Braze Career Growth & Development

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

My team does this in a bunch of different ways. One common exercise across all teams in the product engineering org is knowledge-sharing sessions. In these sessions, engineering managers will ask someone to present on a topic they’re familiar with. Sometimes, the presenters are engineers talking about technical topics, other times, they’re people in other roles and teams diving into a different topic that’s relevant to the team’s work.

We also encourage engineers to drive their own learning. Some have used our yearly Braze Global Learning Stipend — $2,000 per year — to take courses in new engineering topics, while others use it to buy books. When possible, engineers try to use each other to stay accountable by reading through the books as part of the larger Braze engineering book club or occasionally going through one as a team.

But the biggest way we do this is mixing learning into the flow of regular project work. By talking to engineers about their interests ahead of time, we can match them up with projects that will help them grow technically. This usually means setting aside time in the project plan for engineers to ramp up and ensuring they have mentors and resources as needed.

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

In the long run, building a learning culture should improve the velocity and quality of the team’s work. A couple of years ago, we hired a very strong front-end engineer who had an immediate impact on our code quality and output. But he made it his mission to level up the rest of the team on the front end as well, constantly teaching through presentations, pairing, code reviews and design reviews. Two and a half years later, more than half of the engineers feel strong on the front end, and it shows in their output: we’re able to deliver work more quickly and with higher quality than we were before.

Other times, exposing engineers to new problems through knowledge-sharing sessions has turned into potential project ideas. In one case, SMS operations came to talk to the engineering team about their workflow for setting up new customers. We left that session with a bunch of new ideas for places to automate some of the manual things ops had to do, letting their team spend time on higher value work and speeding up the onboarding process for our customers.

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

As a leader, the most important things to do to help build this environment is to make space for learning and to incentivize engineers to prioritize teaching others. It’s really easy to deprioritize something like preparing for a knowledge-sharing session against a project that needs to be delivered, but doing so would cause you to lose out on a lot of the benefits I mentioned above.

You also need to make sure engineers are rewarded for mentorship and teaching work. For us, this is part of career ladder expectations, and before someone gets promoted to a senior engineer role, we expect them to have multiple examples of cases where they helped uplevel another engineer through things like knowledge-sharing sessions, direct mentorship or advising on a project. You don’t have to drive everything yourself as the manager; you just need to make sure engineers are encouraged to help build this culture themselves.