How the Fivetran Product Team Gets It Done

At Fivetran, we have the good fortune of being a fast-growing startup. To support our rapid growth, the Fivetran product team is building out processes and frameworks to clarify project ownership and autonomy as we guide the future of the Fivetran product offering. These new processes and frameworks flow organically from the vision, principles, values and objectives of our team.

Vision

As our team grows, it’s important to have a unifying vision that will help us stay oriented toward a common goal. All of the projects we take on should help us get closer to this ultimate vision. Our team vision is to collaborate to create the most reliable, easy to use and connected data integration product for every organization that aspires to be data-driven.

Principles

In order to help everyone in the organization (including our growing team) understand and apply our product principles, we’ve written them out and share them every chance we get.

The core of Fivetran is and always will be connectors. Fivetran is a one-stop shop for all your data pipelining needs.
One simple, predictable, default choice. Our industry is rife with unnecessary complexity. Fivetran wants to provide a good default choice for the customer, and (ideally) offer no customization.
Our connectors just work. Our primary value is making sure customers don't have to think about data pipelines.
Your data is secure. Customers trust us with their most important data, which is an enormous responsibility, and a potential liability.
Access your data quickly. Customers expect instant results across industries, and data is no different.

These principles will help all Fivetran employees make decisions and prioritize projects that advance our product goals.

Values

When teams grow quickly, staying cohesive and efficient can be a challenge. To make sure we live our values as we grow, we’ve written them out and use them consistently in our interview process and self-evaluations.

As a team, we embody:

Curiosity. We’re always asking why and seeking the root cause of an issue.
Ownership. We own the success of our areas and take responsibility for mistakes.
Collaboration. We are nothing without our designers, engineers, customers and stakeholders, and we collaborate fervently.
Kindness. We approach all situations with kindness and compassion.
Integrity. In keeping with our company values, we do the right thing, even when its hard.

Inspired by the accidental acronym our values spell out, we created a team logo, and sweatshirts we can wear as a tribute to our team values.

Objectives

As we know, the best way to evaluate the success of a solution is to measure it. We assign one or two KPIs to each product manager, so their success and the success of their product area is clear. By making objectives clear and measurable, everyone can have visibility into how they’re doing and focus on what drives the most value for our users.