Building Mapbox Mobile
This week’s official launch of Mapbox Mobile was the culmination of a lot of hard wark done by a dedicated team of people distributed around the globe. The end product is amazing (seriously you gotta play with this) with an equally impressive tech list, but the real story is how we pulled this all off working together as a unified team.
This project certainly wasn’t anyone’s first rodeo, but it did come with a lot of unkowns. Mapbox is a growing company which means new people coming on board and everyone working with people that they may not have worked with (or even met) before. There were also A LOT of moving tech pieces that many hadn’t worked with before nor we even knew we needed until we got into the project. Finally, did I mention that the team was distributed across 5 countries and 6 different timezones?
So how’d we pull this off? In a word: culture. I’ve never been on a team that consistenty practices empathy, understanding for one another, openness, trust, and patience the way Mapbox does. Everybody on the team is it together and is there to support each other. Whether that means helping someone understand new technology, being there to talk through an issue, asking questions, or even rearranging their work times to be available for others the members of the team consistently do this because they want to see not only the project succeed, but also their colleagues succeed.