Could Our Leadership
And Culture Work For You?

Since 2013, we have been studying and borrowing the best practices in modern leadership and culture. Through trial and error, we have distilled and adjusted those learnings into routines that work for Smartly.io.

Although those routines will never be 100% perfect or ready, we believe they're worth sharing – for you to borrow a learning or two from us in turn.

Smartly.io Leadership Handbook

Modern leadership requires constant iteration: it changes as we learn and grow as a company. Still, some routines are worth establishing and scaling within the organisation. One of them is to help others grow by sharing useful learnings.

Walking the talk on the latter, here's our take on modern leadership. This 66-pager is our best shot at capturing how we aspire to lead and be led at Smartly.io.

Take a look and see if there are ideas you'd like to borrow!

"Every leader's fundamental responsibility is to
ensure that the team produces results that solve customers' problems
and take us towards our strategic goals and our vision."

Kristo Ovaska, Founder & CEO at Smartly.io

Our Leadership Principles

Nurture Trust

Be consistent in decision and actions, keep decision-making transparent and explain why.

Create Direction and Clarity

Understand your team's role in executing Smartly's strategy, creating success in practice and communicate it to your team regularly.

Emphasize Action

Foster our culture of moving fast, iterating and learning to deliver the best outcomes.

Hold Accountable

Monitor progress and intervene if necessary.

Help Others Grow

Enable your team members to exceed themselves in their roles.

Lead by Example

Walk the talk, make our values come alive every day and keep improving.

Smartly.io Culture Handbook

The secret sauce of our growth has always been our culture. It defines how we aspire to build our product, whom we hire and reward, and how we work towards a shared vision. In short, our culture is why our customers and employees choose us and stay with us.

Capturing culture between the covers is impossible. Yet trying to do it has helped us learn and get on the same page (or 41 pages) as a company. And while sharing the outcome hopefully helps others learn a thing or two, it certainly helps us stay humble and progressive with our culture.

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"We're all extremely motivated to build our future
– developing the best product and service for our customers, and building
the best company for our people."

Tuomo Riekki, Smartly.io Founder & CPO

Our Values

Hungry Humble Hunters

We’re humble yet ambitious to become the best in what we do. We’re hungry to win—we experiment relentlessly and make bold decisions to stay ahead of the curve.

Build Trust

Trust is the cornerstone of any successful team and a must for fast decision-making and candid feedback. We build trust by holding ourselves and each other accountable for our actions and decisions. If trust is broken, we go out of our way to restore it.

Take Ownership

Nothing is someone else’s problem—we act as owners and work towards common goals as one big team. We optimize for the success of the whole company, not just our own.

Work Smartly

We make decisions nimbly, automate manual work, and execute with speed as a habit. Working smarter, not harder, allows us to take care of our wellbeing and productivity in the long run.

Maximize Learning

We learn fastest by boldly going for the biggest challenges — if we fail, we make sure to learn from it, teach others, and set the bar even higher on the next try. We champion radically candid feedback to help each other improve.

Think Customer First

All our decisions are inspired by providing long-term value to our customers. We understand their needs by working closely with them and collaborate across teams and functions to solve their trickiest problems.