Design cultures don’t eat design breakfast

In organisation talk, you can’t avoid the word culture. 

As Webster puts it:
“[Culture is] the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization.”

In business talk, culture practically means what a company is like. You know, besides making profit. How it behaves, what its core values are and so forth. More often than not, defining culture is like coming up with a blueprint for a car someone else already built.

Nothing wrong with that but it just sounds so… vain.

Rather than describing a genuine culture of a company, the average culture manifesto just sounds like plain employer branding. An office with a chilled-out atmosphere and a flat organization fixed on making the world a better place has a nice vibe to it, sure.

But is it based on anything real? Well, you be the judge.

Let’s take Wolt as our example. As you might have heard, we are looking for a Senior Designer to join us.

We want to get the word out there. But there is one big problem with putting too much emphasis into culture talk. You guessed it by now, we are not fans of empty talk.

Coming up with a blanket description of our behavior is simply impossible. No matter how big of a Keynote presentation we create for you.

Besides, in the madness that is the job market, insecurity often is louder than confidence. 

Walk it, don’t talk it

Here’s a quick test. Try to describe yourself as a person. In text. For example, with five bullets or a short paragraph.

Maybe you are talkative as a person? Introverted? Intelligent? Loud? Superficial? No matter your personality traits, write it down. Really workshop that thing.

See? It gets hard. And weird. The odds are, no matter how honest you try to be, a list of bullets simply won’t do justice to who you are as a person.

Now try that with an organization of 101 professionals. Exactly.

It’s hard. And useless. Anyone can come up with pretty words.

We believe Wolt is a great place to work. That’s all we can say. Feel free to ask anyone working here!

To grow and hire the best talents out there, we need to talk. But we need to talk work; what working as a Wolt designer is like. When you get the best idea about the open position and – even better – decide to apply, we all win.

So let’s try, shall we?

Seeing the people in action always conveys a better idea of the job than a meaningless pulp of overblown jargon.

This goes for all designers who want to work with us, too. Show us what you’ve done (all materials are treated confidentially) and what you are good at. Of course we’d like to hear about your future hopes and dreams. We’ll make sure to see if we can make it happen. Well at least job-wise.

Design as a job

To shed some light to the way we design things, let’s talk about focus. 

Wolt should be the world’s best interface for great food. With a world-class design in its very core.

Because, in product design, there are no small things. And to succeed in designing the very best, all pointless noise must go. As a part of Wolt’s design team, you will always have someone to give you their input and support when needed. We can’t overemphasize the importance of focusing on the design task at hand.

Instead of juggling ten projects, our designers get to stick to what’s really important. In my experience, this is the best way to become a better designer too.

Working on a single project doesn’t mean things are easy. Far from it. And some projects simply have the decency to branch out to smaller parts. That’s life.

But still, at Wolt, the majority of a designer’s work is in design. By a wide margin. Your job is to design. Our job is to make sure that it really is design you work with. Not lunging around trying to keep a hallway full of plates spinning.

And don’t worry, Wolt is made of people. Talented folks who work hard to create the very best in the business.

So, Designer. Are you interested in working with us? Wondering what to do during the next few years? If working among talented people with design in their focus rocks your boat, apply now.