Michael Grosser was given an opportunity many tech leaders never get when he joined Neighborhoods.com in April 2015. The fast-growing tech startup’s new vice president of engineering was responsible for building a tech team from the ground up.
Given a blank slate upon which to build team culture, Grosser had a pretty good idea of what he didn’t want.
"One thing you’ll find at a lot of engineering operations is the ‘brilliant jerk,’” Grosser said. “This person is great at writing software but terrible at interacting with humans. We’re careful not to hire that person. We’ll pass on a really strong technical fit if they’re going to bog down the team and be destructive to culture.”
Neighborhoods.com is a real estate and neighborhood discovery platform. In addition to browsing for houses, users can get information on neighborhoods, including ratings of nearby schools and information about local businesses and restaurants.
The startup works with various data sources, from public records to third-party vendors and real estate companies, to populate Neighborhoods with information. Grosser said managing this data and keeping it in-sync presents an interesting challenge for his team.
When Grosser joined the startup, he was the 17th employee. Now the engineering team alone counts 22 members.
Grosser said he sought to build a culture based on mutual respect and continued growth — whether that means learning a new role, mastering a current one or expanding one’s skill sets. To Grosser, one of the best ways to help engineers grow is by setting goals. He meets with each team member twice a year to learn how the company can help them achieve their professional and personal goals.
“If someone wants to get DevOps experience, we’ll give them the chance to work with tools like Ansible or Docker,” Grosser said. “We’ve had front-end developers who wanted more full-stack experience, so they got the chance to complete tasks on the back end.”
As for personal growth, Grosser said, his goal is to do what he can to make it happen.
“If you want to get better at rock climbing, we won’t hire you an instructor,” he said. “But we will work with your schedule so that you get to class on time.”
Grosser’s goal for Neighborhoods.com is to become the authoritative source of information on neighborhoods across the country. Projects on the team’s plate include reworking the site’s UI to create a more robust map-based experience and building new features to present even more data about a neighborhood.
The startup expects its tech team to add another 10 to 20 people over the next year, and is looking for engineers versed in creative problem solving who value teamwork and collaboration.
“People looking for a bunch of tickets to bang out aren’t good fits for us,” Grosser said. “We’re trying to do some things in the real estate space no one really has a template for.”
Images via Neighborhoods.com.
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