2. We believe that nPlan will
positively impact the world that
we live in.
We can only achieve this
through the power of our
incredible team.
You’ll notice our little nPlanaut making
an appearance throughout these slides.
Our mascot represents all of things that make us who we are.
We’re inquisitive and exploratory by nature. We take risks, so that
others will be empowered by our actions. We push boundaries, to
explore the limits of where we can go. It’s exciting, exhilarating,
and it’s a very fun ride.
Our nPlanaut shows up in all sorts of places to remind us of who we
are, what we do and why we do it. An astronaut wouldn’t be
successful without a brilliant team, and we work closely together as
a very strong team of nPlanauts.
3. 100%
Minimal
The percentage of nPlanauts who have remained in full-time
employment, on full pay, during COVID-19.
The repercussions of COVID-19 upon our business.
We have won contracts and onboarded new clients.
We have continued to hire and grow our team.
We have managed to extend our runway and have remained antifragile.
4. Our mission, vision, purpose, and values
The shared goals, aims and values we strive for our work and our workplace.
Our Mission 🚀
Our Vision ✨
Our Purpose ⚡
Our Values ❤
To unlock a trillion dollars of new project value
through data-derived forecasting
To inspire the world to forecast correctly & empower it to
tackle risk
To build a world where ambitions are no longer
limited by our understanding of risk
● Aim high, run fast
● Be radically truthful
● Learn from everything
To put it simply, this is our company goal. Our purpose empowers us to achieve our mission and vision.
Together with our values, it makes up what we refer to as our ‘culture’.
Our vision statement defines where we aspire to be upon achieving
our mission.
5. How we organise our team: chapters and squads
Chapters and squads allow us to deep-dive into topics and projects, but also to pan out and look at the bigger picture. We borrowed some of
these concepts from the Spotify Engineering team, but not all of them.
The structure enables cross-functional relationships. Anyone can follow along with, or request to join, any chapter or squad.
Every nPlanaut is part of both a chapter and at least one (usually only one) squad.
Chapters Squads
Software
Engineering
Data Science Machine Learning
Commercial &
Operations
Squad 1
Purpose: to create predictive capabilities
Squad 2
Purpose: to create powerful technology
Squad 3
Purpose: to empower our customers & users to extract the
highest value
Squad 4
Purpose: to create products that deliver value for our users
Squad 5
Purpose: to create & enable business & operational efficiency
6. We focus on and prioritise what matters most - and we achieve our
ambitious targets
🎯 OKRs
● We set 3-monthly Objectives & Key Results (OKR) cycles to
identify how we can work to achieve ambitious quarterly company
goals and targets.
🚀 Levers
● Levers (or pillars) of success to help us achieve longer-term goals.
For example, we used levers to determine exactly what we
needed o be ready to fundraise.
👟 Sprints
● Squads use weekly sprints to identify priorities and push to
achieve
short-term goals, which influence our success in hitting our OKRs
and levers.
💡 Transparency and visibility
● We have an ‘open-doors’ policy: anyone can join and follow
along on our communication/collaboration platforms, and
can listen in to meetings (unless the subject matter is
confidential, of course!)
● Our co-founders send weekly video updates to highlight and
celebrate wins and make sure that upcoming deadlines are
crystal clear.
● We practice Radical Candor and embed it in our culture and
values.
💭 Retros
● We hold fortnightly all-company retrospectives (retros) on
topics that concern everyone, and make collective decisions
to move forward effectively. Recent topics have included
remote working and communicating client feedback.
7. The percentage of women working at nPlan
Gender inequality is a big topic in the tech world, with just 19% of
UK tech workers identifying as female. At nPlan, we are incredibly
proud of how many fantastically talented women we have on our
team.
Our female nPlanauts hold a wide range of roles, such as Risk &
Planning Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer and Operations &
People Lead.
We hold a monthly ‘Women of nPlan’ event, which is typically
centred around a lunch and/or a discussion topic. And men are, of
course, invited.
45%
8. 19
17
The number of languages we speak
The number of nationalities in our team
English Italian Arabi Portuguese Dutch
Slovak Japanese German Hungarian French
Hindi Russian Czech Mandarin Armenian
Gujarati Spanish Swahili Romanian
British Swiss Peruvian Venezuelan New Zealander
Slovak Kenyan Armenian Australian Taiwanese
Polish Canadian Portuguese Moroccan Romanian
Irish American
We are building a company that’s going to
change the world, with our incredible team
from all over the world.
9. Communication & collaboration
We believe strongly that a remote-first approach fosters creativity and innovation - and empowers our team to be successful.
