How a Culture of Learning Unlocks Innovation on These Engineering Teams

On Kevin Boers’ team at LogicGate, it’s nearly a right of passage to “take down the stack.”

“It sounds scary, but what it means is that we don’t treat failure as the end of the world; we treat it as the start of real learning,” the senior engineering manager told Built In. “That mindset makes people more willing to experiment, take ownership and improve their craft.”

To cultivate this mindset, Boers and his teammates take part in regular weekly practices such as “story time,” where they discuss possible implementations and debate trade-offs. He said that practices like this one make team members more knowledgeable, enabling them to deliver better products. 

Software Engineer Adam Arbree and his peers at Dropbox also see knowledge as the key to creating impactful solutions. That’s why the company invests in various initiatives that make it easy for engineers to share their ideas, such as its annual Hack Week, which has spawned product features that are used by millions of customers. 

“Learning and innovation deliver clear business value,” Arbree said. 

For these teams, it’s critical to create a space where the best ideas win, a notion that IMC Trading has embraced as one of its core values. According to one of the firm’s software engineers, Yunsoo, this mindset makes it easy for engineering teams to unlock innovation. 

“It will help motivate your team to learn and improve themselves,” he said. 

Below, Boers, Arbree and Yunsoo, along with representatives from 11 other companies, share how their teams cultivate a culture of learning, the positive impact of doing so and the advice they’d offer to others in their field who are eager to instill knowledge-sharing on their own teams. 

SailPoint offers a suite of products designed to safeguard enterprise identities, improve IT efficiencies, reduce operational costs and mitigate cyber risks.

 

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

SailPoint’s core values, known internally as the “Four I’s” — Innovation, Impact, Integrity and Individuals — define our culture and clearly articulate the environment where our employees thrive. Technological advancements and the cybersecurity threat landscape are changing at a rapid pace. Upskilling on technology and identifying innovative ways to control threats is a continuous process. Our team continues to learn about new technology, tools, process improvements and more via online learning platforms like Udemy or other newsletter/blog subscriptions. They come up with innovative ways to design solutions or solve complex problems. Our crew also consistently engages in innovation workshops and hackathons held at regular intervals. Additionally, we attend lunch-and-learn sessions to stay informed about new initiatives, tool adoption and process change.

 

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

The continuous learning culture helps the team grow, remain competitive and provide a profound sense of accomplishment, whether it’s delivering new product capabilities or solving real-world customer problems. Team members share knowledge among each other and actively participate in brainstorming ideas before finalizing a specific approach. All of this helps create great bonding among team members and improves employee retention. Psychological safety is key to innovation, and the SailPoint crew does an excellent job fostering this by staying deeply committed to and rooted in our core values.

 

“Psychological safety is key to innovation, and the SailPoint crew does an excellent job fostering this by staying deeply committed to and rooted in our core values.”

 

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

Learning and adapting to change are crucial for survival, along with maintaining the “edge” in the future. Engineers should always strive to learn new things, much like sharpening an axe at a regular interval to have a better impact, which will help deliverables and drive innovation. Engineering leaders should budget time for learning/upskilling and think about how the team is getting ready for the future. 

 

 

CSC offers a wide range of business, legal, tax and digital brand services, such as subsidiary management, real estate document recording and international compliance. 

 

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

We approach learning with a simple concept: If it benefits you and provides business value, go for it! We use traditional education, online courses, certifications, team tabletop exercises, lunch-and-learn sessions and team collaboration.

As for continuous learning, nothing is off the table. If a team member or leader discovers an opportunity to learn a new skill, we fully encourage them to move forward. That could be through an in-person workshop with the team or a third-party vendor, or a series of videos and online resources. We want our team to feel enabled to chase learning opportunities.

We also emphasize the importance of hard skills just as much as soft skills. There are many resources to learn coding, infrastructure as code, cloud compute and more. But learning critical skills such as effective communication, handling difficult situations and time management are usually more challenging to find. As a team, we hold regular sessions called “Quinn’s Quips,” where we share real experiences and lessons learned on these topics and then supplement them with additional educational resources.

 

“As a team, we hold regular sessions called ‘Quinn’s Quips,’ where we share real experiences and lessons learned on these topics and then supplement them with additional educational resources.”

