It takes a village to launch a successful product in today’s tech industry. From the engineers who build the software to the revenue team who sell it, maintaining success in tech requires a strong company culture that keeps teams working and learning together.
This is even more important for hybrid and remote offices. Connection and collaboration take extra effort for a team working together from different locations, but the teams that find a healthy communication groove achieve more as a result. In a McKinsey & Company report on social technologies, companies that adopted modern social tech raised their overall productivity by 20 to 25 percent, and in a more recent study on remote work, employees who feel included in detailed workplace communication are five times more like to report increased productivity.
Staying connected is key to team success, and no teams know this more than the ones at FloQast, one of Built In Los Angeles’ top companies hiring today. Built In sat down with Software Engineering Manager Christopher Ngo to learn more about his FloQast experience over the past four years and his appreciation for the interconnectedness of the FloQast team.
For remote and hybrid job seekers looking for teams who stay connected, no matter the distance, take a look into Ngo’s story at FloQast — and their currently open roles.
FloQast is the industry-leading accounting workflow automation solution powered by an AI-enabled platform designed by accountants for accountants.
Describe your company culture in one word. What made you pick that word?
We have what I would describe as a very “connected” culture at FloQast. Having coworkers who genuinely care about helping each other and our customers is inspiring. Our everyday conversations include questions like “What can we do to help you?” and “What can we do right now to make this better?”
I cannot count the times I’ve asked someone from DevOps to hop on a call with me to debug a deployment issue. We have a strong sense of togetherness in research and development.
That said, our product development cycle is enriched and made possible by voices across all our departments. You remember when Megan from Sales joined your ideation session to highlight those feature request patterns. Or when Sheerod in accounting helped you understand that process better. Or when James from IT helped you publish that Microsoft app that takes over 10 external reviews and iterations. It’s not just product and engineering; it’s product and engineering working with sales, accounting and customer success, marketing, legal and everyone else that keeps this village running. You remember everyone’s contributions to the project and how they helped you, and you want to celebrate them.
“It’s not just product and engineering; it’s product and engineering working with everyone else that keeps this village running.”
How long have you been with the company, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?
It’s so wild; I was introduced to FloQast in 2019 thanks to a BuiltIn LA email. Now, over four years later, everything has come full circle. I now feel like I can write a short series on all my humbling and fulfilling experiences, but I’ll stick to some highlights.
I started as a Software Engineer on a small team, still in the ideation phase and figuring out our product-market fit. I remember entering the office daily, cranking out code, and developing a new module to integrate with our app. Shortly after, we built a functional prototype and demoed it to our executive team and many others in the org. That trial-by-fire experience is one I’ll never forget. It gave me more confidence in my abilities, and I became emotionally invested in our company and customers. I’m thankful for everyone who helped get our product, FloQast ReMind to market. It’s an irreplaceable feeling, knowing that something you built is helping others solve real problems.
In 2022, I moved into the Software Engineering Manager role, leading the technical development and people management for my own teams. Ironically, the higher you go, the more you realize just how much other factors contribute to your team’s success. As an individual contributor, I was more focused on my own output, and often, I just assumed I was successful whenever my code hit production. As a manager, I learned that the lifecycle is much longer — there are so many ways you can influence results beyond coding. Knowing how to organize productive team conversations, when to coordinate engineer efforts and how to communicate the impact of your decisions are all productive tools in the engineering manager’s belt.
I’m an advocate for the customer, my team’s livelihood, and our work product; it feels like running a small company. Bringing this all together through our “connected” culture is one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.
