From COVID to War: Organizing Work in Turbulent Times

With a sizable percentage of PandaDoc’s 700-plus employees partially based in Belarus and Ukraine, it’s been crucial for us to act quickly and decisively to protect our people. Despite our steady and rapid growth, and in the wake of the violent response to protests over the Belarus election in 2020 and the devastating war in Ukraine in 2022, we’ve remained a tightly knit — and exceptionally productive — organization. 

Here’s how we’ve accomplished this.

4 pillars we’ve built and rely upon

In the face of the pandemic, Belarusian unrest, and the Russia-Ukraine war, PandaDoc has shown extraordinary resilience in each case by rebounding to 60-100 percent of normal productivity within 6-8 weeks. We’ve done this by designing our teams and organizing our work around four main pillars:

1. Culture. Our team members are often attracted to — and remain with — PandaDoc because of the strong personal and team bonds created by our internal work culture, especially during times of historic upheaval.
2. Structure. From autonomy to centralization, we’ve built our organization for long-term stability to ensure we’re capable of withstanding cataclysmic global events beyond our control.
3. Enablement. When your team can focus on its business objectives, knowing everything else will be taken care of — that’s enablement in action. It’s something we consistently prioritize.‍
4. Goals. Our organizational design helps keep our targets in clear view, while also allowing for modifications that help us reach our objectives more quickly.

Culture: L.I.F.E. at PandaDoc

PandaDoc’s mission clearly defines our main business objective:

• Help innovative organizations scale and win by eliminating workflow inefficiencies and bureaucracy.

And naturally, our vision enables us to fulfill our mission:

• Build the most intuitive platform that automates agreements, transactions, and other document-driven workflows.

Of course, we haven’t reached this point without a team of dedicated individuals who (quite literally) bring our culture code to L.I.F.E. by living and promoting our company values:

L: Learn
I: Impact
F: Fun
E: Empathy

Digging deeper, here’s how we interpret and practice these four values.

1. Learn. We offer full transparency into our business, allowing everyone to learn how each aspect of PandaDoc functions. We also offer a variety of educational programs for team members, plus an annual education budget and internal career paths — we prioritize hiring within the company whenever possible.
2. Impact. We encourage our people to dream big by promoting a culture of autonomy and experimentation. We’re equally thrilled to see our employees take ownership of metrics, revenue, and other business-critical items.
3. Fun. We keep all lines of communication open from the top down and always put our people first. We do this by offering ask-me-anything (AMA) sessions with our founders, C-level team, and executives, plus private one-on-one conversations. And as pandemic conditions continue to fluctuate, we get our global teams together in person whenever possible — and of course, regularly on Zoom.
4. Empathy. We create a safe working environment for our employees through relocation programs, financial support, flexible scheduling, revised productivity expectations in times of upheaval, and an overall atmosphere of support. We actively adjust our perspective to see things as others do.

Through these core company values, we’re able to attract, retain, and develop top talent, which continuously spins our flywheel and pushes us toward fulfilling our mission.

People often ask how our culture contributes — and, more importantly, how it’s applied on an ongoing basis? For us, a well-defined Culture Code is a guiding principle in hiring. When screening candidates, we include a dedicated culture-fit interview to determine if a potential employee will reinforce our core values. This step serves as a virtual “filter.”

Structure: Teams, processes, tracks

We’ve mentioned the emphasis we place on autonomy, and nowhere is this more evident than in the way we structure our development teams at PandaDoc. At PandaDoc we are using Large Scaled Scrum Framework to run our R&D organization.

Usually consisting of five or six developers, our teams are atomic units focused on delivering end-to-end value. Teams are independent and autonomous, so they can deliver their changes without any external dependencies.

Each one boasts a clever name they’ve come up with themselves — for example, “cAPIbaras” (you can probably guess what this team’s primary focus is). 

Recently we’ve started to shift away from including a QA engineer on each team as we move toward a more automated QA model.

Because strong social connections on a team can help overcome the type of global turbulence we’ve endured the last few years, we don’t like to change team members often. Furthermore, we don’t optimize by location, language, or culture since we’ve seen that grouping individuals from different countries can stabilize a team over time.

When it comes to our processes, we like to pursue a combination of scrum tactics and simple common sense by:

• Maintaining a unified single backlog
• Allowing every team to work on any area of our app
• Removing dependencies on experts
• Allowing any team to work with any product manager
• Constantly prioritizing the backlog for the entire product

Scaling from 12 to 40 development teams, as we’ve done at PandaDoc, isn’t easy. From unclear areas of responsibility and constantly changing social connections to cognitive overload and reduced ownership and engagement, there can be plenty of potential pitfalls along the way.

To help avoid these perils of rapid growth, we’ve introduced tracks as a way to scale our organizational structure smoothly.

A track at PandaDoc is a set of 4-6 teams sharing a unified focus — either a very clearly defined area of our app, or an equally clearly defined set of metrics. The former is often visionary work requiring deep research, and where architecture and quality are critical; the latter touches many pieces and requires quick testing, as well as being OK with 60-70 percent of experiments not working out favorably.

Each track at PandaDoc has a leadership team consisting of people from Product, Engineering, and Product Design, as well as a Scrum Master — our communication interface within the track. Our current tracks include Growth, Day2Day, Document-as-an-App, Ecosystem, Solutions, SaaS Foundation, and Platform.

The advantages of using tracks are far-reaching and include greater scalability, clear focus and responsibilities, long-lasting social connections, and autonomy. Tracks are also easier to manage. Disadvantages are less acute, but isolation from other tracks is a potential issue, as is too much rigidity.

Goals: For the win

We push toward our business goals by pursuing alignment through a unified planning process.

Our yearly company strategy includes all annual goals for PandaDoc, plus other major items such as revenue, hiring, expansion, global projects, and more. This then informs product big rocks, pebbles, and sand granules — all of which shape plans for each track. Finally, based on our quarter track plans, tracks build their backlogs.

All plans are documented in detail and, in the spirit of company-wide transparency, shared across the entire organization — as is progress toward each goal during our biweekly all-hands meetings. After experimenting with different tools, we currently use Coda for all our planning and documentation.

But planning is only one side of the story. To continuously drive the organization toward our goal, we’ve established a rhythm and cadence where we check progress and make necessary changes to our approach. Here’s a high-level look at how we do it:

1. Yearly company strategy: This translates into an annual product roadmap.
2. Quarterly OKRs by quarter: Each track’s plans are based on its contribution to the product roadmap for the quarter.
3. Monthly track sync: Track leaders discuss progress toward goals, as well as roadblocks.
4. Bi-annual product roadmap review: Planning for the entire year is a challenge, so we have an offsite meeting to analyze the first half of the year and make necessary adjustments to the second half. Usually we do it in person with a larger group of people representing both Product and Engineering.
5. Bi-weekly sprint review: Every other week, tracks and teams share their progress towards goals and demo their work. This is reminiscent of a mini-conference with keynote speakers (track leadership) and different streams where engineers present product updates. These gatherings are open to anyone in the company and routinely well-attended.