 

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

The culture we’ve instilled has allowed team members to embrace the mindset of, “I may not have the answer right now, but I’ll find it!” This thought process has established us as a team that can be trusted, relied on and gets things done. Whether it’s learning YAML, AI skills and development, engaging with experts to understand Azure policy and security or trailblazing cloud technologies, our biggest impact has been in producing stronger client relationships.

For example, we needed a Microsoft Defender for Cloud expert. We asked one of our engineers if she could take on this challenge, and she agreed without hesitation and an enthusiastic “Absolutely!” She learned the tool and positioned herself as the expert. She’s now a critical point of contact when our clients have security or best practice questions. They know they can contact our team and specifically her for help. This is just one example of where cultivating a community of learning has created a positive relationship with our clients.

 

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

Make the time and make it a priority. It’s a leader’s responsibility to empower engineers to feel comfortable making time for their own education. Check in with your team regularly to make sure they have enough capacity dedicated to learning. If they don’t, help them adjust their commitments so they can find the time. As an engineer, hold yourself accountable. Block your calendar, commit your time and prioritize self-improvement. Set a measurable goal that learning is going to be your top priority.

Open communication between engineers and leaders is also critical. Leaders can point engineers in a direction, but it’s up to the engineers to communicate if it’s the right path. If you prefer visual learning over reading a textbook, express that. If you think it makes more sense for you to learn about Mongo databases instead of SQL databases, share that thought. Create a space of frequent, open communication, where the avenues and content of learning make sense for the engineer as well as the team.

 

 

Dropbox provides cloud-based solutions for file storage, sharing, and collaboration, leveraging AI to transform knowledge work for over 700 million users.

 

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

As a technical lead for Dropbox Core, the team behind our file, sync, and share product, I help ensure learning is part of how we work every day. Each summer, we pause our regular projects for Hack Week: five days dedicated to exploring bold ideas, collaborating across teams and developing new skills. This spirit of innovation continues year-round through self-service training, from quick skills sessions like strategy planning to intensive programs such as the AI Academy and Ascent leadership program.

 

“Each summer, we pause our regular projects for Hack Week: five days dedicated to exploring bold ideas, collaborating across teams and developing new skills.”

 

We also invest in peer-to-peer learning. Our mentor-matching program connects engaged mentees with experienced mentors, fostering growth on both sides. And we encourage creative knowledge-sharing, from tech talks to coding challenges, that bring engineers together across the company. By embedding continuous learning into our culture, Core keeps growing the skills that will shape Dropbox’s future.

 

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

Learning and innovation deliver clear business value. Hack Week has produced product features used by millions. Many promoted engineers are recognized for sharing their work in forums like our annual offsite, where front-end engineers exchange technical insights, which has improved both the speed and quality of our engineering. Targeted programs like the AI Academy have helped expand the use of AI tools across the company, contributing to measurable productivity improvements in many teams. 

But just as importantly, creating a strong learning culture boosts engagement, happiness and retention, a cultural impact that is every bit as significant as the tangible gains in product quality, speed and productivity. Having a role in creating this culture — and sharing in the growth it creates for everyone — is a key reason I continue to be excited to work at Dropbox.

 

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

Like anything, you start small and build up. A key point is recognizing that sharing is just as critical as consuming when creating a learning culture. I recommend taking a course every few months, but I’ve often learned just as much from peers who shared a hidden skill with me on Slack.

The next step, the one that truly builds culture, is encouraging that peer to add a bit of polish to their write-up and share it with the whole team. It seems small, but people notice when a colleague takes those few extra minutes to make a recommendation. That can quickly grow into a #tips-and-tricks Slack channel or an internal Confluence page, our shared knowledge base, filled with key insights and shortcuts.

The best of these can grow into recurring formats like weekly tech talks or brown-bag lunches — and, if momentum builds, even an annual offsite for front-end engineers. The key to accelerating this cycle is consistent support and recognition at every stage, with leaders celebrating not only the big wins but, most importantly, the small sparks that get everything started.

 

 

IMC Trading is a proprietary trading firm that ensures 24/7 liquidity across major exchanges worldwide, operating trading hubs in the United States, Europe, Asia-Pacific and India.

 

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

At IMC, learning is everywhere: firm-wide, within teams and for every individual. New engineers start with a five-week global traineeship. It’s a mix of hands-on work with our codebase and lectures to build foundational knowledge, taught by some of our best engineers because we believe our people are our greatest asset.

