Working at Reax
A letter from the Founder, Skyler Shuford  (read time: ~4 min)

A question people often ask about a company is “What’s the culture like?” I believe that culture is an emergent property; you can’t do culture. Rather, culture pops out through a combination of complex factors, such as the people that get hired, societal trends, the industry, inside jokes, sometimes tension, what leadership reinforces or tolerates, and shared experiences. Despite that, most companies have websites that describe the culture they hope develops, which is certainly not what the culture actually is. Also, given that Reax currently has so few employees, there is no inertia to the culture and it can change very fast, so pinning down a description probably isn’t useful to potential teammates. 

 

What I think is more useful is to reveal what we’re trying to do and why, as well as some very practical and tactical ways I think about company-building. It doesn’t quite answer the question about culture, but I do think it will provide a better sense of the answer to the question, “Is Reax the right place for me?”

 

Accountability as the Antidote to Bureaucracy

 

A critical company outcome has a specific owner. That person makes all the calls on how to deliver the outcome.

Not a process

Not a committee

Not an approval chain

 

Expectations

 

The owner is expected to deliver outcomes that make the business work, rather than check a box or be an advocate only for their specialty.

 

The owner must account for all the complexity: end-user needs and experience, cost, schedule, coordination of others, risk, safety, security, aesthetics, uncertainty. 

 

This is hard.

 

Additionally:

• If the target outcome won’t help the business succeed, the owner needs to change it and communicate it to relevant folks.  

• Ownership does not mean suffering in silence. An owner asks for help, because succeeding with an assist is obviously preferred to a quiet failure. We can swarm people or cash towards issues or blockers, but only if we know they exist.

• The owner must go directly to the person who can unblock. If that's me, don't hesitate.

 

This is hard.

 

This is also not how most companies are built, especially in aerospace and defense.  Nearly every process you may be familiar with was designed to remove individual human judgment, such that any person can be substituted into a role. It can feel like codifying “the right way” to do something or preventing issues before they happen, but that’s a false idol.  It’s really just making your company more fragile, less agile, less thoughtful, and slower.

 

We want to do the opposite. We want to build the company around the individual superpowers of our teammates, and then unhandcuff them.  We want our processes to reinforce ownership and accountability, to funnel context to the one decision-maker such that they can make the best calls.

 

Management

 

Given that a specific person owns an outcome, a manager must make sure the right people are on the right outcomes. 

 

The tools for this are standard: clarifying or adjusting scope of responsibility, hiring, promoting, coaching, firing. Rescoping evolves dynamically and constantly, independent of the org structure.

 

Wins of increasing scale and complexity are the path to promotion.  

 

Ultimately, we want to find the managers who will hold their team to the highest bar for the company outcomes that team is currently responsible for.

 

Approach to Work Ownership

While sometimes unavoidable, an ownership breakdown with the fewest hand-offs is usually best.

 

This:

person ⬎

person → goal

person ⬏  

 

is typically better than this:

person → person → person → goal

 

Again, this approach is atypical for aerospace and defense.

 

Beliefs You Must Hold

 

10x outcomes in aerospace and defense are possible and worth striving for.

Related: You can’t achieve a 10x better outcome doing things the 1x way, even trying really, really hard.

 

It is better, faster, AND cheaper to quickly deliver a sequence of an easy, medium, and hard thing than it is to one-shot something that is hard.

 

It’s more impressive to rethink a problem to make the outcome easy rather than overcoming a major challenge to deliver the same outcome.

 

Our customers are the users, not the bureaucracy.  

Related: We often must stand our ground against the bureaucracy to achieve what our customers need us to.  The best way to do this is with kind stubbornness backed up by data / strong rationale.

 

Escalation up the chain of command is a powerful tool.

 

It matters how it feels to operate the products.

 

Conclusion

 

All this being said, one of the worst things to be is dogmatic. So if it becomes clear that we need to deviate from these ideas, we will. Making the business as successful as possible to ensure our customers get the right products when they need them is the goal.