Senior Software Engineer Ben Ross began his tech career when almost everyone across the industry was motivated by the desire to “move fast and break things.”
Many of the teams Ross worked on previously embraced Mark Zuckerberg’s famous motto, and while he admits that he enjoyed constant deployment, he has seen fewer organizations continue to adhere to this ideology. As more companies strive toward intentionality over delivery, sectors like financial services require a slightly slower pace for obvious reasons: no one wants their banking information compromised for the sake of releasing a new feature.
That’s why Ross and his colleagues at payments platform provider Moov Financial move quickly — but not quickly enough to break things.
“Correctness and testing are very important when working with other people’s money, and that’s baked into the engineering process from the start,” he said.
To pursue this level of thoroughness and precision, Ross and his peers, including Software Engineer Anna Blasingame, rely on a team culture that fosters open communication, flexibility and, most importantly, collaboration.
“Teamwork is essential for us to succeed,” Blasingame said. “You’ll never hear someone say something is ‘not their problem.’”
For Blasingame, this focus on togetherness encourages her and her peers to share expertise and support each other when working on new features. In turn, this makes every accomplishment, both big and small, a milestone for the entire team.
“There are no lone warriors here; just a group of very dedicated people looking to make payments a little less scary,” she said.
But team culture isn’t just defined by getting projects across the finish line; it’s found in the nuances of the day-to-day work. Technical Writer Devin Beliveau has come to understand this over the course of her career, and at Moov Financial, she gets to see it in action every day.
“Regardless of size, teams really need to be able to adapt without disruption and accept growth without conflict,” she said. “Since we’re still a small company, collaboration and communication happen quickly, which makes it feel like everyone is one giant team, not smaller, siloed ones.”
As Beliveau, Ross and Blasingame help drive the company’s mission to “make money movement work for everyone,” and they get to enjoy the journey alongside others who are as passionate about getting to know each other as they are about finding the best solutions.
“We just have fun here; it’s that simple,” Blasingame said.
More Than ‘Just a Job’
Time and time again, Blasingame has heard people say, “It’s just a job” — but she’s never believed this herself.
“You spend 40 hours or more per week working in life, so why spend it with people you don’t like?” she said.
For Blasingame, showing up to work each day feels like much more than “just a job.” She and her peers have grown incredibly close to one another; so much so that when they recently met face-to-face for the first time in Denver, it felt like being reunited with old friends.
“People were laughing, telling stories and playing games,” she recalled. “The mood was downright joyous. I’ve never seen that at another company.”
Finding joy in spending time with team members is important for Moov Financial’s engineers, considering the work they accomplish can be challenging. For instance, Ross recently helped lead his team’s efforts to drive their first push to debit transactions, which he considers a major milestone for them and the company as a whole.
“This is an initiative that our team has been working on for the past six months, and it was really exciting to see it come to fruition,” he said.
In Ross’s mind, this achievement wasn’t simply the result of a robust tech stack and talent — although both of those things played a role. He believes flexibility drove the project’s success and is a key attribute to have as an engineer at the company.
“Our projects’ end goal remains the same, but how we get there changes frequently,” Ross said.
There’s a lot that goes into being an engineer at Moov Financial, especially considering the nature of financial payments. Blasingame explained that as they deal with outdated specifications and tribal knowledge, she and her teammates rely on humility and curiosity to confront roadblocks that often feel insurmountable.
“Humility helps you roll with those punches, and curiosity fuels the fire to keep on digging,” she said. “We aren’t just looking ahead; we’re looking around the next corner, too.”
“We aren’t just looking ahead; we’re looking around the next corner, too.”
For Ross, these elements of day-to-day work aren’t simply essential for driving progress; they make him excited to conquer each day.
“Feeling valued and respected are things that I find very important at work, and I get both in spades here,” he said.
At Moov Financial, engineers aren’t coding machines; they’re human beings motivated by the desire to help build the future of payments together — and share countless laughs along the way.
“The work can be hard sometimes, but that doesn’t dampen our spirits,” Blasingame said. “If anything, the jokes flow more freely. Stay here long enough, and you might just get your own Slack emoji — a rite of passage.”
KEEPING A PULSE
Given the breadth of work accomplished across Moov Financial, the company keeps a pulse on how employees and their teams are performing. Blasingame said that managers have regular one-on-one meetings with their direct reports, which provide valuable insights into their daily experiences. Besides that, tech teams conduct regular post-mortems for incidents and retrospectives for sprints, which serve as useful ways to gather data needed to iterate and improve processes. “I have worked at many companies that attempted these kinds of things but rarely actually did them, or did them constructively,” Blasingame said. “But at Moov, they’re an essential part of the work week.”
Trust and Transparency
Have you ever been in a work situation and felt as though there were “too many cooks in the kitchen?”
Beliveau has encountered this scenario a few times throughout her career — but not at Moov Financial.
“The leadership team trusts people to do their jobs without poking and prodding at every decision,” she said.
Trust and transparency are key to the ways in which employees work at the company, Beliveau explained, with leaders playing more of a supporting role. That’s why you’ll see CEO Wade Arnold asking questions and requesting clarity when it comes to the decision-making process.
This overarching sense of empowerment enables Beliveau and her peers to act as the bridge between the company’s product managers and engineers. As they spend their workdays delivering helpful documentation, they rely on a constant feedback loop — and a partiality toward experimentation — in order to thrive.
“The company is still small enough where testing out and changing or adapting processes doesn’t get in the way of completing work,” Beliveau said.
“The company is still small enough where testing out and changing or adapting processes doesn’t get in the way of completing work.”
Considering Beliveau and her teammates are expected to be experts on every aspect of the company’s product, it’s important for those who join the team to be able to absorb a significant amount of information quickly.
“Not only does it obviously help with communicating clearly and getting work done, but it’s crucial to simply follow conversations about projects or company goals,” she said.
On a cross-collaborative level, Beliveau’s team relies heavily on constant communication with the company’s product managers, who are always consistently prepared to offer support.
“I’ve never worked at a company where product managers are on top of everything like they are here,” she said. “I rarely have to wait long for an answer to any question I ask, and the documents that get handed off to us are clear and formatted in a way that makes writing public-facing docs very smooth.”
Having worked at companies that range in size from tens of thousands of employees to less than one hundred, Beliveau knows how unique it is to work at an organization that encourages this type of environment. And while there are many reasons why she loves being a team member at Moov Financial, one thing stands out to her the most: having the chance to cultivate a universal passion for confronting — and overcoming — the industry’s toughest challenges.
“People at Moov love to solve problems, and we love helping others solve problems, too,” Beliveau said.
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