Learning doesn’t stop there. As you grow, you see the value of open knowledge-sharing. Developers attend sessions on trading fundamentals, join monthly team updates and ask questions freely. Our “If you hear about it, you can ask about it” culture means even experienced engineers learn something new daily.

On my team, we run biweekly knowledge shares with developers and traders, and recently organized Chicago’s first hackathon, an afternoon for engineers and interns to step away from day-to-day work, explore new ideas and try new tools. The best part, however, is that developers don’t have to wait for a hackathon to try new things. When you see growth opportunities, you’re encouraged to pursue them, whether that’s adopting a new library or asking someone about their work. Mentorship is abundant, too; I practice prioritization with my manager and learn new workflows by shadowing senior developers. 

 

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

A culture of learning helps to reduce wasted efforts. Much duplication goes unnoticed when working in an organization. I once saw a coworker demo an order book simulation, which later turned out to be the key piece in debugging our strategy that saved me days of work. In another case, a one-hour workflow walkthrough shaved my five-minute daily process down to a single command that runs in seconds.

Access to more information also helps increase each person’s scope of work and ownership. You can see the investment pay off when a trader and a developer work together. With each side having context for the other, they can easily translate trading objectives into technical objectives. This means developers can make key decisions on their own, picking solutions that balance speed and quality without waiting on constant input from trading.

 

“Access to more information also helps increase each person’s scope of work and ownership.”

 

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

Building a culture of learning is a long-term investment, and there’s no magic formula. However, I’ve noticed common traits among teams that succeed. First, let people drive their own learning. Help create the stage for learning, like lightning talks, mentorships and training, but let the topic come from the team’s interests. People remember the things that they want to learn about. Second, let the best idea win, a core value at IMC. No matter who the idea comes from, let the idea speak for itself. It will help motivate your team to learn and improve themselves.

Finally, normalize being wrong and growing from it. Encourage questions and admit your own knowledge gaps. When leaders own up to what they don’t know, others feel safe to speak up, too.

 

 

GitLab’s AI-powered DevSecOps platform is designed to help teams deliver software more quickly. 

 

 

“Our learning culture builds on peer mentorship, where engineers at all levels teach and learn from each other.”

 

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

Our capstone and passion projects yield measurable returns on learning investments. One engineer enhanced multi-IDE Diagnostics across VS Code and JetBrains Editor Extensions while mastering TypeScript and Kotlin. Another engineer’s exploration of Rust resulted in the DaVinci Knowledge Graph architecture, now recognized as a next-generation project at GitLab.

 

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

Model learning yourself and be transparent about struggles. When I was learning Rust, I openly asked team members for help, showing that growth happens at every level. Structure peer mentorship without bureaucracy. Our mentor circles and skill-pairing systems remove friction from knowledge-sharing. Make it easy to find who knows what. Protect learning time and celebrate intelligent failures. When engineers feel safe experimenting with new TypeScript patterns or Rust optimizations, innovation follows. Finally, connect learning to impact. Help your team see how mastering Vue’s composition API or Rust’s memory safety directly benefits users and business outcomes. Learning that drives results creates lasting cultural change.

 

 

Justworks’ cloud-based platform is designed to offer businesses support with payroll, benefits, HR and compliance.

 

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

At Justworks, our culture of learning is rooted in our mission: Helping small businesses grow with confidence. Engineers here partner closely with product, design, data and our customers to solve complex, real-world problems that matter to small businesses and the people behind them.

Our culture of learning is deeply integrated into how we work, rather than relying solely on formal instruction and programming. One of the cornerstones of our culture is “52 Fridays,” the idea that every week, we make something true. A year only has 52 Fridays, so imagine the momentum of making 52 meaningful things happen for our platform and customers. This mindset has fueled a culture of learning by doing and purposeful urgency.

 

“One of the cornerstones of our culture is ‘52 Fridays,’ the idea that every week, we make something true.”

 

This also manifests through weekly team demos and our global technology demos, where engineers across all teams show the work — what they’re in the middle of building, learning or experimenting with right now. Beyond simply showcasing what we’ve made true, they’re intentional opportunities to learn from each other and stay connected to the broader progress happening across the technology organization. Combined with hackathons, development budgets, apprenticeships and mentorship opportunities, we’ve built a culture where learning happens in everyday interactions grounded in collaboration and deep care for the customers we serve.

