A few weeks ago while reflecting on how Cariloop had approached engineering since I joined, I wrote out our current engineering strategy. The first strategy was inspired by our Company mission “To help relieve the stress and anxiety felt by all caregivers.” We know our members come to Cariloop stressed because they tell us they are overwhelmingly in their onboarding. Our members are often experiencing the most anxiety-inducing moments of their lives and they are asking for help. They need childcare so they can get to work, they want help navigating a cancer diagnosis of a loved one, or they have to move their parent into a nursing home and need help from a coach. They aren’t here to play Candy Crush.
That led to a guiding principle: “Don’t introduce more stress.”
Beyond the clever headline, I thought about what decisions that has driven and will drive in our org. It meant making sure the user experience felt polished and snappy. We know slow websites or wonky ui frustrate users. They rage-click on elements, they end up on the wrong part of the site, or they simply leave. Research shows a 2-second delay can increase a bounce rate by 50%, that’s a frustrated user who won’t get the help they need.
It meant meeting the user where they are – being accessible, being available in the user’s language, and supporting many different device sizes. Users shouldn’t have to take on extra mental load or be locked out of getting access to our platform.
It meant we aren’t tolerant of bugs. We needed to have a strong base of automated testing and a strong deployment. When things do go wrong, we have an easy and fast way to rollback which can take less than a minute to execute. Ideally, when an engineer on our team has to make a decision where they are trading off the things above, it should feel like the exception not the rule.