Our story

Read on to learn what drives us and what's the vision behind our company.

Why did we start Brains & Beards?

The company was started by two developers: Patryk and Wojtek. They've met years ago working for a big German professional networking site. As it happens pretty often, at some point in our careers they grew tired by the restraints of working in structured organisations and decided to become more independent. After some conversations they've decided they share a lot of ideas and principles, so they teamed up and started Brains & Beards together.

One of those ideas was that we want to help others build better digital products faster. Over the years of working with different organisations on different products, we saw a lot of different teams and gather plenty of experience what works well. We want to share this knowledge by helping our clients not only by delivering great software, but also showing how effective a good team can be.

That's why Brains & Beards is a consultancy.
It lets us focus on constant improvement in the two most important areas.

Building a great team
Our employees are our greatest asset, so we do our best to help them become even better versions of themselves. We treat everybody individually, because every person brings their own perspective and you can never see the full picture without many points of view.
Finding the best workflow
As there are no silver bullets, similarly there are no perfect workflows. Instead, every team figures out their own way of working and that's what we're trying to do - find the best possible way that works for us. We document our processes, standardise common tasks, and define our own way of working. That gives us a possibility of iterative improvement of our ways.

We understand that when building a product it's difficult to decide on tradeoffs between time spent on improving your product and time spent improving your development speed, or smoothing the processes. That's why we want to come and help you with an experienced team that already works great together. This way we can focus 100% on improving your business.

Why remote?

Because remote work is the future
and we like living in the future 🚀

Of course, living in the future is not all unicorns and rainbows and it's often painful. It's like getting an electric car, or a laptop with only USB-C ports. It takes some getting used to and the transition is often annoying, but once you get past the initial pains, you can feel all the benefits.

For people who work remotely the benefits are clear: avoiding the commute to the office leads to lower stress levels, being able to cook your own meal at home and go to the gym (when it's not completely full!) improves overall health, and being able to setup our own perfect work environment allows for maximum productivity. It also allows us as parents to fully enjoy the time with young kids, observing as they grow and learn.

Of course, like everything else in software development, it's a tradeoff. Pair-programming is more difficult, meetings are harder to organise, and you can't just drop by somebody's desk for a quick question. But all of those are just growing pains, they can all be tackled. Remote teams work in asynchronous manner and that means you need to put extra effort to remove any potential roadblocks before they occur and keep clear communication on what we're trying to achieve. As a side effect, this usually results in work that goes smoother and much fewer surprises.

Last thing that makes us excited about the remote work is that it makes it much easier to do deep work. A lot of times, teams which are co-located in an office aren't really more productive, they just seem more productive, because it's much easier to be engaged in so-called shallow work (discussing unimportant details, having meetings, etc.). However, to deliver milestones that actually push the project forward you need deep work: uninterrupted periods of time when you can focus on a single (hard!) problem and get it solved.

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PS. Where does the name come from?

When organisations decide to outsource a project (or parts of it), they're usually looking for one of three things:

Brains

This means trying to find a creative solution from outside of their own culture. For us, it stands for creativity, innovation, and problem-solving.

Beards

A symbol of experience and wisdom. Like Gandalf, or a Shaolin sensei with their stereotypical grey beards, we want to share the knowledge we gained working on many different projects to help deliver the best solution to client's needs.

Hands

This means that an organisation knows what they're doing, knows how to build it, they just need some extra hands to assemble the parts.

We pride ourselves on our intellectual curiosity, so only the first two categories are interesting for us. When you look at Apple's products you'll always find Designed in California. Assembled in China. written somewhere on the back. Apple doesn't consider their products as made in China , because it's only where the hands are. But it's where the brains and the beards are, that matters.

That's how Brains & Beards got its name.