 

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

Our embedded learning culture leads to better technical decisions, faster feedback loops, engaged engineers and deeper customer empathy. Because demos happen weekly, teams feel empowered to move quickly and share early. This visibility often sparks cross-team conversations, highlights reusable solutions and drives healthy momentum.

As a part of our development lifecycle, we host almost daily tech proposal sessions, where engineers present ideas or architectural decisions to a cross-functional panel of peers and leaders. These forums are frequent and open to anyone, making them powerful vehicles for learning, both for presenters receiving fast feedback and for others listening in and building technical context. Our internship and apprenticeship programs have brought in exceptional talent, including many now thriving full-time engineers, while creating meaningful mentoring opportunities internally.

 

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

You don’t need to start with a fully developed learning program(s). It can be tempting to spin up a shiny new learning initiative. Instead, begin by making learning a natural part of your team’s operating rhythm in service of your company’s mission.

Create lightweight rituals, like weekly demos or open forums solely focused on craft, that normalize sharing, feedback and exploration. Systematize your knowledge management in ways that reduce the barriers to learning; make documentation easy to find, keep it regularly updated and design it to support discovery. Leverage Slack channels to elevate and celebrate learnings. Build in time for technical storytelling, and encourage leaders to not just support but actively participate in the culture of learning by experimenting, sharing their own work and showing up in these forums as learners and contributors themselves. 

When you do build structured programs, treat them as ways to scale what’s already working, not as the only place where learning happens. We’ve found that our most meaningful learning moments happen in the flow of real work: Solving hard problems with empathy, improving our product through iteration and learning from one another as we build for the small businesses that depend on us.

 

 

Webflow’s platform enables marketers, designers and developers to build, manage and optimize websites without coding. 

 

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

From the moment an engineer joins Webflow, they get access to a complete AI toolkit built to maximize productivity and insight. This includes a ChatGPT Enterprise license for every employee, unlocking shared rules, collaborative discussions and customized GPTs that reflect the way our teams work.

 

“From the moment an engineer joins Webflow, they get access to a complete AI toolkit built to maximize productivity and insight.”

 

We also provide access to Cursor, a context-aware integrated development environment that acts as an engineering co-pilot. Cursor understands the structure of our codebase and can orchestrate sophisticated refactors across hundreds of files. We leverage Augment Code to bring the best of LLM-assisted engineering into VSCode, WebStorm or Cursor. It answers long-context questions, finds bad assumptions developers are making, helps find logic flaws, scaffolds unit tests, highlights regressions and more.

We built a pull request bot that automatically suggests clear PR descriptions in our preferred format. Using this bot is optional, the descriptions are editable, and they update automatically as the PR evolves. Developers just need to add the “ai-pr-description” label, and a suggested description will appear within about a minute. We also built an opt-in AI-powered PR linting tool that engineers can trigger by tag

 

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

These capabilities help engineers spend less time managing complexity and more time building high-impact solutions. They give our team real leverage, and the impact is clear.

In the last 90 days, Cursor usage is up 80 percent, cycle time is down 21 percent, deployment rates have risen 11 percent, off an already high baseline, and change failure rate remains below 2 percent.

We are now using remote agents in combination with tools like Cursor and Augment Code. This setup enables parallelism for our engineers, making it possible for them to work on many PRs concurrently as they manage a team of remote agents. We see this integrated approach as a promising and exciting development that opens the door to entirely new ways of working and amplifies what our engineers can accomplish.

Testing is another area where AI makes a measurable difference. We use AI code generation tools to generate unit, smoke and functional tests based on recent code changes. These tests are automatically inserted into our continuous integration pipelines and reviewed for coverage and quality. This gives our engineers confidence in every deployment without slowing down release velocity.

In production, we use internal anomaly detec

 

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

Start by making learning part of the way your team builds. Give engineers tools that are embedded into their daily workflows and integrate with how they write, review and ship code. The best learning happens through repetition, feedback and visible progress, not in a separate course or doc.

Pair AI with human judgment. Every change should be reviewed by an engineer, whether it was written by a person or generated by a model. Treat code review as a core practice and hold all contributions to the same standard. This keeps quality high and helps engineers sharpen their own ability to evaluate code over time.

Surface context wherever decisions are made. When engineers can ask a question like, “What was decided about the new Designer API?” and immediately find the answer, they stay unblocked and informed. This reduces cognitive overhead and makes it easier for teams to move forward with clarity.

