Commerce Company Culture & Values

What recent decision best reflected your values — and what changed as a result?

We recently made the strategic shift to unify our product lines under a singular Commerce brand. This aligns with my personal values of collaboration and knowledge-sharing, as well as our company value, “Stronger Together.” Historically, our product lines operated in relative isolation, but this new ecosystem approach is effectively dismantling those barriers. We are already seeing a massive shift in how teams are engineering solutions; we are moving away from redundant feature work and toward building scalable platform architecture. This structure is unlocking value across the stack and giving our team members the opportunity to solve larger, more complex technical challenges collaboratively.

What collaboration habit keeps work moving — and how do you measure it?

Our most critical habit is a “write-first” culture driven by lightweight requests for comments. Our team is too distributed for synchronous meetings to be the primary alignment tool. Before building new services or features, engineers write a brief technical proposal and circulate it for async feedback. Crucially, this format democratizes the conversation. It gives everyone the space to digest information and contribute feedback on their own time, rather than only hearing the loudest voices in a meeting. It might sound counterintuitive, but slowing down to write actually speeds us up. Once aligned, these proposals graduate into architecture decision records, creating a permanent history of our choices. 

By solving architectural debates during the design phase rather than during the build, we avoid mid-sprint blockers and costly rework. We measure success through team velocity and delivery timelines. While no timeline is perfect, the RFC process has effectively eliminated the massive, late-stage rewrites that used to jeopardize our release dates and cause frustration.

How do you recognize impact fairly — and what’s the return on investment?

Fairness starts with clarity. We recognize impact by mapping everyone to standardized engineering career ladders that clearly define expectations for every level, from junior to principal engineer. To ensure these are applied fairly, we hold rigorous calibration sessions where leadership reviews performance data across the entire organization, not just within one team. This eliminates manager bias and ensures an L4 engineer on one team is held to the same standard as an L4 on another. The return on investment is evident in our retention and internal mobility rates. Because the path to promotion is transparent, our engineers choose to grow with us. We see team members frequently transferring internally to tackle new challenges, rather than leaving to find growth elsewhere.

What values do you ideally want to see in an employer?

When I think about values, I want to see alignment between my personal values and those of the company. It’s not just about how work gets done, but also about what the company stands for.

When I began my journey with BigCommerce — now Commerce — over 12 years ago, I was immediately struck by how people were always at the center of everything, whether that meant our customers or our employees. That focus continues today, embodied in values like “Stronger Together” and “Customer Compass.” These values are lived out daily — through the way colleagues support one another and in how we create the best possible experiences for our customers. Personally, I’ve always been motivated by helping others, so finding a company that shares that commitment allows me to show up authentically and collaborate with peers who hold those same values, even when we’re tackling difficult, innovative challenges.

How does your employer show a commitment to some (or all) of these?

One of the strongest examples is our Awardco recognition program, which allows employees to celebrate peers who live out our values. Recognition isn’t given casually — it’s always tied back to a specific company value. This makes recognition more meaningful and it has become one of our most impactful cultural programs with the highest employee participation, especially since it spans our globally distributed teams and bridges office and remote environments.

We also live out “Stronger Together” through our long-standing employee resource groups, which have been active for over eight years. These employee-led groups foster community, celebrate diverse perspectives and create learning opportunities throughout the year.

Other programs reinforce our values in different ways. The employee funds program provides employees with an annual budget to connect — virtually or in-person — building stronger relationships across teams. The employee hubs offer spaces and dedicated times for employees who work remotely to gather, connect and collaborate in-person. Listening programs are tied to our value of “Keep It Real, Always.” We actively collect and act on employee feedback to shape our culture. 

Why is it important to you that your work (and workplace leaders) share these values? 

I’m fortunate to be in a role where I help champion our cultural values and bring them to life through programming, offerings and daily interactions. When leadership and employees are aligned on values, it creates a culture where people thrive and do their best work. Values provide a compass — they clarify who we are, how we work and what kinds of interactions define us.

Leadership alignment is especially critical. For example, during our recent unveiling of our new parent brand Commerce, we worked across three distinct brands to define four new shared company values. This wasn’t a top-down decision; it was built collaboratively through employee feedback sessions, manager forums and final input from senior leadership. The result reflects what our people value most and ensures the culture we’re building truly represents us all.