As part of my onboarding process after joining Thorgate, I was asked to add my “Why” to a trello board shared within the company. This is a standard onboarding process at Thorgate where the new person gets to add a little something about themselves for the team to see and can also see everything everyone before them added when they joined. I knew immediately that this was somehow related to Simon Sinek’s famous talk on how everyone and every company should “start with why”. Personally, I was amazed to see that there’s a company that has deliberately put the ‘start-with-why’ ideology at the core of their culture. So I continued reading the ‘why’ of each of my colleagues that was added there, and this demonstrated to me how mission driven the company is. 
This takes me back to my decision of joining Thorgate. I have been working as a project manager most of my life and my last job was at one of the biggest digital transformation companies in Estonia that has international reach. I was really looking forward to moving on from the project management side towards a more customer facing role. This is when I came across an opportunity at Thorgate as a key account manager in healthtech to help build and sustain customer relations within the healthtech industry. While the role seemed like something I was looking for, the deciding factor was definitely the company culture for me. During the very first screening calls I could sense that a culture fit was very important in recruiting at Thorgate. Therefore, before I even joined the team I was asked to have calls with many different people in the team which helped me evaluate what the culture was like and also helped them gauge a fit.
I have really enjoyed the passion my team carries towards creating products that can make a world-changing impact. During a 1-on-1 meeting with one of the developers at Thorgate, he said that he’d like to work on projects that truly make people’s lives better. So, within the very first week of my onboarding I felt very secure to be working with people who wanted to create a positive impact with the work they did.
In other meetings, I found out a few important things that make Thorgate a very unique place to work. For instance, the focus when any new project starts is never B2C or B2B, instead the perspective is to look at any digital product as H2H - human2human. This creates a very unique foundation to how product development is done at Thorgate and how everybody tries to solve any problem at hand.
At Thorgate we say our vision is to ‘change the world with technology’ and for me this vision is very well-connected to the fact that we create people-centric, H2H products. An example of this in my team is Nordic Braintech. It is a very ambitious project where we help develop easy-to-use and scientifically proven technology to help people predict and prevent brain disorders. Our entire focus (in line with the client’s focus) is to create an easy-to-use product that is accessible to anyone to prevent outbursts and reduce pain to improve people's health and increase quality of life for patients with brain disorders.
Besides our H2H approach, I also really like how smooth the remote work/hybrid culture is at Thorgate. The discipline in maintaining good communication is very high. Thorgate has created the right daily rituals to keep up work productivity and have optimal communication which has been essential in the current situation. This is why the team is dedicated to what they do regardless of the changing external solution during the pandemic.
Interestingly, we have a documented version of what the culture is like at Thorgate, how we manage and steer it and obviously ‘why’ it is so important to the team. If you want to read more about that, you can access the Thorgate culture book here.
I am glad amid all this I am able to help the company find new opportunities especially in healthcare and solve crucial problems with digital solutions.
Read related articles:
People Development at Thorgate
How Thorgate built a culture that makes people thrive
Thorgate's culture while working remotely
