Building an Inclusive Culture of Distributed Ownership

Welcome to Didask's Product and Technical blog! As we launch this space to share our journey, it seems fitting to begin with what's at the heart of our company: not just what we build, but how we work together.

For those just discovering us, Didask is a learning platform that helps organizations create effective learning experiences based on cognitive science principles. We leverage AI to enhance these experiences, always guided by what research tells us about how people truly learn. Behind the technology is a deliberate approach to building a team environment where we all want to work.

When we started working on Didask, we brought with us more than just ideas for a learning platform. Our backgrounds in academic research and involvement with non-profit initiatives focused on educational equity shaped how we wanted to build our company.

Developing a work environment where people experience genuine satisfaction in their daily work—not just finding meaning in outcomes, but enjoying the process itself—has always been important to us. We started Didask because we wanted a workplace where enthusiasm and engagement could coexist with personal balance.

Intellectual rigor combined with genuine care for people is part of our DNA from the beginning. Our work on educational inequalities naturally led us to value openness, evidence-based thinking, and a commitment to making knowledge accessible to everyone. These principles of fairness and inclusion carried over from our academic work into how we structured Didask from the beginning.

As we grow, preserving a workplace where people feel included, autonomous, impactful, and aligned with what we care about, remains a priority. A few years ago, we decided to take a more deliberate approach to how we work together. Drawing inspiration from other organizations, we structured our practices around a central principle: creating an inclusive environment where everyone can have meaningful impact through distributed ownership. This approach became a defining characteristic of our culture.

As we launch this tech blog, I want to share these cultural elements because understanding them helps explain how we work and who tends to thrive in our environment.

Distributed Decision-Making

The foundation of how we work is distributed ownership. In practice, this starts with giving team members significant autonomy when entrusted with projects. Beyond just executing assigned work, everyone is encouraged to identify problems, propose solutions, and implement them without waiting for top-down direction.

This approach requires mutual trust—a belief that everyone is working toward shared goals, regardless of their position or seniority. While giving people both responsibility and authority tends to increase their investment in outcomes, it also creates complexity and occasional tension. Despite these challenges, we've chosen to lean into this approach rather than defaulting to more centralized control.

Transparency as a Foundation

For distributed ownership to function effectively, information must be widely accessible. Our commitment to transparency takes multiple forms. We conduct discussions in public channels and document decisions with their rationales publicly. Even delicate conversations involving disagreements or mistakes happen in the open, with exceptions only for truly personal matters. And instead of relying on meetings, we primarily work through written communication.

This last point is particularly important. As a primarily remote team, defaulting to writing creates a more inclusive environment. Meetings are the exception rather than the rule at Didask. We primarily work through asynchronous discussions in Slack and documentation in Notion. The meetings we do have serve specific purposes: exploring entirely new subjects, fostering team connections, or sharing milestones.

How to make a decision (worst nightmare version)

This written-first, transparent approach helps prevent common workplace dynamics that can limit inclusion. It reduces the advantage of those who are quickest to speak or most comfortable dominating a room. It prevents decisions from being made through private networks or backchannels. It gives those who need time to process information space to contribute meaningfully.

People from diverse backgrounds can participate without insider connections. New team members can quickly understand context and history by accessing past conversations. The reasoning behind decisions becomes visible to anyone, regardless of their position or when they joined.

Our approach to decision-making balances thorough consideration with forward momentum. We debate ideas openly by focusing on substance rather than authority. Once a direction is set, we all work to support it—even those who initially disagreed. This isn't always comfortable, but it leads to clearer direction and a stronger sense of shared purpose.

Honest Feedback and Genuine Care

Our approach to feedback is closely tied to our commitment to transparency. Feedback serves as a tool for improvement, not judgment, which is why it flows in all directions rather than just top-down. Everyone at Didask is encouraged to provide feedback to others, regardless of role or seniority.

The public nature of much of our work naturally creates accountability. When discussions happen in the open, feedback tends to be more substantive and objective—it's harder to make vague or subjective critiques when others can evaluate your reasoning. While this level of transparency has costs (it can be uncomfortable to have your work or ideas critiqued publicly), we believe these costs are outweighed by the benefits of more honest, helpful exchanges.

We aim to make feedback specific, actionable, and focused on impact rather than intent. Finding the balance between directness and empathy isn't always easy, and we continue to work on this balance. Empathy remains central to how we interact with each other—recognizing that behind every piece of work is a person with their own context, challenges, and aspirations.