Finally, create space for experimentation while holding a high bar for excellence. AI will not replace engineers, but it will multiply what they are capable of every day, especially when the systems around them are designed to help them learn by building.

 

 

Sprout Social’s social media management software is designed to enable teams to plan and schedule content, engage with customers, analyze their performance and more.

 

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

We approach learning as a core part of who we are, not just something nice to have. Teams get real support for growth through budgets for books, courses, certifications and conferences, plus subscriptions to educational content. We also run internal workshops, bring in guest speakers and hold regular lunch and learns. When you work with your manager on career development, learning opportunities are a key component of mapping your path forward. Your growth plan will identify specific skills and knowledge areas you need to advance in, backed by resources to get there. 

Valuable learning also happens through collaboration. Remote teams gather at our headquarters twice a year for focused time together, and our Slack-heavy culture offers ongoing knowledge-sharing. You’ll find channels for projects, technology topics like #talk-ai, and interest-based communities from do-it-yourself projects to cycling to gardening. Our community resource groups, like Underrepresented Genders In Tech, host events, connect peers and present monthly companywide sessions. Learning isn’t on the side at Sprout; it’s embedded into how we work and grow.

 

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

Our culture of learning and collaboration drives better work and faster results. When everyone’s growing and sharing knowledge, we move faster by brainstorming unique solutions and tapping into our collective experience to work smarter. Learning inspires new thinking; oftentimes, the best way to solve a hard problem is to see it through a different lens. Whether from a new framework, a conference or even an insight from a hobby channel, fresh ideas open possibilities we might not have considered.

We build on each other’s discoveries instead of reinventing the wheel, sharing breakthroughs through Slack and workshops so that they become part of our problem-solving toolkit. When a developer tries a new testing approach or someone returns from an AI conference, that knowledge spreads quickly. Biannual office gatherings and ongoing digital connections ensure we’re not in silos, pulling from a wider pool of experience. By testing and experimenting, we foster innovation and creative thinking, leading to solutions that are more effective than any one person could produce alone.

 

“When a developer tries a new testing approach or someone returns from an AI conference, that knowledge spreads quickly.”

 

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

Learning happens in two ways — planned and organic — and we often underestimate how powerful the organic stuff can be. Books, courses and conferences are valuable, but some of the most impactful learning is spontaneous. Think about pairing with a peer and suddenly seeing their workflow, or talking through a problem and having that “aha moment” when it clicks. Those moments stick because learning shifts from abstract ideas to practical application, becoming invaluable experience instead of just information.

My advice for engineering leaders is to be intentional about building and supporting a sense of community. Become the facilitator. Introduce people, connect teams and encourage curiosity about how others work and what problems they’re solving. Your job is to create conditions for spontaneous learning through informal pairing sessions, cross-team Slack channels or unstructured time to connect. Budgets and workshops matter, but the magic happens when casual conversations spark new ideas. You’re not teaching directly; you’re creating the space for people to teach each other.

 

 

HERE Technologies’ unified live map provides location data that helps automakers and enterprises build reliable automated driving systems, improve electric vehicle battery consumption and more.

 

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

We recognize that it is important for everybody to learn and grow. The company organizes a week-long annual HERE Learning Festival, which comprises a plethora of talks on a variety of business-related topics, with some deep dives into specific technologies. All the employees are invited to allocate some time to attend or at least access the meeting recordings. Sometimes, an online “brown bag” meeting is also organized by a specific team. We can then learn about different approaches to problems and technologies from our colleagues, possibly incorporating some of our findings into our direct team’s work.

 

“The company organizes a week-long annual HERE Learning Festival, which comprises a plethora of talks on a variety of business-related topics, with some deep dives into specific technologies.”

 

It often happens that we stumble upon something interesting during our daily work or just want to share our way of working with other teammates. During internal Tech Review meetings with a targeted audience, we share our work item solving process, disseminating good practices within the team faster than what can be accomplished through a code review. We can also access a range of online courses, allowing individuals to learn at their own pace. Having such a multi-tier learning structure helps everyone identify inspiring and useful pieces of knowledge in their daily routine.

 

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

In this way, we can leverage the potential of every team member. In particular, this reduces the bottleneck of someone being stuck on a problem for too long, as we also have an open team space, where we can ask questions if we encounter something problematic. Within our frequent standups and Tech Reviews, we are also made aware of specific team members’ areas of expertise, so we can also reach out to them directly for help.

