How we work

Three habits that keep a remote team fast

Kestrel Labs is 64 people in 19 countries, building developer tools without a head office. These are the habits that make it work, written down so new joiners can read them on day one.

01

Write it down before you build it

Every project starts as a two-page brief in our handbook: the problem, who has it, and how we will know it is solved. Anyone can comment for 48 hours. After that, the author decides and the brief is frozen.

It sounds slow. In practice it saves the week we used to lose discovering, halfway through, that two teams meant different things by “done”.
- Briefs live next to the code, in plain Markdown
- Every decision is logged with a date and a name
02

Ship small, every day

Changes go out in pieces small enough to review in ten minutes. Last quarter we merged to main 2,814 times and rolled back 19 of those changes, each one in under two minutes.

Small changes make reviews kinder, too. Nobody is asked to approve three weeks of work on a Friday afternoon.
- Feature flags on everything customers can see
- One-click rollback from the deploy log
03

Work from anywhere, meet twice a year

There is no office to come back to. Everyone gets €1,500 to set up a desk at home, and a coworking membership in their own city if they would rather not work from the kitchen.

Twice a year the whole company meets for a week, once in Lisbon and once somewhere new. The one rule for those weeks: no laptops before lunch.
- A €1,500 home-office budget from your first day
- Shared hours from 13:00 to 16:00 UTC, the rest is yours

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