11Sigma at Stoplight

Since we joined in 2018, Stoplight continued to work on its major products allowing its customers to design, document, explore, and govern APIs. 

Besides TypeScript engineering work, we’ve started organizing team building events in Europe before the year 2018 ended. We hosted the first micro-retreat in Warsaw, Poland, where the 11Sigma crew, Stoplight’s director of engineering (flew to Poland from the USA), and some in-house engineers had a chance to meet, work and have fun together. Following up on this event’s success, we’ve soon organized another one in Sopot, Poland – a seaside resort where we rented a hacker-apartment in a XIX century villa. That started a tradition of annual retreats (like the one in Głęboczek), on-site on-boardings in Poznań, and regular trips to conferences (API Days Barcelona, API Days Paris).

In early 2019, we became responsible for managing the entire European team (Stoplight + 11Sigma) and hired two more engineers to Stoplight. Late 2019 was the advent of setting up a QA process. We continued working on Studio, Spectral, Prism, and redesigned workspace-based Platform. By the end of 2019, we hired one more engineer (a senior who soon became a team leader) and onboarded and mentored a manual QA that became an SDET and later a junior developer in under a year.

In 2020, we continued extending Stoplight’s team with more senior engineers, created and coordinated a QA process across the board, automated e2e tests (which enabled Continuous Deployment). Our engineers had a significant impact on developing all products and continue to remain the top contributors.

For all those years, we’ve been building and improving a dedicated hiring process. When Stoplight had very few resources to develop their own, we’ve taken the lead and prepared the hiring processes, including the messaging, tasks, questions, and job marketing strategy. We’ve also set up the infrastructure, screened CVs, reviewed candidates’ home-assignments, conducted live-coding interviews, and prepared detailed 360-degree candidate profiles. To give an example for one of the jobs, we’ve reviewed over 300 candidates in under a month and selected 5 for a final interview with the USA team.

In the meantime, we’ve been supporting our engineers in their personal growth. Our goal-oriented 10x-self sessions with individual engineers resulted in many success stories. Some of them are technical, like starting a technical blog, creating a YouTube channel about JavaScript, or being promoted to more senior positions. Some are very personal, like getting back to their own passions such as flying or contributing to OpenSource projects.

It’s been a unique partnership since Karol and I met Stoplight’s founder, Marc MacLeod. This uniqueness is based on the fact that we’ve always been treated like first-class citizens and “part of the team”.

Except for the paperwork, there is practically no difference between 11Sigma engineers and in-house employees.

We’ve been able to achieve this kind of relationship because of the unique characteristics of our model:

• We focused on building a dedicated “11Sigma at Stoplight” crew
• We built and conducted a bespoke hiring process
• We adapt to Stoplight’s organizational changes (seed -> post-Series A)
• Our engineers work full-time at Stoplight (we don’t split our engineers’ time between clients)
• We inherit Stoplight’s culture, as well as organize and engage in various team-building events