Keeping Humans at the Center of What We Do

We founded Pagos to address a multifaceted question: “how can we make this (gestures wildly) better for everyone in the ecosystem?” Some key words we’ve used to define our approach: awareness, advice, action, and community. 

Why community? Simply put, without people, you don’t have a business. You need people to build, run, and support the business as teammates, vendors, and partners. You need people to like—ideally, love—and appreciate what you do so they want to be (and stay) your customers. We build technology-centric services, but it’s people who drive everything we do.

Community’s a nuanced word, and the interpretation depends on its context:

• Community at its most basic definition is a social unit with a common interest
• Community teams in the tech world oftentimes focus on engagement with an external audience—especially on social media
• Communities can also be used to define and divide between “us” and “them” groups, the underlying assumption being that we’re in a zero sum game

At Pagos, we define Community as an environment of learning and growth for people who make it their business to improve payments, and whose actual businesses could benefit from improving their payments and commerce infrastructure. When you think of community as a both/and construct—one where distinct groups can also overlap in areas of common interest (like payments)—this expands our options for connection and growth beyond linear bounds. In thinking back to the original question of how we can make this better for everyone in the ecosystem, we realize a community with a common interest in improving something can and should be addressed on multiple levels:

• Experience – What backgrounds, identities, and skills we have and need
• Environment – How we build trust and deliver on common goals
• Development – How we learn and grow
• Communication – How we perpetuate learning and growth
• Platforms – Where and how we share knowledge, for whom, and when (more on this in an upcoming post)

Community at Pagos is aligned with our focal areas of awareness, advice, and action to ensure solutions and resources are available to meet people where they are and move them to where they need to go. 

• For teammates at Pagos, this looks like strong documentation practices to ensure we have the context we need to work effectively, Slack channels to ask questions and share knowledge or advice, a default to mutual ​​respect which promotes creativity and innovation, and—especially as we grow—enough structure to keep us accountable to each other
• For customers, this means giving processor agnostic access to payments intelligence insight and tools to improve and manage your payment and commerce infrastructure
• For partners, it’s in creating mutually supportive connections between our services; we can work better and more efficiently by leveraging strengths across the community

The concepts we’re applying to our internal work environment should manifest themselves in our customer and partner relationships. And we’ll assess the accuracy and relevance of them as we grow, adapting as needed. Our current values are:

• Promote understanding
• Build community
• Advocate for growth
• Think positively, creatively, and question existing norms
• Embrace ambiguity: experiment and learn together

We’ve just released birds to illustrate these values and allow teammates to signal (via Slack emoji, etc.) when and where they see our values in action.

If you’re excited by how we’re thinking about building Community at Pagos, we’re hiring and are always open to growing our network of partners/collaborators. Reach out!