One of the many things I enjoy about my time here at Cogent is the culture of listening we have. It’s a rare thing, and being here for almost 8 years now, a thing I sometimes take for granted.
What’s a ‘listening culture’? Well, it’s rare, but, a listening culture is one that involves saying less in order to understand more.
The more you understand about a problem, the better you’ll solve it. That approach, underpinned by trust in transparency as a common value, runs through every vein of our business – the way we build products, grow people and businesses, and even, deciding what we sell.
If our recent cultureamp results are anything to go by, Cogent does culture well. We have (and continue to attract) a growing group of lovely people who are experts in their field – whether that’s product management, design, or development. We’ve been doing this for over a decade, with hundreds of customers, so we like to think we know what’s needed to do it well. Culture, after all, underpins how successfully teams can work together. And what benefits from teams working well together? Scaling businesses.
A people-first approach to scaling
At Cogent, we’ve helped businesses grow from pre-seed to scale-up and beyond. We’ve partnered with founders, and even founded businesses ourselves. We know what it takes to grow a business at each of those critical early stages. And, instead of keeping that to ourselves, we’ve done what Cogent does best, created something so scaling business can benefit. Why? Because we’ve listened to them and now understand the common problems they face when they’re trying to grow.
Introducing Ways of Working Reviews
Scaling businesses can be…tricky. If you have a single product team, or even a few teams, it’s usually pretty easy to keep things in sync — to make sure everyone is working on the right thing, at the right time. But when you start to scale, these foundations can come under pressure.
To get to where you’re going next, you’ll likely need a different approach than the one that got you this far. As you know better than anyone, it takes different techniques, processes, cultures and roles to scale effectively.
The purpose of a Ways of Working Review is to enable your teams to produce great work that takes your business from where it is today, to where you want it to be. We’ll take stock of your current landscape, and share insights to help you work out what’s causing the challenges you’re seeing now, and how best to overcome them.
We’ll openly share our knowledge and experience, suggesting new processes and practices to help your teams become more productive and ensure your product is more likely to succeed long after we’re involved.
At the end of the Ways of Working Review, you’ll have defined recommendations to create high-functioning product teams shipping valuable work. You’ll know how to keep empowered, motivated employees all working towards a common goal.