For example, by attending an AWS course, I was able to better understand the solutions used in templated deployments. This helped develop extra tools for observability, making issue investigations much easier than before.

 

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

It’s important to give engineers some time to learn and even encourage them to allocate some time to it, apart from their daily tasks. It is also a good idea to have these internal Tech Reviews, so that good practices and interesting new technology applications can be shared.

Finally, it is essential to have an open space for every team member to ask questions when something is unclear without being judged. More experienced team members can lead the way so that newer team members are also presented with a space open to learning.

 

 

Founded in 2010, commercetools is the company that made “headless commerce” mainstream, offering a platform that enables teams to build and scale e-commerce experiences at their own pace.

 

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

Our team cultivates a culture of learning and belonging through a variety of collaborative and celebratory practices. We host Exchange and Exploration Days, our own version of hackathons, where engineers from different geographies and locations come together to experiment, build prototypes and explore innovative ideas. These events create a space for cross-functional collaboration and spark creativity beyond day-to-day work. We also run lightning talks, where team members share fresh ideas, novel approaches and lessons learned, fostering knowledge exchange across the group. Our kudo sessions celebrate achievements, both big and small, ensuring we recognize both individual and team successes.

 

“We host Exchange and Exploration Days, our own version of hackathons, where engineers from different geographies and locations come together to experiment, build prototypes and explore innovative ideas.”

 

Importantly, we nurture psychological safety, encouraging engineers to take risks, try new things and embrace experimentation without fear of failure. We see every setback as a shared learning opportunity and every win as a shared celebration, reinforcing our commitment to grow and succeed together.

 

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

This culture keeps our team energized and brave, ready to try new things and explore emerging technologies without hesitation. For example, our Smart Data Modeler started as an X&X Day idea and is now shaping how we dramatically improve our customers’ time to go live.

When Model Context Protocol was released, we quickly experimented, recognized its potential for building an agentic ecosystem and transformed a prototype into a fully fledged product called Commerce MCP, which was announced onstage at our flagship event, Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit, this past May. These successes show how our culture turns bold experiments into real-world impact for our customers.

 

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

My advice is to stay authentic. Your team will quickly sense if you genuinely believe in nurturing a learning culture or if it’s just a buzzword to you. Start by creating psychological safety, a space where engineers feel they can experiment, take risks and even fail without fear of judgment. Encourage failing fast, because the faster you test an idea, the faster you learn from it.

Make it clear that we win and lose as a team, never as individuals. That means no blame culture; mistakes are shared learning opportunities, not moments to assign fault. This mindset builds trust, fuels collaboration and removes the fear that can be a barrier to creativity. When people know they’ll be supported whether their idea succeeds or not, they’ll be brave and push boundaries, explore emerging technologies and find solutions you never imagined. Over time, this doesn’t just create a learning culture; it creates a high-performing, resilient team that’s not afraid to try! 

 

 

LogicGate’s governance, risk and compliance platform enables companies to leverage real-time data to make informed decisions. 

 

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

On our team, we focus on making learning both visible and safe. We’ve built regular practices into our week, including “story time,” where we discuss possible implementations and debate trade-offs, and “office hours,” where anyone can bring their work for feedback. We also hold “chaos time,” which is essentially red-teaming: We explore how our systems might break or how we’d react to different outages or attacks. And because security is a significant part of our work, we run weekly “security spelunking” sessions, where we review findings, remediate issues together and ensure we’re staying on top of compliance. 

What ties these practices together is psychological safety. We encourage engineers to ask questions in the open rather than in direct messages, even if that feels a little vulnerable. Asking questions publicly can be a double-edged sword; it sometimes exposes that you’re still wrestling with a concept or not retaining as much as you’d like. But on balance, it’s a net positive. Every question asked out loud is a chance for learning for the whole team, not just one person.

 

“We encourage engineers to ask questions in the open rather than in direct messages, even if that feels a little vulnerable.”

 

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

The impact is tangible. When engineers are encouraged to ask questions publicly and share their thinking, problems get solved faster and knowledge spreads naturally. Instead of just one person leveling up, the whole team benefits.