Remote-first work is here to stay - and we are glad. We use a wide variety of tools and technologies to
support our remote-first approach, supplemented
by best practice guidelines.
Our remote-first approach enables us to be flexible with
how (and where) we work. A combination of synchronous
and asynchronous communication allows us to adapt our
approach to different workflows and requirements.
Information is easily accessible and accurate: decisions
can be quickly made and reviewed. We are empowered
to aim high and run fast, and to learn from everything.
Communication/
Workflow
Software development,
code review
Emails, contracts, files,
presentations
Project Management Process documentation,
intranet
Employee engagement,
OKRs
10. Some of our benefits
● Comprehensive health insurance
● Monthly fitness allowance
● Weekly team lunches
● Regular social events
● Flexible working hours and locations
● Visa sponsorship
Example L&D benefits
● Training - e.g. we funded and supported our Operations & People
Lead, Sarah, through the CIPD Level 5 qualification in HR Management.
● Conferences - e.g. we regularly attend conferences such as ICML and
NeurIPS, and have published at KDD 2020
● Coaching and mentorship - e.g. our active Peer Coaching
programme, where nPlanauts support each others’ growth and
development.
● Extensive lending library
Workplace benefits
We offer some great benefits, and strongly
champion the learning and development of
nPlanauts.
11. Knowledge-sharing is central to who we are, and it is something we will always
care deeply about.
Machine Learning Paper Club Show & Tell Sessions
Our remote-first approach enables us to be flexible with
how (and where) we work. Every week, we hold a Paper
Club where we discuss an academic paper in the
Machine Learning space. Our Paper Club is free and it’s
open to everyone. In two years, our community has
grown to well over 1,400 members.
Every Monday we have an internal all-company meeting,
known as a Show & Tell. We love these!
In Show & Tells, an nPlanaut presents a topic that is
interesting and informative for the team. Recent topics
have included software architecture changes, negotiation
skills, and mental health awareness.
12. Mental health and wellbeing
“Every year, around 1 in 4 adults will
experience a mental health issue.”
It's very important to us to provide tools,
resources (and people!) that can help with
support and guidance if one of our team
experiences mental ill health. We care about
the psychological safety of the workplace, and
are committed to doing everything we can to
support our team.
Mental Health First Aid
Sarah and Natalia are our Mental Health First Aiders: they underwent
training with MHFA England. They can provide first port-of-call help and
support, and recommend tools, guidance and pathways.
Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)
Our Vitality healthcare policy includes a 24/7 EAP, which is a free,
confidential service available to nPlanauts to support their emotional
health and wellbeing.
Headspace
Every morning, we host a guided Headspace meditation session that
all nPlanauts are welcome to join.
Internal Resources
In addition to the above, we have an open-access resource list where all
nPlanauts can add and access mental health resources such as books,
podcasts, TV shows and helplines.
13. A brief history of nPlan
We’ve accomplished a huge amount since nPlan’s inception in
November 2017, from growing our team to landing huge client
contracts, raising our Seed Round, and bonding closely as a
group of colleagues and friends along the way.
We don’t want to forget our journey so far - or how we started -
so we created a Brief History of nPlan as an internal resource.
This helps us reflect on all the awesome (and fun!) things we
have done, and it’s a really useful way for new starters to
understand how we’ve evolved to where we are today. We add
to this every month.
We supplement this with our individual User Guides, which
detail how we work best, our motivations and interests, fun facts
and how we want to develop our skills over the next 6 months.
14. Yearly company retreat
We run a mixture of work-related and just-for-fun events, as well as our annual Company Retreat. These help to unite us as a team, forge deep
relationships with one another… and share/develop interests and hobbies along the way!
In 2019, we took the company to Somerset for our annual retreat (our 2020
retreat is coming up shortly!)
We were invited to a behind-the-scenes tour of the construction site of Hinkley
Point C nuclear power station, where we learned from planners and senior
managers about some of the challenges faced in the planning and execution of
a project on such a massive scale.
We workshopped and reviewed our company purpose and values, and
developed plans for the following year. We also did a whole heap of fun stuff:
we trekked with alpacas, made our own gin, had some great BBQs and honed
our archery skills..
15. Team events and activities
We run a mixture of work-related and just-for-fun events, as well as our annual Company Retreat. These help to unite us as a team, forge deep
relationships with one another… and share/develop interests and hobbies along the way!
Our regular events include team workouts, Friday after-work drinks, board
game sessions and book club, to name a few.
We hold frequent one-off events and activities, typically in-person but we’ve
had to get creative during COVID! In-person activities have included escape
rooms and murder mysteries, remote activities have included bake-off
competitions and quizzes.
