PassiveLogic has grown from a small group of multidisciplinary engineers and high-performance building scientists to an international team backed by top technology and real estate investors including NVIDIA and Brookfield. As we continue to grow beyond our 100 employee milestone, the demands of collaboration are greater, and it becomes even more important that we develop processes to stay aligned.

Connecting to the bigger picture

PassiveLogic’s accelerated growth is directly correlated with each employee’s commitment to the company vision: to empower people through generative autonomy to solve the world’s largest climate challenges. We attract top talent from all over the world — determined, innovative, and energetic engineers, researchers, and creatives who care deeply about making disruptive technology.

What’s been clear to us is that when our employees understand how the outcomes of their work connect to the bigger ecosystem of technology and products that we’re building, they produce better work.

One of the most successful practices we’ve prioritized to help our employees cultivate this awareness is our “Product Demo Day” which provides all new members of our team (and anyone else who would like to get a refresher) a fun, interactive series of guided demos on each of our products in our autonomous platform.

Collaboration is key

Building a fully autonomous platform is hard work. It involves a lot of moving parts to develop an entire ecosystem of hardware and software products. In order to succeed here, employees will need to get up-close and personal with the technology developments their teammates have contributed to and gain a deep perspective of how their own work fits in the bigger picture.

Led by the team leads who worked on the products themselves, the Product Demo Day illustrates how each of the products work and how they solve commonly-experienced user pain points. Because each employee is an important contributor to our vision, everyone, no matter their technical background, gets an opportunity to understand what our users care about. This helps employees to easily chart a logical path from the project they’re working on towards the user experience.

The Product Demo Day highlights our cross-functional collaboration across teams — a valuable hallmark of our culture. When Mobile Team Lead Adam Petersen started at PassiveLogic, he realized that the open-door policy helped him to grow quickly: “We’re not siloed in ‘this is what you do and that’s all you’re ever going to know about.’”

Here, we encourage our engineers to step outside their usual office spaces to help each other, ask questions, and share their skills. Because of this, we’ve nurtured an environment that generates user-centric products.

We like to emulate the ethos that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Even when we were just a small group of employees, one of the things that made our team so strong was the collective understanding that transparency and collaboration is fundamental to our success and growth.

Building an entire ecosystem in tandem

Developing an ecosystem of products is no simple feat. One of our software team leads, Alec Nelson, said: “The Demo Day is hugely important for PassiveLogic employees — it’s the fastest and most beneficial way to understand as a whole what the company is doing.” Alec knows the learning curve is steep for new employees. “Getting oriented can get complicated, so having a day where you get an in-depth explanation of the products is the perfect onboarding experience for someone to see how all of these products interact.”

Caroline Genster, PR and Media Relations Strategist, started at PassiveLogic earlier this year. “At the beginning, it was information overload. The technology we’ve built here is so advanced.” She continued, “Getting to actually see it and experience it is a super helpful way for me to conceptualize how all the pieces come together.”

A superior user experience

The Demo Day is also a valuable opportunity to showcase how we’ve made progress on our initial design plans and gain feedback from our peers. We’ve carefully designed our products to meet user needs, so this is a chance to put that to the test and onboard our employees, too. “Everybody has a love for the projects they’re working on,” said Joel Joseph, AI Application Engineer. “It’s pretty rare to see that. Most people at other companies collect their paycheck and go. But here, my favorite part is each team’s pure excitement to share the tangible outcomes of their work with newer employees.”

Sharing our developments in real time in front of real users means that it opens the product to critique. We’ve essentially established a live feedback loop that helps us to add new features or fix bugs we didn’t see. Adam has received many helpful suggestions to help push the product: “Some of the greatest ideas come from sharing your work and receiving feedback.”

Alec has also improved in his understanding of the product itself. “Explaining what our products do helps me to build my understanding of the tool to a deeper degree,” he explained. “As we’ve done more of these demos, I’ve realized that it doesn’t feel like a presentation anymore. It’s evolved into a freeform discussion where I can learn more about my user and then paint a picture that is customized to them.”

Keeping the end-users’ needs in mind through every step of the way is a fundamental value at PassiveLogic — it’s something we want to instill in our newer employees from Day 1. Thanks to the collaborative efforts of our teams and the live feedback they receive during the product demos, we build better products.

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If you’re interested in working at PassiveLogic, check out our careers page.