Wantedly is a Tokyo-based startup, founded in 2010 helps you discover jobs that ignite your passion. Our mission is to ’create a world where work drives passion.’
Wantedly aims to create a world where people can experience personal growth and development and contribute to society through their challenges of work.
Because your work takes up such a great portion of your life, we believe it must be exciting and worthwhile.
Wantedly Visit is the matchmaker for you and your dream job.
It's like Kickstarter in the sense that people who believe in your ideas come together, or like Tinder in the sense that you casually meet new people, but instead, Wantedly Visit is for your work.
You can casually visit offices, have a conversation over coffee, go on a quick tour of the office, and meet people behind the scenes of cool projects.
It's really important for both applicants and employers to get to know each other first, proceed straight to an interview right away is a suicidal mission, just like someone who you've just met to marry you.
Let’s say your proposal is successful, but what if you find out things are not how you expected or is different from what you signed up for. A familiar example of jumping into things too quickly is Anna from Frozen, accepting Prince Hans proposal and discovering soon afterward that it wasn’t true love.
So if you want to find a true love for your work, Wantedly Visit is there for you!
I’d like to share four characteristics of product development at Wantedly.
Wantedly is an engineer-led company.
There's no directors in our company. We don't micromanage people, everyone's self-managed. This structure enables us to focus on being more creative. (Though we have leaders, unlike typical managers and directors, they're not authority. These leaders think and act by seeing the big picture, and feel greatly responsible for the decisions, and drive the team towards goals.)
So, engineers in each team take a lead in coming up with ideas, deciding what measures to take by making plan proposals, and executing their strategy with other members. Together as a team, you create the vision and experiences the product should have and decide how we provide values to users.
All of this happens from within the team, and not from management or seniors.
We believe the role of engineers is solving people’s problems, and changing their lives through our products.
We consider a great deal of product design, and what it induces and brings to our users.
By "design," I don’t mean what it looks like. It's about the 'experience' that comes with how we present information, how we convey our message, how it interacts, how it works, and how it empowers.
When a new project starts and a new team is formed, we hold workshops to create a sense of purpose and have mutual understandings.
Occasionally, team members get together to talk about concepts and visions of the product and enthusiastically discuss how to make it better.
In the international team, we continuously conduct user tests in order to figure out the gap between ideal experiences and the status quo. This is because expanding a product to foreign countries is really hard without understanding each culture and its contexts.
Finally, we ourselves always keep in mind to be a user, and more importantly, to be a fan of our own product.
Sincerely facing the product and thinking from the user's perspective is the key to gaining insight into the user’s trouble and needs.
I think ‘responsibility’ is not what you take; It's how you feel.
Rather than just sitting and waiting for instructions, every single member of a team feels responsible for the product, in other words, has ownership of the product.
Earlier I said there are no directors at Wantedly; You might be wondering, how can it be possible for a team to work well without a director?
It is possible because everyone in the team shares the same vision, faces in the same direction, and works towards the same goal.
And their individual thoughts and actions spontaneously contribute to the team.
With this sense of responsibility, roles of individuals go beyond their position, field, and age.
Designers do coding because what they're trying to build is not an image, but a product. They consider coding themselves is the most efficient way to reach their destination.
Engineers, on the other hand, consider programming merely a tool. What's important is to create a great product. By pursuing design thinking, we try to deliver more than what can be done with programming alone.
There's something called 'Wantedly Way' in our company.
They’re our core values regarding our culture and product which we always refer to and ask ourselves whether we’re acting up to.
Let's explore these ideas:
'User first' is quite often misunderstood as "listening to users' voices," but this is not the true user first. Don't get me wrong, user’s voices are important but users don’t always know what they exactly want and what’s best for them.
The real user first is to capture their subconscious desires and to solve them fundamentally.
So if you got feedbacks like "I need this feature. I want that function. Can you make this button a little bit bigger?" and you implemented everything as their requests, the product would be a mess and no one would use that in the end.
This might be relevant to the previous value. The more features a product has, the harder it is for people to understand.
The author of The Little Prince once said, “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
So in order to make the product easy to understand and simple to use, you must decide what not to include. We have to think thoroughly of people who use the product. We have to think more than users do so that they don't have to think.
This is rather difficult, complex, and sometimes requires some courage.
That's why it's not easy.
Which explains you that arguments create nothing.
When we have hypotheses but are not sure whether it's gonna work or not, or which one is better, rather than contemplating impracticable theories, we boldly execute a strategy.
The best way to evaluate is to ask users, in other words, to see how they react.
And most importantly, our company supports us in taking daring actions. Even if a strategy ends up a failure, we keep a positive attitude and think of it as a new learning opportunity.
The strength of Wantedly lies in the teams that truly believe in their products and the company culture that supports us to boldly pursue greater things.
Thanks!
Purpose of the International team
Why
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