Pros
- Most startups generally have similar qualities, but the team dynamic at Atrium operates at a much higher level of empathy and integrity. This stands out and is what makes me believe Atrium is a place that I can invest in long term, which goes against the startup norm where you go somewhere for a year or two and then hop to the next.
- Diversity and inclusion is something leadership cares about. It's not just something Justin tweets about. We are allocating significant resources in order to continue to grow in this area to be better than baseline tech culture.
- As a product designer, the internal user base here is a dream come true. A lot of our legal team is attracted to leveraging tech to make their work/life balance better than Big Law. They always make themselves available for interviews, testing, co-designing, whatever. It's so nice to have real relationships with the people you're building for.
- The engineering team values design and product at a higher level than previous teams I've worked with. There is a lot of interest in the quality of our UI/UX output and the user value we're imparting.
- We iterate really quickly, so the real life impact is felt more immediately. My work was shipped to production my very first week. Since we have internal users, we can celebrate first hand together how we're making their lives better.
- My PTO is respected! When I'm out of the office, people honor that.
Cons
- We're still building trust between the legal side of the business and EPD (engingeering/product/design).
- Sometimes goals are set at the leadership level without much transparency into why/how they were set. That lack of context can create a lack of confidence in the vision.
- We need to become more mature around our development pace. Sometimes we need to spend more time on research/discovery before prioritizing so that we can execute more efficiently. We have a small EPD team and sometimes we go through phases where expectations can exceed team capacity.
