Located in the industrial, urban space of the TAXI community in Denver’s RiNo Art District, Tack Mobile designs and builds software for mobile and connected devices. With an impressive portfolio of clients and employees, Tack offers a work culture that is open and intellectually stimulating. Read on to learn more about the team and how they’ve used Kin to improve their employee reviews.
Who are you, what’s your role, and your favorite hand-held food?
[JM] My name is John Myers, and I’m the President of Tack Mobile. My favorite food is Mochi, with or without ice cream in the middle.
What’s the story of Tack Mobile?
[JM] Tack Mobile was founded at the end of 2011 in Denver. We’re a client services company focused on software development for mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, and other connected devices). We place an emphasis on user experience design, and ensuring the server-side services behind the scenes that make the magic happen are well integrated as part of the larger solution. Most of our 20-something staff is here in our main office in Denver. We have one developer who spends part of the year in Dublin.
Tack Mobile also owns a coworking space in Denver called Assembly, and we enjoy meeting new like-minded folks there. It’s a good way to stay engaged in the community and another excuse to host happy hours and bake-offs.
What’s great about working at Tack?
[JM] I believe the greatest thing about working for any company should be your coworkers, so many of the decisions we make are around team happiness and recruiting.
During our new office build out last year, we attempted our own take on something of a mash up of the Dropbox office and Facebook’s Menlo Park offices. Our space is much smaller than either of those, but we ended up with something better than we could have reasonably expected and we were excited to have it featured recently in Offscreen magazine. No one has a private office here, we have lots of plants and natural light, everyone has electric sit-stand desks, and we have some typical startup-type amenities such as snacks and a gym.
Please share some insight into Tack’s approach to employee and workplace operations. How has Kin played a role?
[JM] We try not to be arbitrary about anything, or do anything because that’s the way it was done yesterday. It’s a balance of providing process support and rigidity where it’s helpful or necessary, and having the confidence that things will work out when people are given the freedom to do the right thing. Iteration is good and inevitable.
I don’t think is controversial to say the biggest determiner of the success of any company are the people that work there, I’d extend that to include how well they work together. We’ve learned someone who might be a great contributor working in isolation but struggles for whatever reason in a team environment isn’t a fit with us; just about everything we do is done as part of a team. There’s a great book on working on technical teams called “Team Geek,” and the authors discuss the importance of humility, respect, and trust in a team environment. They are core to our philosophy.
“KinHR helps with those administrative tasks that sound simple, but aren’t, like onboarding and time off requests. Now that our team has gotten used to it, I can’t see ever going back to emails, shared folders, and spreadsheets.”
We began using KinHR to help improve and facilitate some existing processes we had, and formalize and better document some others. Possibly most significantly, while most people don’t like to be micromanaged, we’ve found people do like to be closely guided with their career path and want candid and structured feedback. The objectives and reviews process in KinHR helps us do this in a lightweight and reliable way and is better implemented than in any of the other tools we evaluated.
Anything notable going on lately?
[JM] While it’s not all we do, we’ve recently started to become a go-to agency for home automation, internet of things, and connected device manufacturers. We’ve always been interested in small screen, resource constrained devices, so this is a natural fit for us.
We’re currently hiring mobile software developers, including iOS and Android. We’ve been discussing having a physical office in San Francisco recently, and we’re interested in talking with developers both in Denver and San Francisco.