This empathic approach extends beyond our internal interactions to how we engage with our clients. We believe that truly understanding their needs, challenges, and contexts is essential to providing meaningful solutions. Just as we strive to make our workplace inclusive and supportive, we aim to create products and services that reflect this same care for the people who use them.

Recognizing Different Forms of Impact

This focus on impact extends to how we recognize contributions. We value diverse forms of impact—not just those that come from formal roles. Technical expertise, mentorship, improving processes, maintaining code quality, documenting knowledge, "glue work" that helps teams function smoothly, or contributing to a positive work environment are all valuable forms of impact that we acknowledge.

Our compensation structure reflects this approach, with a transparent salary grid that's accessible to everyone in the company. While the criteria are clear, evaluating impact remains nuanced and contextual rather than a simple formula. This transparency helps reduce some of the inequities that can arise when compensation depends primarily on negotiation skills or background.

Creating this kind of environment requires ongoing attention from everyone. When it works well, it allows us to learn from experiences, adjust our approaches, and grow both individually and as an organization.

Navigating Tensions as We Grow

Maintaining this culture requires continuous attention. We face several persistent challenges as we grow.

Our most significant ongoing effort revolves around balancing high standards with psychological safety. We strive to create an environment where critical thinking and accountability coexist with the space to take risks and learn from mistakes. This means designing systems where feedback can be direct and substantive without creating unhealthy pressure. It also means fostering ownership without generating anxiety.

Other persistent tensions include balancing autonomy with alignment across teams and making decisions efficiently without sacrificing inclusion. As we grow, preserving the transparency that underpins our approach requires increasingly thoughtful systems and practices.

These aren't problems to be solved once and for all. We address them through ongoing dialogue, experimentation, and adjustment, believing that the effort to maintain this balance serves both the quality of our products and the sustainability of our team.

Our commitment to creating a healthy working environment was recently recognized with a second place in the Great Place To Work rankings on our first participation. While this external validation is encouraging, what matters most is ensuring that as we grow, we remain true to our values and continue to be a place where people can do meaningful work without sacrificing their wellbeing.

Technical Excellence in a Collaborative Context

While we place significant emphasis on our culture and how we work together, this doesn't mean we compromise on technical excellence. We hold ourselves to high standards in our work, seeking depth and rigor in our technical solutions. Our approach aims to combine strong domain expertise with thoughtful collaboration, recognizing that building great products requires both technical skill and effective teamwork.

Nerds are most welcome but please check your overengineering at the door

Throughout this blog, we'll be sharing concrete examples of the problems we're working on and how we approach them. Our goal is to illustrate both the technical questions that drive us and the thinking processes behind our solutions. We'll explore not just engineering challenges, but also perspectives on product development, design, and the various disciplines that make up our team—showing not just what we build, but how we collaborate to get there.

Making Space for Different Perspectives

Creating an inclusive environment is essential, but we recognize it's not enough on its own. We also take a proactive approach to building a diverse team. This means deliberately seeking out people with different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives—including those who might not fit the traditional mold for certain roles.

We understand that diversity doesn't happen by accident. It requires challenging our own biases in hiring processes, creating opportunities for people from underrepresented groups, and ensuring that our workplace practices don't inadvertently favor certain types of people over others.

Just as importantly, we recognize that bringing diverse talent into the team is only the beginning. We're committed to providing the support and mentorship needed for everyone to succeed. This means adapting our onboarding, training, and feedback approaches to accommodate different working styles and needs.

Finding Your Place in Our Culture

While we strive to build an inclusive environment where diverse perspectives can thrive, we also recognize that our approach to work isn't universal. Our specific practices and values create a working environment that resonates more strongly with some people than others. We believe this clarity is ultimately more inclusive than trying to be all things to all people—it allows individuals to make informed choices about whether Didask would be a good fit for them.

Here are some traits we’re looking for and that help people thrive in our environment:

• You can engage in written debates on complex topics, maintaining clarity and respect even when disagreements arise—without feeling the need to "take it offline"

• You're allergic to environments where status or persuasiveness trumps evidence and reasoning, and you find satisfaction in both giving and receiving well-articulated explanations

• You have the confidence to gather input, make decisions, and move forward without seeking validation from above

• You're quick to identify improvement opportunities and take initiative without waiting for direction

• You're comfortable having your work and ideas discussed openly by the team

Join Us!

As our team grows, we're looking for people who will naturally connect with this way of working and help us continue to refine it. If the culture described here resonates with you, we'd love to hear from you!