Onboarding Manual

Welcome! You’ve elected to join a dynamic, ambitious, and slightly odd collection of researchers, data scientists, and eternally curious people. On behalf of the entire team, we are elated to welcome you.

This manual is an attempt to equip you with the context and tools you will need to be successful at Gradient. As a firm that has been distributed from Day 1, we strive to have extensive high-quality documentation of everything we do. This means that your first few days at Gradient will be less sitting around a conference room during hours of HR orientation, and more getting familiar on your terms with the Gradient research process.

That said, you are far from alone! We want you to interrogate us over everything you read, see, and hear. Please use comment threads liberally, schedule some time to talk, Slack individuals or entire channels, ask to join meetings you see on our calendars until you get the clarity you need.

We are all invested in your success and hope that this manual is the first step at preparing you for a fulfilling career at Gradient.

– The Gradient Team

At Gradient, we’re still inventing our story day by day, but a short chapter has already been written. We often discuss internally about our purpose and vision for the company, and we decided it became time to write down a few things about how we got to where we are today. Our history is core to our purpose, our values, and ultimately our operating principles.

If you’re interested in the story behind Gradient, feel free to take a stroll through Tom’s About Gradient page. When you’re done reading it, add your personal entry to the Our Team section.

In keeping with the origin theme, you probably noticed our website is gradientmetrics.com but we refer to ourselves as Gradient. Gradient Metrics was necessary for registration and differentiation as we started building the company, but at our core we’ve always been Gradient. You will occasionally see Gradient Metrics on legal documents, but in all your communications please only refer to us as Gradient, both internally and externally.

We try our damndest to be principled in our decision making. To this end, we crafted 12 principles that every Gradient team member should strive to uphold. Consider this the Gradient Bill of Rights.

Gradient Leaders (which is everyone, including you):

1. Are honest and integral to a fault
2. Do more with less
3. Think win-win
4. Prove themselves wrong
5. Are obsessed with constant improvement
6. Collaborate and communicate extremely well
7. Deliver results, not work
8. Take care of each other
9. Self-Manage
10. Investigate deeply
11. Are ambitious risk takers
12. Take ownership of dependencies that they rely on to be successful

You’ll see some of these principles put into practice through codified processes like kaizen (Principle #5) and others through our mindset.