The Culture of a Mercury Team

We bring work to the team, not a team to the work

The “Genius Myth” is the tendency that we as humans need to ascribe the success of a team to a single person/leader

The vast majority of the work at most companies doesn’t require genius-level intellect, but 100% of the work requires a minimal level of social skills and collaboration. What will make or break your career as a professional, including at MercuryWorks, is how well you collaborate with others.

Because of the Genius Myth, many engineers are afraid to share the work they’ve just started because it means peers will see mistakes and know the creator isn’t a genius. Professionals working alone, though, increase the risk of unnecessary failure and making fundamental design mistakes that peers could help spot.

We have burst the Genius Myth at MercuryWorks with Agile teamwork, pull requests/peer reviews on all code commits and team-based metrics.

Bus Factor (noun): The number of people that need to get hit by a bus before your project is completely doomed

Working well with your team will help disperse the knowledge and know-how of all parts of your products/projects. If you’re the only person who understands how a given system works, you will not only be bombarded with trivia questions but also greatly imperil the product’s Bus Factor. If you’re working with a colleague, though, you will have doubled the bus factor.

At MercuryWorks we increase the Bus Factor by sharing knowledge via PRs, ensuring there is reasonable documentation and cross training all team members.

Personalized, one-to-one advice from a knowledge colleague is invaluable – expert team members can provide completely contextual advice and impart valuable knowledge. Although one person might be able to provide personalized help for a few people, this doesn’t scale. Documented knowledge, while much less contextual, can scale across our entire firm.

What is MercuryWorks’ actionable strategy here? We apply both one-to-one knowledge sharing and formal documentation to build up what we refer to as tribal knowledge – knowledge that exists in the gap between what individual team members know and what is documented.