Because we pressure-test ideas together in story time and office hours, the work we roll out is better vetted, which means there are fewer surprises in production. Our chaos time exercises have improved our incident response; we’ve identified gaps in our runbooks that could have harmed us during a real outage. Our security spelunking efforts have consistently kept us within the security service level agreement for security findings while also raising the baseline security awareness across the team.

Everyone knows failure is inevitable — even senior engineers make them — but on our team, failure is treated as a learning experience. We joke that it’s almost a rite of passage to “take down the stack” at some point in your career. It sounds scary, but what it means is that we don’t treat failure as the end of the world; we treat it as the start of real learning. That mindset makes people more willing to experiment, take ownership and improve their craft.

 

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

Start with psychological safety. If people don’t feel comfortable admitting they don’t know something, no tool or program will fix that. Encourage questions to be asked openly, and model transparency by being open about your own learning and mistakes.

Then, make learning part of the team’s operating rhythm. That could mean dedicated time for hack days, chaos testing or office hours. The format matters less than consistency; if learning is optional or ad hoc, it will always get deprioritized.

Finally, think, “teach to fish.” It’s tempting just to hand out answers, but if you invest the time to walk someone through how to solve a problem, they’ll be able to do it themselves next time. That builds not just skills but confidence.

If you can get those three things right — safety, consistency and empowerment — you’ll see both the team’s output and their sense of ownership grow.

 

 

Gradient AI serves clients that specialize in group health, property and casualty insurance and workers’ compensation, offering AI solutions that perform tasks like predicting underwriting and claim risks and reducing quote turnaround times and claim expenses. 

 

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

We foster a culture of learning by anchoring our work in a bold shared vision. When the path forward challenges us, it sparks growth and encourages each team member to develop new skills, adopt better approaches and rise to meet the moment. Ambitious goals act as a catalyst, pushing us beyond what is comfortable and into new territory. In contrast, when the vision is small or the demands too familiar, it is easy to stay still. But with a clear and inspiring vision, we build collective momentum as we embrace the discomfort that comes with learning and transforming together.

 

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

A strong vision acts as a forcing function. It sparks movement, shared ownership and momentum. It gives teams clear direction, aligns incentives and creates an environment where learning and growth happen naturally. When someone learns and shares a better pattern, the whole team benefits. Over time, this builds a virtuous cycle that continuously accelerates progress.

 

“A strong vision acts as a forcing function. It sparks movement, shared ownership and momentum.”

 

Take our legacy API. It was generating revenue but was flawed, fire-prone and hard to maintain. The team was talented and staffed, but progress was stalled. What changed? We introduced a bold, company aligned vision: Scale the API and make it foundational for new products.

That shift created urgency and clarity. We quickly mobilized to redesign the API and, in the process, introduced major improvements — better patterns, updated processes and modern architecture. These changes happened not because someone mandated them but because the vision made them obvious and exciting. The result? A better API, stronger team momentum and a culture of growth fueled by purpose.

 

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

First, there will always be tradeoffs between product needs and engineering health. But if you consistently prioritize business goals at the cost of engineering well-being, morale will suffer. Cast a vision that includes building excellent systems and processes. Make space for best practices and time to implement them, so engineers can grow by working on and owning increasingly better technical solutions.

Second, if senior leadership is not providing a strong vision, you still need to create and push one. You will eventually need leadership to support it, but you cannot wait for them to go first. Their attention is often pulled in many directions, and they rely on your initiative to surface opportunities, identify gaps and keep momentum alive. That momentum is what drives learning, adoption of better patterns and team growth. Your vision can be the spark that unlocks long-term progress.

 

 

Dscout’s SaaS video research platform is designed to help companies better understand the experiences consumers have with their products and brands. 

 

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

Here at Dscout, we’re all about fostering a culture of continuous learning. We’ve got a bunch of ways we make that happen, both structured and informal. Every month, our engineering lunch and learn brings everyone together to dive deeply into technical topics and industry trends, like the latest AI tools for engineers. We also create Learning Communities, where teams from different departments can explore shared interests, like AI and UX research.

 

“Every month, our engineering lunch and learn brings everyone together to dive deeply into technical topics and industry trends, like the latest AI tools for engineers.” 

 

To make sure learning is a part of our daily routine, we have regular back-end and front-end engineering forums. And our code review process isn’t just for catching bugs; it’s a chance for us to teach and learn from each other. Dscout’s benefits package also offers an education stipend to help pay for classes and workshops. It’s all part of our commitment to making sure everyone can keep growing their skills, whether it’s through a formal presentation or a quick chat while reviewing some code.

