On the best company I’ve ever worked for (so far): Net-A-Porter
** Disclaimer — please keep in mind that NAP is NOT equals to YNAP **
A few days ago, my FB feed remind me of 2 things:
· First, it was a memory of 10 years ago: my last day @ Treelogic. Even if I dislike the ways of working, or the industry, back home in Spain, I have very fond memories of my time there. Yes, I did shit lots of overtime without even being thanked for, and instead getting threats like ‘There are people queuing outside, waiting for your position if you are not happy’. I’m not talking about getting any extra € or time in lieu, but at least some appreciation for taking time from your personal life to get stuff delivered on time, because the projects were wrongly estimated and tight on budget. But despite of that, I was super lucky of having the opportunity to:
o Work in many projects… in several industries…with different technologies…
o With a bunch of people who knew what they were doing, and with who you would feel like, even when doing long hours, it was super easy. And I can proudly say I call many of those friends, and we’ve been in touch since I left, almost on a daily basis. That was for me the key reason to stay longer there when I knew that was not what I wanted to do.
· The second memory, and the main driver of this post was the best team I’ve ever worked with / as part of. That was the Commando Team, at Net-A-Porter, or as we call it on the Napster world, NAP.
But before telling you about Commando and how we got there, let me give you some context on NAP.
When I arrived at the UK, I moved into a tiny studio flat in Wood Lane, literally opposite Westfield London. The NAP offices had moved from top of Whiteleys at Bayswater, into top of Westfield London at White City.
When I was interviewing with companies, a recruiter told me about the company and that’s how I first heard about it. I was hooked with the business and everything I found about it on my initial research. But I got an offer from my first gig, with Geoplace, so I didn’t proceed with getting into the process.
2 years later, when I decided it was time to move on, and I was starting to look at the market, I got a call from the Talent team at NAP (waves at Hannah). They had an opening for a mid-level developer position and my profile seemed like a good match, so we started the process. After the initial screening call, and getting the thumbs up after completing the take home test, I was invited for the final F2F interview.
As soon as I did enter the office I could feel the vibes and how people around were happy. There were 2 parts on that final stage: first, a technical discussion with 2 senior Devs on my solution and other tech related stuff (waves at Ian and Alex). I felt so relaxed with those 2, and that was the first time I met Alex, who I’d work with later in the Commando time, and who these days is another good friend (despite of complaining about not validating the 30th of February as an invalid date…).
Second part, with Lovell and a lady from the Talent team (Helena, if I do remember correctly).
When I did get the call with an offer, I knew I was joining a good company, but still didn’t know the scale of it.
Day 1, I walked into the office and my manager (waves at Frank) took me to where my team was sitting, in the Upper Mezzanine, overseeing the business teams. I got introduced to a few team members who were in the office on the day, and then, we went to a weekly meeting with over 20 Devs from multiple teams where people would discuss issues, actions, mitigations… Can you imagine walking into a room with that much people, with everyone staring at you, sitting next to the person who should be introducing you but instead was typing an email before starting the meeting, until someone said, ‘Are you not going to introduce us?’ To which Frank replied ‘This is Bea, the new developer in the Seaview Team. Bea, this is a bunch of people’. Frank’s style!
The second highlight of the day, was having a whiteboard session with Frank where he started by explaining our team’s services / APIs, and ended up with a whole bunch of systems connected (basically the whole NAP ecosystem / platform). When I saw that, I asked a single question ‘Why are we not using something like Hybris or ATG instead?’ and Frank’s answer was another eye-opener on the kind of company I had just joined ‘As Natalie (NAP’s founder) always says we do everything in house, the only thing we don’t do is shipping, because we can’t afford planes’.
The last thing which made me feel like a person and not a ‘resource’ (I hate that word) was towards the end of the day, it was 6’30pm, and around me it was only me and Frank left. When he was about to leave he asked why I was still there. And I told him I was waiting for someone, so instead of being around Westfield going into shops, I’d prefer to wait in the office. He then said ‘One thing I want my team to do is to have a good work / life balance, so I don’t expect you to do long hours for no reason or without getting a compensation. And for me, if you start at 12 and leave by 4pm, as soon as you’ve done your work, I’ll be happy’. Nice, right?
