Category
About the Applicant
1. We are relentless in uncovering user truth. We obsessively validate user needs by applying user-centered design and Lean methodologies.
2. We embrace rapid product development. Our agile team structures and streamlined delivery support quick and efficient design and development with minimum waste and world-class quality.
3. We empower the enterprise. Building great products is not enough—we thrive on the opportunity to empower. Through highly flexible engagement models, we enable, support, and enhance the teams we work with.
Myplanet
If we could give one nugget of advice to young product and UX companies, it would be this: Practice what you preach. Find any excuse to embody the values, process, and philosophy you bring to your product or service—treat your environment and methods of engagement with no less discipline, focus, or passion. At Myplanet, staff engagement is a design product, not an HR function: Our space, organizational structure, mentorship initiatives and professional development approach are truly human-centered. We apply Agile, Lean, and UCD at a meta level. We evolve our environment continuously as we learn more about what does and does not work for our staff and our customers. And we let the voices of our staff define the experience of working at Myplanet.
Being Lean & Agile. In 2009, we were just six Myplaneteers strong (we added an extra fire), hunched together in a tiny uptown office, often bunking at each other’s homes. We shared a boardroom, office help, and our Internet connection with five or six other companies. Core to our existence in ’09 was the notion that collaborating closely with others makes for an amazing employee experience. We iterated on our organizational structure endlessly, building, validating, invalidating, and rebuilding. We reinvented our positioning constantly and valued everyone’s input.
Being Ourselves. In 2010, we hit startup adolescence in Markham, Ontario. Spreading across an entire floor in an industrial office complex, we grew to 30 people working both on-site and remote. Despite the not-so-trendy industrial complex we called home, we came to love our space. Defying the long commutes from downtown Toronto and gloomy glow of fluorescent overhead lighting, we injected our personality and nurtured our culture with a barrage of homemade inspirational posters, Ikea furniture and impromptu breakdance parties. We let our personality and passions speak in both the types of work we took on and the clients we embraced.
Being Collaborative. Today, in downtown Toronto, Vancouver, and the Ukraine, we’re proud to say that a true team effort has brought us to this point. It’s been a voyage of blood, sweat and tears—or more appropriately, a billion post-its, lines of code, and late nights—with growing pains and pleasures at every pivot. And today our new working environment (the space, the types of work, the people) are a testament to that relentless, collective pursuit of doing exactly what certain people told us we couldn’t, and doing it as a team. Like an ever-evolving product, our environment needs to be examined, debated, and remixed with all the fervor of a Lean-Agile-UCD evangelist. Even as we near 100 people, we are committed to finding ways to ask for and act on the ideas of our peers. At all costs we will eliminate bureaucracy and bottlenecks. 100 heads are better than one, and ensuring that every Myplaneteer can truly feel that their opinion counts is a goal worth fighting for.