 

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

Our focus on continuous learning helps us deliver great work and stay on the cutting edge. We look for this quality in interviews, specifically seeking engineers with a “mentor mindset” who are passionate about learning and teaching others. Also, our required engineering forums are key for keeping everyone on the same page. They help us see what other teams are working on and align on architectural changes, which prevents us from getting stuck in silos. This collaborative environment also sparks innovation. For example, our willingness to explore new AI tools has led to us integrating them directly into our workflows.

This proactive approach to learning also makes our onboarding process more effective. New engineers get structured training and meet with different teams right away, helping them get up to speed and contribute faster. We believe the more we learn, the faster we can grow, which is a huge part of our company’s core values.

 

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

My number one tip for building a strong learning culture is to make it a regular habit, not just a one-off event.

To make it systematic, first, create a predictable schedule. We have monthly lunch and learns to keep the momentum going. It’s also super important to have someone dedicated to coordinating these efforts and keeping things consistent.

Next, embed learning into daily work. Make knowledge-sharing a requirement, like we do in our engineering forums, so it becomes part of everyone’s routine. We even reward people for teaching and mentoring others by including it in their performance reviews.

Finally, offer a variety of learning opportunities. This could be formal presentations, informal learning communities or even financial support through an education stipend. None of this can happen without leadership commitment. Your leadership team needs to be all in and recognize those who contribute to the learning of others. A strong learning culture won’t just happen on its own; it requires intentional design.

 

 

Work & Co is a design and technology company that partners with companies including IKEA, Apple, PGA TOUR, Gatorade, Google and more to launch digital products that transform businesses.

 

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

Our company operates with a lab mindset: We value experimentation, curiosity and sharing. What makes learning thrive here is not a specific format but the culture; people feel motivated when surrounded by colleagues who ask sharp, meaningful questions that push their thinking. We encourage everyone to find a peer who can be a sounding board, someone who challenges them with tough questions and helps refine ideas.

 

“We encourage everyone to find a peer who can be a sounding board, someone who challenges them with tough questions and helps refine ideas.”

 

From there, individuals lean into different learning styles. Some attend conferences, others prefer structured online courses, while many alternate between deep exploration and lighter, faster learning, like lunch and learns and peer-to-peer sessions.

Of course, a huge amount of learning comes directly from the Work & Co model, in which team members form a single team with clients and are hands-on in the hard work of building and shipping complex products. An important driver for us is the belief that learning is amplified when we share a culture of curiosity and experimentation in a rapidly changing environment.

 

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

Learning is a cultural flywheel; the passion and enthusiasm of team members learning and sharing what they’ve learned becomes infectious and spreads through the team. This mindset makes a big difference in our work. In complex projects, sharing knowledge across disciplines pushes us to test assumptions quickly and reinforces that measurable results matter. 

At Work & Co, clients come to us to strategize, design and develop digital experiences that simplify what’s inherently complex, whether it’s ecommerce systems, airline booking flows or healthcare platforms. For example, in a recent airline project, internal debates around edge cases in rebooking flows led us to propose a design that reduced user friction while still handling regulatory requirements. While working on a healthcare platform, tough internal questioning ensured our approach balanced usability with data security. 

Challenging each other and implementing knowledge from fellow team members in different disciplines such as design or product strategy helps us uncover hidden constraints, articulate trade-offs clearly and design solutions that feel effortless, even when the underlying systems are highly intricate.

 

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

Start by focusing on what quality learning provides, not just how to provide it. A culture of learning isn’t built on courses alone but on a mindset where people are encouraged to pursue the right learning methods for them and drive each other to raise the bar. Encourage engineers to find peers who push them with hard, meaningful questions, as this builds sharper thinking and shared accountability. As a leader, your role is to create the conditions and spaces where people can challenge each other openly, give teams permission to experiment and share their discoveries in whatever format feels natural, from a quick demo to a deep dive talk. Teams shouldn’t be precious; get comfortable discarding ideas, and work in pursuit of the best outcome. 

What matters is not standardizing how people learn but making sure the environment rewards curiosity and critical thinking. Create an environment where the learning doesn’t stop at a certain job title; it’s a value that needs to be reflected at all levels of your team in order to stay connected to the work and relevant in the industry.