Rocket Tech Handbook

Welcome to Rocket Tech.
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Hello! Thank you for joining us.

The first day at any new job can be a confusing experience. You’ll meet lots of friendly people whose names you will most likely forget. You will be told about laws and benefits that will raise many questions and you may get lost looking for the toilet. The good news is that you will already have a schedule for that day, a nice desk, the hardware you chose and find everybody to be very helpful. It’s possible your first day at Rocket will be the most organized day you will have in your time with us.

Your second day and beyond is much harder to predict. We’ll cover more on the topic of how Rocket’s business model results in engineers working on different projects over time but this might impact what you initially work on. Given the difficulty in aligning projects with your start date, it is possible you won’t have a long term project when you join. You may be placed on short term projects for a little while until you feel like you truly “own” something. The upside is that this gives you a great opportunity to learn about different companies and meet many new people.

If you’re new to Germany, there will be lots of information coming your way, including how we help you settle into a new life in Berlin (such as help with the language and more!).
What is Rocket’s business model?

You may have heard about Rocket’s obsession with efficiency. Of course this is ridiculous and we laugh when we hear such stories. Ha ha ha. However, now you work at Rocket you should know this is not at all ridiculous. Stop laughing immediately as it is inefficient.

Rocket builds internet companies. Our advantage is that we are able to move fast without compromising on quality. We achieve this by using our homegrown mobile & web platforms that help many of our companies get started. These platforms provide useful tools and services but they are also forked and modified to suit the particular needs of the company. After launch, Rocket continues to support these companies with a variety of services such as partnering on recruitment, monitoring of live systems and further engineering work to help scale.

A large number of Rocket companies are created by a small group of people from our office in Berlin working in project teams. Over time, these project teams have learned from success and failure to help them understand how to build a company. Those companies then grow, develop a unique culture, hire their own team to replace the project team and design some fancy t-shirts. Like teenagers, they then move out of the house and into their own place on the road to true independence.

Rocket is fast and exciting, which often results in necessary change to keep pace with our business goals – we consider this a feature, not a bug. It is possible you will work on a project that initially has few users at launch, followed by a project that needs to scale quickly. That transition may happen immediately or may be followed by a short period of work on internal projects to help keep Rocket lean and fast. Again, this is a feature, not a bug.
How we work.
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Rocket is ambitious and has high expectations of delivery and quality but we strive to foster a genuinely happy work environment. Maintaining such an environment is done by you & your colleagues but to help you along, here are some guidelines…
- Try to be available. We need close, cross-functional teams in order to work on difficult problems. This means working in the same place and where possible, at the same time.
- Learn from failure. When things don’t turn out as expected, use it as an opportunity to make Rocket better by sharing what you learn.
- Be data-centric. Awesome and creative ideas are welcome and should be validated with qualitative or quantitative data. If our ideas aren’t as awesome as we think, then we modify or move on. Pride never beats data.
- Be a good neighbor. The people in the next pod might be working on a launch or trying to deal with an unexpected burst of traffic. Be aware of their situation and think about whether they need to hear you on the phone to your mum.
- Assume trust. Trusting the intent and competency of one another is cheaper than a process and more fun. The assumption of trust is a critical part of our hiring strategy and our success.
- Be curious. Occasionally you may not fully understand how all decisions are made but you have faith that everybody is trying to do the right thing with the data they have. If you don’t understand something or disagree, then you should feel comfortable asking.
Everybody should keep these points in mind and team leads should consistently use them as a basis for feedback and hiring. Team leads are not expected to be any smarter than the people on their team but they are expected to give their teams the environment and tools needed to be happy and successful.
What you can expect from Rocket.

There are some things you can expect from Rocket, your manager and your colleagues:
- You will only be evaluated on the quality and impact of your work.
- You will not be asked by your manager to compromise on quality. Having launched over 80 companies and counting, we know cutting quality is always painful in the long run.
- Teams at Rocket use their judgement to employ the tools and methodologies they believe will yield the most success. You will work in the mode that best suits you and your team.
- You will have as few rules and processes imposed on you as possible. Some processes are necessary but we try to avoid those that cater to the lowest common denominator and could damage autonomy.
- You will be allowed to experiment with how you deliver new products. Well-considered experiments are at the heart of Rocket’s success so we aim to provide you the latitude to try new things.
- You will be provided with opportunities to learn and grow. Rocket provides various career paths and you want to learn new, relevant skills. We will try to provide the time and resources to help you develop in the direction that best suits you.
We thought about making a promise to “provide you with every variety of Kellogg’s Toppas breakfast cereal” but that list is actually too important for something so trivial and we cannot control the stock of the local supermarket. But know that we will try…if we remember…which we might not.
Learning & development.
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We try to keep engineers engaged with a variety of new projects, providing time to learn, share skills and mentor other engineers. Engineers who want a raise or a sense of career progression are traditionally pushed into a management role – we want to avoid this as we feel only engineers who really enjoy the science of leading & organizing should pursue a managerial position. Because of this, we run engineering and management as parallel progressive career tracks so you can become a Lead developing people or a principle Engineer guiding technical strategy, depending on your interests.

