While Disco is a small company, and we don't consider ourselves to be particularly hierarchal, we do have a general organisational structure and defined relationships between different roles.
It's important for you to clearly understand the nature of your role and how it relates to others within the team.
It's also really important to have a clear understanding of the expectations we have of you in your role, how your performance in that role will be assessed, and how we anticipate your skills and experience to develop within your role over time.
In addition to the responsibilities listed for each specific role below, as a Disco employee you are expected to:
Everyone at Disco has a "lead". (We prefer the word "lead" to something like "manager" (a) to emphasise that everyone at Disco should self-manage to a degree; and (b) to get away from the big-company hierarchal baggage that comes with that word).
In addition to working with you on a day-to-day basis, your lead is responsible for clearly laying out the expectations of your role, giving you feedback on how you're doing, and working with you to ensure you're getting the support and resources you need to get your job done and level up your skills. Your lead will schedule regular 1:1 sessions with you to do this.
Disco does not perform periodic performance reviews, 360 reviews, or use a performance rating system. Our perspective (which is backed by research) is that these can create anxiety for employees, pull focus from impactful work, and are vulnerable to subjective assessments from peers and managers.
However, the same research (and our own experience) tells us that employees do like to have a sense of how well they're doing, whether they're getting better at it, and how they can improve the work they're doing.
To help with this, we have identified performance indicators for each role at the company — things which we consider to be reasonably objective measures of how people are executing their key responsibilities. These indicators are listed below in the Role Breakdown.
These indicators will be reviewed and discussed with you by your lead on a quarterly basis. Consistently exceeding expectations with your performance indicators suggests that you're ready to take on a bigger or more challenging role. Consistently struggling to meet those expectations suggests that there's something that needs to be dug into and discussed — whether that's a change in the expectations or responsibilities of your role, additional support to help you succeed, or a different way to tackle your work.
While they are important, performance indicators are only ever a starting point for a conversation with your lead, never the be all and end all of success in your role.