Open Sourcing our Company Handbook

As a rapidly growing company, we’re constantly reviewing our internal processes to make sure they scale and are fully aligned with our values and the team needs. Transparency and Care are two of our values and we want to live by them by sharing our company handbook, explaining the reasons why we decided to make it public and how everyone can use it going forward.

Our journey to remote-first

In less than 2 years, the Strapi team grew from a team of 7 people based in Paris, France to a remote-first company with 50 team members affectionately called “Strapiers" spread across 7 countries in 4 continents. While Covid-19 acted as a major forcing function to embrace remote work, our ambition to build a global distributed workforce also led to some growing challenges.

Inspired by the success of fully remote companies like GitLab or HashiCorp, the Strapi team wants to embrace a modern way of working that provides the freedom and caring setup needed to build a healthy business and both attract and retain the best talents. Our first big step in that direction was to start hiring employees outside of France. This meant adapting to the different time zones and shifting to more asynchronous communication. The second challenge was to hire our Head of People & Talent to help structure our hiring processes, people policies, ensure all employees feel included and treated equally regardless of their location and most importantly to cement our company culture as a remote-first company. As an example, we decided to rename our office in Paris to co-working space and limit the number of days employees can come to the office to prevent the creation of a separate office culture.

From that point forward, there was no going back. Communication methods and decision making processes had to evolve drastically. That’s when we started to document and structure the internal knowledge to facilitate onboarding of Strapiers and build the foundation that would scale with a growing team.

Open Source in our DNA

Strapi started as an open source project back in 2015. Today, the Strapi GitHub repository counts 40K stars and is ranked the 163 most popular repository among the 28 million public on GitHub as of October 2021. We are truly humbled by this and realized that none of this would be possible without the support of the Strapi open source community.

So being open-source has been part of our DNA from day 1. It's about transparency, care, humility and data privacy. As a company, we couldn’t be more aligned with these values. Not just through Strapi, but through contributions to other open source projects we rely on such as StoryBook, Webpack, and Babel.

Although Open Source is deeply rooted in our company culture, it does not mean we are perfect “open source citizens”. We still have plenty of room for improvement to be more transparent and inclusive with the Strapi user community. In addition to the benefits in terms of hiring, onboarding and efficiency, open sourcing our company handbook is also a way to give back, become more transparent in the eyes of the Strapi community and hold ourselves accountable to higher standards.

What does it mean for you?

As a community member, it means that you know exactly what we stand for, the vision and values that drive us and the methodologies we follow from Product Development to Marketing or Sales.

As an investor, partner, prospect or customer, it means that you know exactly who you are or might be doing business with. From high level company values and driving principles to more granular tech stack decisions and processes, we’re literally an open book.

As a potential candidate, it means that you can look for the information you need to know exactly what to expect and if you like the way we operate. No more surprises. By the way, we’re hiring!

As an employee, it means that you are working at a radically transparent company. No more wondering if that information can be shared outside of Strapi, if it’s in the handbook it is public information. You have visibility over the decision making process and who are the directly responsible individuals for each topic or program.

Conclusion

This is the first iteration of this company handbook. We’re committed to making more and more pages public overtime as every team reviews carefully existing content to make sure it’s safe to share, up to date and up to our company standards.

We’d like to thank GitLab for their leadership on this topic as their public handbook has been a source of inspiration for many years. Our hope is that one day, others will find the Strapi handbook as useful as we found the GitLab handbook to be.

Have feedback or ideas for our Handbook? Join the conversation in the comments section below!