Can you imagine working in a company, with a fancy office which was all white & black and super stylish? Where EVERYTHING was done in house, from buying to editorial. From taking pictures in the studios (where you could see the models) to preparing the orders in the DCs. From launching our magazine (PORTER) to having a dedicated Personal Shopping team for the business’ most important customers: the EIPs. From building all the websites & mobile apps and the underlying platform, to building other systems supporting the business such as fulfillment, our own PIM or a fraud tool to evaluate fraud on real-time. Do you get the vibes?
You know what is to have a place that truly believes on having a flat structure, with no private offices for C-level positions / Senior Management, but instead an open plan office, so everyone is sitting together? Where you see the founder arriving the first in the morning and leaving the last. Same applied to Mark Sebba, NAP’s CEO at the time. And when you see those people talking to a grad or a cleaner, in the same way that they talk to a celebrity or a designer, you knew the mentality was like a big family. And of course, there were challenges, and like in families, people would argue and fight, but it was always keeping in mind what we thought was better for the business.
NAP’s DNA was around the BLESS values. What the hell is that?
· Be the best: Don’t settle for less. Strive to be the best you can be and to live truly with high standards. If you aim for middle of the road then if you succeed that’s exactly where you will be. Always aim higher and higher and that’s where you will go.
· Lead, don’t follow: Ok — follow instructions and follow advice, and be collaborative BUT STRIVE TO make a difference. Do this in business, and in your own life. Celebrate individuality. Opportunity finds you when you go looking for it.
· Exceed expectations: At the very least do what you say you’ll do or are expected to do. But no one remembers those things. Add flourish, a thoughtful touch, something unexpected. It can be the tiniest of gestures or details. You will be amazed how far the little extra bit gets you — no matter how massive an undertaking you might have delivered.
· Be Smart and Stylish: Celebrate both in everything; your life, your team mates, an intricate operational matrix, a new operating program, a fashion story. Intelligence is stylish and vice versa. Celebrate and create balance between the two. Don’t have one without the other.
· And Serve, serve, serve: Never ask someone to do something you wouldn’t do yourself and likewise follow the golden rule — treat others as you would like to be treated. Make yourself indispensable.
B L E S S !!!
I loved the idea of BLESS, and I said to myself I’d follow these principles. I was in a great place, with an incredible mentality and the work was challenging and interesting.
And the social… NAP was very well known for their Social, and all kind of parties that were organized by the BLESS committee, and I’m talking about company level. The teams were also quite active on organizing social stuff, such as endless nights in Defectors or the Bull, lunches at several places including Tianfu, karaoke nights, or Tuesdays for Cheese and Wine nights (where I proudly introduced many people to Albariño and how to drink white wine). The last big social event was the summer party in 2015 @ the Somerset House. It was epic!
I could be talking about endless stories, many memories, but I want to get talking about how I ended up in the best team ever. So, the 2 final things to mention:
· How many of you know about what Natalie organized for Mark Sebba when he decided to retire? You don’t know what I’m talking about. Watch it here!
· You might think that I’m talking about some kind of Utopia and it’s all on my head. On that case, please, take the time to read Robin’s views here — https://robinglen.medium.com/au-revoir-net-a-porter-98c0af8fddbe
So, what about the team/s I worked with. I did start in November 2013 with the Seaview Team, a back-end team looking after all the Customer and Order data. A bunch of brilliant people who, without any business requirements, wrote API-based services to 1. Have single sources of truth for those domains and 2. Enable so much additional features for the wider business that we had quite a few clients consuming our stuff, including the websites and mobile apps, other back-end services such as Fulfillment, Recommendations, personal shopping, the fraud tool…
I learnt so much about APIs, load testing, high scale, security, DevOps… And also, something super important, that naming is one of the most important things. You would ask why our team was called Seaview, and I honestly can’t remember how the customer service ended up being called that, as it was before my days. BUT I do remember every other name, such as Cliff who would sit on top of the Seaview to check the customer data in a business-friendly manner (and not through raw APIs), or Lighthouse, or Lionel, our discovery service with a single endpoint /hello… Those to name a few, but we had many others.
After almost 2 years, it was decided that the Seaview team would merge with the Payments team, and that was the beginning of the Commando Team. We went from a team of 6, up to a team of 10. And that was before others joined us. And you know how Scrum tells you that Scrum teams shouldn’t be bigger than 3–5 per team? In our case, that wasn’t an issue. That was the highest performing as well as self-managed and self-organized team I’ve ever worked with on my career.
