When you join a tech company, you’re not just choosing a product, a stack or a team. You’re also choosing a path for your career for maybe a few years, where you will play an important role in the evolution of the product. Eventually, you will become stronger, ship faster, with fewer QA returns and bugs, less reworks overall, and see your own hard and soft skills evolve to make you part of the best engineers.
In short, best engineers are the ones that can consistently find and deliver the best solutions to the right customers’ problems at the right time. However, even the best potentials may struggle to grow if they operate in a broken system: time spent is not synonym of valuable experience.
At Qonto, we’ve spent the last years deliberately designing our Tech Qonto Way. It’s heavily inspired by Lean, adapted to a fast‑scaling European fintech, and now used every day by more than 500 people building a service that simply cannot fail. For our engineers, that operating system is not an abstract concept. It intentionally shapes our daily life based on all our cumulated learnings so far: A real customer obsession, how much we can focus, how much ownership we have, how much bureaucracy we face, and how fast we grow.
This is part of our leadership principles: Customers problems are everyone’s problem.
Qonto is a business bank account augmented by financial tools for SMEs and freelancers, used by 600.000 customers in 8 European countries. We ambition to make entrepreneurs’ lives simpler to let them focus on what matters to them: run their business. They run payroll, pay their taxes, and keep their companies alive using our product. When we ship something to production, it has to work.
We oscillate between 4.7 and 4.8 stars on each platform. To reach this level, we focus deeply on quality ****and new features must match customers expectations in a simple yet delightful and consistent way.
In terms of reliability, we target at least 99.9% uptime per month. That means we allow less than 43 minutes down per month, may it be for planned maintenance, or unplanned incidents. You can check our public page here: https://status.qonto.com/.
Just as important as uptime, we care about keeping our volume of bugs under control. Despite hundreds of deployments per day, we have a maximum of 180 bugs opened, which means less than 4 bugs per team / stack at all time (we are more than 400 Product engineers).
We also encourage our engineers to participate in customer interviews with product managers to sense first-hand the pain points of our customers and come up with the best solutions.
Our goal is to work on the right subjects, do them good, and do them on time. For this, we must eliminate reworks, bureaucracy, keep the teams synchronized, and obviously reach the expected feature success, its value. It starts with the right planning, followed by the right execution.
Our customers’ needs evolve quickly, our market evolves fast, and even if we have a good idea of all the features we want to ship in the future, we do not want to start working on features that will eventually either be discarded, or postponed for a new priority and will require another full analysis from scratch by the time we come back to it. We would call that “waste”.
So by design, we keep our feature roadmap short-term to avoid a stock that can’t go faster than engineers’ delivery anyway. And we are not paid to constantly move items in a Notion backlog timeline 😉.
The Product team is responsible to decide what are the next features we will work on, and they make sure to pick the most impactful subject for our customers today. Each item in the roadmap translates into a measurable success to achieve. This prioritization is made through teamwork between Product managers, Ops, Growth and Compliance teams, and obviously by listening continuously to customers.