Dwarves Handbook

After years working worked with companies varied in size from startups to corporates, to build world-class quality products and lead the road to success, we come up with the Dwarves Handbook.

The handbook is where we try to share what’s worth knowing about the Dwarves, the company, our culture, our process, and our history. It’s a guide to understanding what people are talking about, whether it’s okay to take your vacation when you’ve only been with us for few months (yes), what a benefits package looks like, and hopefully everything in-between. The handbook also offers us an opportunity to clarify who we are as a company. What do we stand for? How should we work?

Also, the playbook, on the other hand, contains our practices in software development, guides for getting things done, programming well, programming in style, and collaborating to make them successful.

Agile at Scale

We apply the Agile methodology & Scrum to run our company. It takes place in every corner

• Business Direction planning with eight weeks long cycle
• The operations planning & review between departments
• Hiring for culture and values are more important for the team aspect
• The Dwarves are encouraging to catch up with the team and embrace the tacit base knowledge
• The functional team reach the semi-autonomy status and perform on their objectives

Remote Working

We endorsed and adopted Remote culture from early 2019. Till now, it brings more benefits to the team and helps us to transform the way we collaborate. We don't manage chairs. People have more time for the family and their alone zone to get things done. They focus on the quality conversation and output rather than random interrupting messages.

People migrate their conversation to Basecamp, and all the information's there. All the check-in messages are up there to help the team get to know each other more. People from different timezone can catch up when they finished their works, and transparency is back to town.

Engineering Ladder

Along with the engineering practices, we also came up with the ranking ladder, which helps us classify and build a mentoring tree between the Dwarves. The lead or senior is assigned with objectives. During the cycle, they can choose the mentees, the juniors. The ranking system is structured based on engineering drive culture to form the list of metrics. It starts from D to C, to B, to A and ends with S. There are also several checkpoints in the middle.

We try to make everything a bit clearer on how the portion is distributed. It all comes with your unique values, as mentioned above, and how impactful it is.

Automation Operations

Most software companies can't automate their business workflow. It requires a well-defined process, and the cost to make it happens is expensive.

We build Fortress, a dashboard with a built-in bot, integrated with Basecamp and other Task Management tools to aggregate all the operational data and help to schedule other things that other companies have to build a team to take care of. As a result, with the team size of 60, there are only 4 dwarves to wear an additional hat and take charge to run the daily operations, from recruitment, candidate assessment, onboarding new members, leave request handling, payroll, accounting, and even company valuation. All the operational data are pulled into a single hub for lates data analytics and optimization.

Open Structure