Although you will learn and improve as a necessity of your role, we want you to seek out new skills to help you grow. With that in mind, you may attend conferences and expense books and relevant courses. Propose what you would like to do with your manager, discuss whether it’s appropriate and affordable, and they’ll help you get set up.

To ensure the spread of knowledge across the many teams at Rocket, we have frequent Chapter meetings. A Chapter is a group of people interested in a particular topic such as “Diversity in Tech,” “Android” or “Code Quality.” They’re great places to learn something new, make important decisions and meet people with whom you may not normally work. If you’re interested in attending, check out the Chapter Directory. If you feel like there’s a missing Chapter you are encouraged to find a few like-minded individuals and start your own.

In addition to covering the cost of many learning resources and running Chapters, we also host frequent internal events called Happy Hours. These include a mixture of Rocket staff with an interesting tech topic, notable external guests and free drinks. We try to encourage as many people as possible to speak at and attend such events, so if you do have a topic you’d like to present - be sure to get in touch with the organizer.

Engineers can propose a project that will benefit Rocket or the wider community, such as a new tool or open source contribution. If you have a worthwhile project with a clear goal in mind you can talk to Ronny to verify it’s a good idea. If he supports you then 20% of your time for up to three months will be scheduled in order to achieve the goal. If your project is open source, take a look at this to help you get started and launched.

For book suggestions, make sure we don’t already have a copy and then speak with your direct manager to add it to our library.
Giving & receiving feedback.

Every few months, your manager (who actually has a real name) will sit with you and discuss how things are going. While this sounds official and intimidating, it just provides an opportunity to record and track your personal development over time. While feedback is ongoing, you may first experience this at the end of your probationary period, six months after joining Rocket.

In order to keep these biannual catch-ups feeling undramatic, discussions will be frequent and multidirectional. You should expect to know if you’re doing a great job or can improve when a pattern is detected, and receive help planning what to do next. It is equally important that you let your manager and colleagues know how they’re doing, too. Releasing information once a year based solely on your manager’s observations seems ridiculous to us. If you leave a six month discussion in a state of utter shock or surprise, then we consider the feedback process to have failed.

If you lead a team, it is your duty to know how everybody on your team is performing and feeling; whether they’re motivated, unmotivated, struggling or kicking ass. You’ll be given guidance by your own manager in how you’re expected to achieve such levels of omniscience. Keep in mind not just the business impact of the individual, but also how that person impacts their colleagues.
Social responsibility.

We believe strongly that we are privileged to have a stable job, a safe work environment and a good income. We organize activities that try to improve the lives of people far less privileged than ourselves and would love for you to take part. You will see emails and posters when such opportunities occur. If you have a good idea of your own, we will help you organize and plan.
Where you work.
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For the sake of this, we’ll assume you work at Rocket Tower in Berlin where project teams and companies span multiple floors. A rough guide to a company’s maturity is how close it is to the front door of the building; closer to the door, more mature.

Given that the location of project teams and companies is so fluid, here’s a more detailed and current guide to some useful locations:
- The 7th floor contains the In-House sys admin team. You will visit the In-House team to collect your equipment on your first day but, for future reference, you can also email them.
- The 14th floor contains Reception/Business Services (known as “Empfang” in German), HR Talent Acquisition, HR Management & Development and HR Finance/Payroll. HR M&D and Payroll are particularly important early on as they will assist you with the paperwork you’ll need to receive pay and benefits.
- The Ground floor contains a portal to the outside world which we jokingly refer to as the “door” because it is a door.
Note: We have an office map on our intranet and each floor has a map somewhere near the main elevators. This is useful when trying to find particular meeting rooms, for example. Speaking of meeting rooms, the name may seem complicated but is easily decoded. An example of how a meeting room may be written is 13-T-III. The first number refers to the floor, the second refers to the building - either Scheibe (the glass covered one) or Turm and the third refers to the specific meeting room. Don’t forget that you can always ask someone if you’re not sure!

Around the office you’ll find lots of fruit, cereals, different types of drinks and kitchens. If you fancy something else, we are situated in the heart of Berlin so there are a lot of restaurants, bars and fast food. You should have no problem refueling.

Keeping the office relatively clean is important. Everybody is expected to pick the trash up off the floor; from the executives to the people we pay to pick the trash up off the floor. When you leave meeting rooms, the next person in the room may be an interview candidate and we don’t want them associating a discarded banana skin with Rocket.

In the event of an evacuation/intra-office apocalypse, you should panic your way down the stairs. Make yourself aware of your nearest fire exit and be sure to practice screaming and waving your arms. Do not use the elevators during an emergency, as they may not be safe or could cease functioning.
Pay.

