Putting writing at the heart of teamwork: how Lunchr executes fast

Launched a little over a year ago, Lunchr is revolutionizing the way we have lunch every day in France. It's bringing meal vouching systems to the 21st century with a product benefitting both restaurants and clients. They've witnessed massive internal changes in the past year and it's not slowing down in 2018: they're looking for 40 new team members.

We got to talk with Romain, VP Marketing, about:

• How they built their 35-people distributed team
• Why they value the power of written collaborative culture
• How they use Slite

The influence of a written culture: how it shapes their teamwork pillars
Romain joined Lunchr before the team boomed and before they ever started using Slite. The company was way different: it was a very small team plus lots of freelance developers. The aim was to go to market as fast as possible and launch the app quickly. Only once the app was up and running and their business model starting to prove itself did they start hiring a bigger team.

Today, the team of 35 is distributed across Paris, Montpellier and other remote places in France. It will nearly double by the end of the year.

“We've had the habit of writing things down in a concise and clear manner from the beginning at Lunchr” — Romain Libeau, VP Marketing at Lunchr

As they scale, so do their values. There's one that's stuck with them from the start: "We've always had the habit of writing things down in a concise and clear manner," Romain told me. This habit has evolved into overarching principles at Lunchr:

• Transparency: everything should be readable and accessible
• Ownership: everyone should take responsibility of a topic and document it for others
• Minimal meetings policy: meetings should be small and well-prepared

And overall, these three values are guided by one of their mottos: "execute fast".

Finding the right writing tool: how they use Slite to encourage this team culture

Before finding Slite, they'd log their written content in Slack but as soon as they grew to over ten people, it became problematic to keep track of information in threads. They also logged some content in Google Docs but they "always felt organizing docs in Drive is chaotic," Romain admits.

As a team that always valued the importance of writing, they still hadn't found the right place to organize it and make it easily retrievable. Romain felt their content organization pain would worsen as their team grew—that's when he stumbled upon Slite.

“We were losing information in Slack threads and felt that organizing in Drive was chaotic. It's much eaiser to write and organize in Slite” — Romain Libeau, VP Marketing at Lunchr

The ease of retrieving information was the reason they tried Slite out but the editor is what convinced the whole team: the minimalist, note, format is totally in line with their concise, straight to the point writing and the developers love that they can add code snippets.

At first, they started by storing all meeting notes in Slite and soon expanded their use case by creating channels for every department: Marketing, Product, HR...

Spotlight on their best practices

• Sprint notes and documents
  They work in one-week sprints and use checkboxes in their sprint retrospective meetings to keep track of the goals they hit or miss.
• Channels for every department to document
  from Marketing, to Product, to HR, to Customer Success.‍
• Onboarding channel
  ‍All important docs in one place for every new hire
• They document their API for their partners in a public Slite doc