But what does Commando mean? Back to the basics and the importance of naming, it meant different things such as ‘Commerce and Openness’, ‘Commerce and Opportunity’ or just ‘Command+O’. Plus, we were the ONLY team in the company who had a brand on the website — https://www.net-a-porter.com/en-gb/shop/designer/commando
On the work side, getting to join with the Payments team was such an amazing opportunity to work on (yet) another service, to expand my business knowledge around that area, to learn tons about security, or around the PCI world (the payments service was a bespoke PSP written in-house complying with all PCI standards).
I think nobody ever realized the power they gave to our team, or they did trust us a lot. Customer, order and payments… I won’t disclose here how many things you could do around that data, as I don’t want to give people ideas on stuff they shouldn’t be doing, but I’ve discussed that with Frank many times, and raise it with others, only so they’d be aware when giving production access to people.
We loved arguing with each other, in a good way, to keep improving our services and the systems we were working on. But besides work, we were pretty good with social stuff. At least 1–2 pub lunches a week (which for me were mostly liquid lunches), tons of fried chicken at the Sindercombe, opening bottles of wine on a Tuesday afternoon for no good reason while continue writing code, having a bottle of Scotch when a release decided to go because of a bunch of idiots who didn’t understand the difference instead thousands and millions, nights out, visits to interesting clubs around Picadilly (if you were a Commando-er you know exactly what I’m referring to) … Even when colleagues decided to leave us for good reasons, we would do something to make them feel closer to us on the new company: like when I sent to Tony, on behalf of the team, a beer delivery to the Easyjet office on his first Friday. I knew without beer, he wouldn’t perform the same! So much caring for the others.
I think by now you should have an idea of why I did love that company and that team. So why did I decide to leave? I could write a long, never-ending post on the why, the full story, but it’s not worth it.
March 2015, a merger between Yoox and Net-A-Porter is announced. It’s the beginning of the end. What happened since that date was unfortunate and pretty annoying. Let’s say the merger wasn’t one of its kind, but a takeover. You want to read the full story about the nasty stuff? — https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/news-analysis/richemont-net-a-porter-yoox-merger-secret-deal
And a figure that HR provided on my exit interview: 117 out of a 350 people on the Tech team, left in a single year, after NAP became YNAP. And I’m talking on the NAP side only, which means London. It was like Highlander…
For Commando that meant first working on a few pieces of work quite interesting to try proving to our Italian counterpart that we could support both sides of the business without going back to the 2000 in the Enterprise world. We leveraged our services and create a few extra pieces in collaboration with other teams, to create a real-time fraud tool to evaluate orders before going into fulfillment, we migrated more than 80 million records of data with a bunch of Rabbit brokers between the London and Bologna infra, we proposed new designs for gift cards and store credit in the new world… BUT when you have smart people, and in the other side, a bunch of architects with not as much experience and exposure to those architectures as you have, what do you think that can happen?
Even the best team will give up. And that’s what happened. We started losing people that were fed up of idiocy, bureaucracy and could see how everything we had built in the past was falling apart. Others decided that we wanted to keep fighting for a bit longer, but on my case, 1 year and a trip to Bologna was more than enough to confirm my fears: that the company I joined did no longer exist. There were still reminiscences, because of the people who were still around, but that was it.
November 2016, I did handle my resignation letter, and I could have shorten my 3 months’ notice given how many people were leaving already, but I didn’t, because I still liked my team and my colleagues and did want to do a proper handover and spend as much time as I could until my last day.
When I finally left on the 10th of February 2017, I said pretty clear on my leaving email that I was leaving YNAP, not NAP. The ‘Y’ made all the difference.
NAP gave me so many things on different aspects, but if I had to pick one, I’d say it did create a big family and a community of people who were aligned and enjoyed working together. And you know what? Not only many of those are good friends, but I’ve been super lucky to work with some of them again. People like Frank, Alex, Arec, Lovell, Varun… and the one who I always said was my Jiminy Cricket, Matt.
I’m getting some of the vibes from NAP @ Tesco, and I hope it continues to surprise me, and hopefully, it will become at least, as good. Saying it will be better is not impossible, but still has to be proven!
