A Trip Around the Sun with Grafana Labs
Sitting on my apartment building roofdeck here in Denver, my (second) cup of iced coffee is sweating, pooling water to the edge of my computer. I think to myself, what, I just poured that? Looking at the clock, no I didn’t, that was several hours ago.
The altitude must’ve limited oxygen to my brain. My next thought is — I should write something about Grafana Labs.
For some reason I make a link to my ignored ice coffee sweating all over my workspace, to my tenure at Grafana. It’s been a year! Surely not? Perhaps time to reflect and share what we’ve built and been up to.
I started back in February 2020 as the first dedicated Talent hire into Grafana Labs. Despite my multitude of interviews and discovery conversations, I was not too sure what to expect.
I was ignorant to the fanaticism of the Grafana community for our product offerings and the technical breadth of it’s reach. From beehives, to Space-X, sourdough starters, Raspberry Pi’s, aviation systems, or cloud infrastructure — Grafana can observe and pull metrics on everything and anything — and it looks fantastic! A simple search on social channels will illuminate how much engineers and the community know and love Grafana.
A unique situation to be in for sure. More so in a ripe market, but what is it like to actually work behind here behind the scenes?
Early on I learned the values of Grafana being a remote first and trust driven culture, did not mean there wasn’t emphasis on regular face-to-face interaction. I lucked out as the PeopleOps team was planning an end of February off-site in London to organize our growth and strategy planning for the year ahead. Being brand new to the team, this was tremendously valuable to build relationships in person, share ideas, collaborate and align on short term and long term expectations. I remember as we closed our off-site we were all standing at the top of the London Shard, glass of champagne in hand, toasting with each other as we neared departure back to our respective locations. This was going to be fun.
On my return home in early March 2020, COVID-19 hit almost overnight and a wave of anxiety fell on me. The market started tanking, layoffs and furloughs were compounding. The good news was Grafana had always been remote first, being founded by way of three founders on three continents. We didn’t need to build a remote async operation overnight — it’s been largely business as usual. The bad news was…. I just joined a Series-A funded company to help hire and scale global teams. Four weeks after my start date a global pandemic hit. Being new, and hired to build a talent structure to hire others, I thought I was first on the chopping block.
Much to my reprieve Grafana truly values open, honest, full transparency. To the extent, on a company all hands our CEO Raj Dutt, explained he was not in the business of layoffs and we were continuing on our growth trajectory. The gales were howling but the ship would sail on. I won’t forget that meeting the rest of my career. That was the moment the values of the leadership team, and Grafana as a whole resonated with me as a person and professional. It wasn’t vacuous corporate speak or fluffy pillar values, it was real. I was lucky.
With a tenuous first month under my belt, I was energized and eager to build as we started back on our path. Here’s what we’ve been up to since then….
Since this day last year, we’ve hired over 170 people and are now geolocated across 36 countries, and in every timezone. At this pace we’ve averaged a new hire every other business day in a wildly unpredictable year that no one will soon forget. This collective achievement is a reflection of Grafana Labs as a whole; hyper collaborative, focused, output driven, and aligned on a common goal to build and refine the best. We’ve blasted through the strastophere of ‘enterprise adolescence’ and are looking at growing our company north of 500+ employees this year. I can feel my grey hair sprouting.
For a company that had 50 employees 20 months ago, expanding into Kosovo, Lithuania, Nigeria, Costa Rica, Singapore — virtually anywhere with an internet connection, this is a massive task.
How’d we do it?
Coffee. Red-bull. Hustle. Alignment. Trust. No geographic restrictions. A kick-ass PeopleOps team.
Additive to that, work life balance is at the forefront of who we are. Oftentimes I’m brewing coffee when my boss is putting her kids to sleep. Most people we’ve hired have not met their colleagues in person. I get ‘Good Morning’ slack notifications at 11:45pm MST time. We’re an asynchronous team and it works because Grafana Labs is always ‘on’, but you don’t have to be — nor should you. We give everyone 30 days of PTO on top of their national/regional holidays. What we’re doing is hard. This past year was hard. Having 40* days off was and continues to be a god send to mitigate burn out and keep happy employees.
But most importantly, we do it because open is in our DNA. From our code and our operating ethos as both a community and company. This DNA is a complex double helix made up of product, teams, process, and culture. There is a prideful sense of preserving this as we evolve at Grafana Labs.
To spur this past year’s growth, and the next wave of it, we’ve built the global recruitment team to a team of five. (Massive shout out to Dasha, Amy, Maggie, Eva and Michaela). We’ve partnered with the business to build and drive hiring processes, galvanized target profiles for niche/volume roles, built in headcount planning reviews, comp leveling — all to be a shared task among recruiting, leadership, hiring managers and interviewers. Mutual ownership and clear communication has driven shared outcomes. In a truly remote first distributed team, this is a necessary evolution stage and one we’re still navigating as a team. We do so by respectfully empowering each other and living and dying by high trust say-do-ratios.
Now that I’ve rotated around the sun once while at Grafana, I’m even more energized than I was my first week. We’re hiring in virtually every corner of the globe across all of our teams, and have big plans for this next trip around the big orange sphere in the sky.
Come join the mission and help us eclipse the Grafana logo in its place. Pretty sure we have a plugin for that.