Once you have a German bank account and a tax ID (which are standards for you to get set up in this country), make sure HR Finance has it on file. You will then get paid around the end of each month. If you have any questions or concerns about your pay, feel free to visit HR Finance, who are located just past reception on the 4th floor.
Data responsibilities
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As a publicly listed company, we are obliged to avoid actual or apparent insider trading. This means not sharing any information you are exposed to for the purposes of buying or selling shares in Rocket or any related companies. While intentionally sharing sensitive information is obviously unacceptable, you should be aware not to do so unintentionally as well. Talking about imminent product launches to somebody from TechCrunch at a party is suboptimal.

The In-House team will provide you with advice on how to keep data safe but it’s worth emphasizing that your laptop’s storage should be encrypted, laptop screen locked behind a secure password when you’re away from your desk, a PIN should be set for your phone and you should use two-factor authentication where available. Be sure to inform the In-House team immediately if you misplace your office door pass, laptop or company phone.
A little bit of Rocket history (by Christian Hardenberg).

My journey with Rocket officially started in 2012 when I joined as CTO. However, I first met the Samwer brothers back in 1999, when they talked to a group of students at my university about how they started Alando in Berlin and sold it to eBay (read more). I was immediately fascinated by their energy and drive to be successful and clearly they were not ready to sit on the beach after earning their first millions with Alando. Next came Jamba (some Rocket employees like Arnt and Julian can tell you stories about it), famously known in Germany for buying almost all free TV advertising slots available. I think it was a pretty amazing achievement to sell a company, whose main product was ringtones, for a whopping $273m. When was the last time someone bought a ringtone?!

After selling Jamba, the Samwers moved into the role of investor for lots of different internet companies, some of them quite well known such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Zynga and MyVideo. But maybe just being an investor got a bit boring after a while… They wanted to be more hands-on again and build more than one company at a time and this is how Rocket Internet was born in 2007.

In the early years Rocket founded companies you might already have heard of like eDarling, Home24 and Zalando. One big success was CityDeal, a company that was sold to Groupon less than six months after founding in return for a 10% stake in Groupon.

With Zalando, we learned how e-commerce worked and it was only a logical step to apply these lessons to other markets like Brazil (Dafiti), Russia (Lamoda), India (Jabong) or South-East Asia (Zalora). We didn’t stop with fashion e-commerce, we went into general merchandise (Lazada, Linio, Jumia), home & living (Westwing) and a lot of other areas.

Over the years we have built a lot of different business models, from financial services (Lendico, Spotcap, Zencap, Payleven, Paymill) to marketplaces (Foodpanda, Foodora, Kaymu, Lyke, Sparklist, Jovago), subscription services (Glossybox, HelloFresh, Helpling) and classifieds models (Lamudi, Carmudi) to mobile on-demand services (Easytaxi, Eatfirst, Zipjet).

Our strategy going forward is to continue to explore new internet business models, launch new companies and build platform technology that allows our companies to be even more successful. If you are new to Rocket, I welcome you aboard for this ride.
Links.

Access to the following links is restricted to Rocket employees:
Glossary.
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Alice & Bob – A custom-built e-commerce system many of our companies use. Alice & Bob have enabled us to get a head start building new products.

Anmelbest… Amenalistaty… Anmeldebestätigung… Whatever – Registration paper. It provides an official recognition of your address and you will need a new one of these each time you change address in Germany. This will be required for opening a bank account and many other types of application forms (e.g. phone contract)… And so the police know where to find you incase you forget to pay for the U-Bahn.

Bürgeramt – The office you must visit in order to register your address and receive your Anmeldebestätigung (the thing above). They also provide many other useful services, such as a German driving license, renewals of German passports, etc. An appointment can be made online or, if you’re desperate, in person.

Chapter – A group of people interested in a similar topic who may work across different teams. They meet regularly to discuss and make decisions on their topic of interest.

Happy Hour – Social gathering that occurs every 2 weeks in the Lounge. It can be an interesting talk from a guest or Rocket employee, a movie night, Q&A session or a general discussion.

Replicon – A time tracking tool. Given many of us work on different projects, potentially for different companies, it is important to understand which companies our time should be “billed” against and where we’re putting our effort. It’s a good idea to save these at the end of each day and you must submit these at the end of each week.

Rockets – Rocket employees are often referred to as “Rockets.” “Rock Stars,” “Rocketeers” or “Astronauts” are probably more appropriate but “Rockets” has already stuck. Deal with it.

Seller Center/Rocket Labs – Rocket Labs builds Seller Center, a white label seller marketplace platform. The correct term for this team is indeed “Rocket Labs,” although people occasionally also refer to the team as “Seller Center.”

SkyRocket – A newer PHP platform that many of our younger companies are now founded upon. Like Alice & Bob, SkyRocket is built at Rocket and provides a lot of important common functionality to help us launch quickly.

Steueridentifikationsnummer (also known as Steuer-ID or IDNr) – The 11-digit number issued to you by the German Tax authorities to administer taxes, etc. You will have this automatically sent to your mailing address within three weeks of successfully registering at the Bürgeramt. This number will never change and is always needed by your employer in order to have the correct tax calculated from your income.

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