's something that generates trust. You say: These people are sharing this.

When I joined Buffer, it was bufferapp.com, and after a few months, we bought the buffer.com domain, which was owned by a different company. In the negotiation process, a detail that always amazes me is that when we went to talk, when that person showed they were willing to sell the domain, we took a screenshot of the bank statement: This is the money the company has. So, you can understand that our offer is this other amount. That's it. There's no trick, it's this. If you're expecting us to be a big tech and so on, that's not what you're going to find. And it seems to me a level of frankness... although other people might say: "you could have gotten it for a lower amount if you had negotiated more aggressively." But we don't work like that. And it's something I remember at that moment as something amazing.

You've described transparency in some behaviors very well. In what do you see optimism?

There are two themes that resonate a lot with optimism. First, it's an adjacent value, which is continuous improvement, which I think when you're applying it at both an organizational and individual level, which is almost like an expectation we have at Buffer, that we're all working on being better people, there's a level of optimism in believing that you can really improve and that what you're trying, no matter how radical it may be, can really bring you something positive. So, there's a point of that leap of faith or that moment of vulnerability that you believe will really take you to that next level. So, for me, they are two things that are very connected, even thinking about it at an engineering level, working with a technology, having built a product that is 13 years, 14 years old, there's a lot of technical debt, knowing, having the confidence: No, we can really take it to a better point. There's optimism because we've also had many moments of leaps of faith in that technological roadmap of we're going to do this, and it's going to bring us something this bet, within a year, when we've crossed this desert.

There is something we have to be practicing every day. On the other hand, also, within the world of startups, being such a rare startup, that we're not raising capital rounds, and that means we depend on the money our users give us, there are complicated moments, like COVID, for example, in 2020. On the web, alongside the ARR, you can see the metric, because now it's an ARR of 18 million, but I think at that moment we could have reached a peak of 20, 21, which is not only related to COVID, there's also a part of product strategy change and company strategy change. And there's that optimism of saying: this change, even at the pricing level. In fact, the pricing system we have now at a unit level is much cheaper than the previous one, but we believe it will really lead us to greater growth, to a better company.

Do you think it would be possible to make exactly the same product you have in a different culture?

I don't think so. I don't think it would have survived, surely, the whole transformation process we've been going through as a company internally. And, naturally, that is reflected in the product, how we've been organizing each moment, each team change, each focus change, you can see, if we could take snapshots of how the product was, what features were there, what parts were stronger and what parts were weaker, they are explained, I think, exclusively through the attention we had as a culture and as an organization internally. It's totally connected.

I'm a big fan of Conway's law and how the team is organized and how information flows is a reflection of how the system architecture is made. And it's literally like that. That change is not only something exclusively at the engineering level, you can literally see it in the user experience. What users had to do four years ago, when we had a company that was several products, because really each team was focused on specific metrics and was working with a high independence prism, almost like startups within a startup. And the work that generated that, we realized it wasn't aligned not only with the company's values but with the vision we have of how Buffer should be as a company, that we seek to be a small company, a small business. We don't want to grow exponentially in terms of staff, like others do. We want to be a small business, a long-term business. And of course, that wasn't aligned with how we were operating.

What is Buffer's structure like today? What are the teams like?

From a user experience perspective, it's much more focused on the jobs to be done or groups of functionalities that are related to each other. We have a team that is much more focused on the content creation part, the experience of creating a post, organizing that, organizing ideas, which is a concept and a new section that we are working on much more now.

We can have another team that is more focused on connecting different social networks, what the analytics process means, comments, that connection, the experience of all this, the publication, the liability of all that. So, it's much more focused on how the user can live to serve each part of the product.

Do you have references? Do you look at companies and their way of managing that inspire you?

I would say yes and no. There is no company we are following. There are companies with values similar to ours. A company that comes to mind is Doist, the company behind Todoist and Twist, which is also a company more or less created at the same time, that focus on remote work, but it's true that they also have different approaches to managing things. For example, they are much more asynchronous than we are, despite being so distributed, we have a lot of synchrony anyway. In the past, companies that were pioneers in remote work like Basecamp influenced us a lot in their day. We've always been like that, suddenly someone sees something very inspiring from a company and shares it with everyone.

The way Buffer is managed is not learned in business schools. It's not learned in an MBA or the best universities. Error is part of that improvement process. Trust, optimism, transparency, those values, that mentality, and that personality are not replicable.

What things do you see in common between the culture you knew at Runroom and the culture at Buffer?

The focus on continuous improvement is something that always amazed me at Runroom, both from the outside, before joining, and being inside, how everything could be questioned and from the focus of how we can do this better together, those retrospectives of the whole company, all together, discussing everything. I even remember discussing salary issues and so on, which already amazed me and feeling a lot of gratitude for the whole group of people we were there having these very direct conversations.

Also transparency. And one of my first memories of you and César was the first time at an Agile Barcelona meeting with that book club. I think they were at Doble you offices in Plaza de la Virreina, Bea was there, I remember those who were there at the table, it was like: This when the Runroom people come, let them tell us how they do it. I don't even remember the topic anymore, but I remember that pair of co-founders, arriving and sharing how they work and also something, some management with the client. Something that might be one of their competitive advantages, and they are sharing it with a community.

There is a level of idealism, of the need for businesses to operate in a way much more aligned with our values and generosity, which I see very much in common between Buffer and Runroom. And I think that belief that with all these years is more than proven that things can be done better and that it really is not a utopia, but that solid businesses can be built with it.

I'm convinced that at some point in the interview you might have said: That's impossible in my company. And I understand you. Freud distinguished three levels of consciousness: conscious, unconscious, and preconscious. The preconscious is everything that is part of the unconscious but that peeks into the conscious side. It harbors experiences, feelings, ideas, and fantasies stored in memory, but of which there is no awareness at every moment. I believe that culture lives in the preconscious. It's something so settled on basic assumptions that many times we are unable to imagine another reality different from how things have always been done here. It seems impossible to us that it could be any other way. That's why it's so important to visit other realities from consciousness. If you liked the episode, give us a little love with a like, a comment, or better yet, share it on your own networks. A big hug and I look forward to seeing you in the real world.

Open Salary System

You have made your open salary system public. I remember when you joined Buffer, that blew everyone's mind. I've always understood it as a formula that depends on the role you play, the value contribution to the organization, and the cost of living in the city where you live or your own context. Explain to us how it works.

Yes, and in the end, there aren't many more variables than this and your level within that role you are developing.

The experience you have, are like several pillars, the level of leadership, the level of impact you have in the company, and so on. Each area has its framework that shows those different levels or what it means to be level four in engineering and what it means to be level four in customer support. There is a common definition for everyone at each level to ensure that we are really having the same expectations at the company level. So, we have to be aligned from that point of view. But yes, it's a formula that we've been iterating over the years, especially simplifying, seeking to make it much easier to understand and much clearer. And even with the cost of living part, now we only have that, the global cost of living and the high cost of living, which is for certain cities and that's it. It's something we always look for: what can we eliminate to increase more clarity and make it something especially fair for everyone.

I think it's a part that has always been there at Buffer, experimenting with what we believe could be the future of work, the future of organizations. Transparency being a very strong pillar, but that, other things like the management experiments we've done or now the four-day workweek, which we started in 2020, always looking for what is really the future of work. Experimenting with it, sometimes making mistakes and going back. But it's true that it's something that I, on a personal level, have always valued a lot, that they took that step. And the work, especially, that is not negligible, even if it was a smaller team, to standardize salaries in that way. At that moment, focusing on saying: how can we really define this?

Because of course, at the moment it's transparent, at the moment it's a formula, I can't negotiate 1,000 dollars more than you. If we're doing the same role, there are no intermediate values, there's no negotiation. Everything has to be the same.

The "performance measurement" framework must be very interesting. How does Buffer find consensus that you are doing your job well?

Every six months, in fact, right now we are in this process of doing performance reviews. Although it's the manager of each person who is really writing this review, and it's the person who can propose if someone deserves a promotion, an adjustment is not decided unilaterally by this person. Not only does it have to present a case as objectively as possible, but at the engineering level, the group of managers gets together to review all these cases and other executives also participate in it to ensure that there is really a consensus from different areas in the perception of this and much more information is sought from everyone.

There is a very important part, also, at Buffer, that these promotions only occur when you have already been performing this role very clearly. While in other organizations there is more of that leap of faith of "We believe you are ready to start working this way."

What I expect from a person who can become a staff engineer, what would be a level six at Buffer in engineering, is not only a level of technical leadership of several teams and so on, but a level of cultural contribution within the company. So, a person who might not work day-to-day with this person has to know about this person, has to have seen that they are really involved and so on. That consensus is sought a lot.

What is Buffer like?

Buffer has been in constant evolution during these 10 years I've been here. Buffer is not the Buffer I joined. We've always been experimenting with different things. But at the same time, the only thing I can say is that what you see on that website is what there is. There is no internal Buffer.

Public salaries, business metrics, the product roadmap we also have published there. People can vote, comment, see what we are prioritizing and what we are not. These are things that are there. Even shareholder updates are published every month on our website, so you can perfectly see what's inside. So, for me, it's a testament to the strong transparency, but in general to the culture and values we have.

The formal organization is quite traditional in the sense of the idea of cross-functional teams, especially focusing on the product and engineering part and so on. Product teams are made up of engineers, a product manager, and a designer.

And at the same time a fairly flat structure, where there is an executive suite with four figures, a few executives, and the rest are these engineering, product, and design teams, a marketing team, and the customer support team.

The organization itself has gone through many change processes because I joined, after all, I think I was person number 24, now we are 75. We have encountered many needs, both organizational, but also to do experiments over time, like a time when we had no management system at all.

Transparency generates trust. And that's something that for me is something immovable. Trust as an operational or basic principle in a team.

In the decision-making process, it is sought that teams have to be able to direct a bit their priorities, their focus areas, and propose areas for improvement, but at the same time, yes, there is a management layer, in the case of engineering, a few engineering managers, right now two, we are about to open the process to hire a third and me. We are both involved in the decision-making and prioritization of the technical strategy, as well as the growth of people within the organization.

Culture and Remote Work

How do you manage to maintain the culture being an absolutely delocalized company?

I think that's one of the litmus tests of a strong culture. If that culture is maintained without having to be all in the same space continuously, it means that we really have those shared values. We don't have to be controlling that. Naturally, then we can talk about more tactical things, like for example we recently had a company-wide meeting. It's the first time we've all come together since before the pandemic.

When I joined, we did it every four or five months. As we grew, we postponed it over time, and it was once a year. Just before the pandemic, the last years, 2018-2019, it was a company-wide meeting, and each team also decided when and where they could meet. We tried to make them every six months each of these. And now, after COVID, already seeing a bit that it was a safer moment for everyone to attend, in March we all got together for the first time. For me, it was a very striking thing because there are people I've known for ten years, and five years have passed, and they are still the same person. But there are people I see for the first time and with whom I've been working for three or four years, and I feel the same level of connection because there are those shared values.

Allowing or prioritizing that each one is having their fullest life is what also makes people show themselves more authentically. Work is not being a limitation to doing things the way you need to do them or the way you want to do them.

Working remotely and working with these values of continuous improvement, transparency, gratitude, optimism, the values we have, it's very clear if this person is really operating from those values in day-to-day life, either because it immediately stands out who doesn't operate like that, in a way that a person is really like that. Or if they are trying to sustain a way of operating that doesn't resonate with them, it also ends up falling under its own weight, and they realize it's not the place where they feel most comfortable.

I think it has a lot to do with the belief that culture is the chit-chat at the coffee machine or in the... And yes, it's also that, it can also be part of the culture, the bonds of friendship you can form, which can last over the years, but that can also be built in another way. How do you see it?

I have very intimate and close relationships with people who don't live in Barcelona and naturally, there are many moments when when we meet, you say: I wish this person were here, and we could share more day-to-day. But I think that, that chit-chat, that connection, and so on, appears exactly the same. It's curious because at the same time Barcelona is becoming a hub for people working at Buffer, now we are five people in total. We never meet unless someone else comes from outside, then we all get together to be working this week, having dinner, sharing those moments with that person.

But at the same time, I think that allowing or prioritizing that each one is having their fullest life is what also makes people show themselves more authentically. Work is not being a limitation to doing things the way you need to do them or the way you want to do them.

Product Roadmap

I seemed to understand that roadmap decisions for a product are also made collectively. How do you do it?

There are two phases or two topics to distinguish. We have a public product roadmap, where users can actively vote and even propose things they are missing. That part we collect and reflect transparently on what we are working on today and what is next we are going to start working on. And then, internally, it's a collaborative process at the level of the engineering, product, and design structure. Each team sits down and prepares that work of what are both the technical or design priorities and the overall UX improvement of Buffer, as well as pure product features. Each team proposes its roadmap for the next quarter and is put together. That's where the more collective prioritization part appears, to see if it's necessary to adjust some topics based on what each team is working on, the needs that may be.

What do the teams receive? Do they receive impact ambitions, and the teams translate that into outcomes and outputs?

The teams are receiving, either actively, feedback from users through this public roadmap we have, as well as active user interview sessions. Naturally, a vision of where we want to go at a higher level, which can be defined by our Chief Product Officer, the CEO, the Head of Design, and me, in terms of certain constraints regarding what direction we want to take this year or these coming months, which is a bit of that vision that informs what features, what improvements are the ones each team can then be taking. But at the same time, the team can really say: we believe that this feature, which may not be aligned with this, can bring much more value regarding these metrics that really matter to us (active users, revenue...) And we can have this completely open conversation.