Smartly
What's the Company Culture Like at Smartly?
Frequently Asked Questions
The culture at Smartly is growth-minded, international and collaborative. The company brings together employees from more than 60 nationalities in a hybrid environment built on trust, transparency and feedback, and it gives people flexibility in how they work while still creating intentional time for in-person connection. Smartly pairs that flexibility with a strong sense of community through shared team gatherings, employee resource groups and regular opportunities for employees to speak up and help shape the workplace.
Smartly is also a high-performance environment that invests in learning and internal mobility. Clear expectations, transparent promotion criteria and stretch opportunities create a culture where growth is visible and earned through impact. Employees are encouraged to keep developing, whether that means building AI expertise, moving across roles, taking on new challenges or even rotating to offices around the world. The result is a culture that is ambitious and fast-moving, while still feeling supportive, inclusive and deeply people-centered.
Teams at Smartly operate in a highly integrated and unified environment, where cross-functional (XFN) collaboration is considered a "symphony of success". The company prioritizes a "One Team" approach, particularly within its commercial and go-to-market functions, to ensure a consistent experience for both employees and customers.
Core Collaboration Frameworks:
-One Commercial Team: To eliminate silos, the Customer Success, Sales, and Marketing teams are structured as a single, unified organization. This ensures that everyone—from those finding new prospects to those managing existing relationships—is aligned on the same growth goals.
-XFN Squads and Teams: In Product Development, the basic building block is an agile team. These autonomous "squads" include backend and frontend engineers, full-stack developers, product managers, and designers. They own a specific area of the platform and work together from prototype to production.
-Radical Candor: Collaboration is underpinned by a culture of trust, transparency, and direct feedback. Employees are encouraged to provide "radically candid" feedback to help one another improve and solve complex challenges.
Practical Ways of Working:
-Internal Alignment Tools: Collaboration extends beyond internal teams, using centralized trackers and shared Slack channels, to manage projects and launches. Regular structured syncs and "Daily Structured Updates" are used to maintain visibility across stakeholders.
-Weekly All-Hands & Showcases: Teams participate in weekly vertical all-hands meetings and company-wide work showcases. These sessions are used for knowledge sharing—such as utilizing AI in workflows—and to align on pacing and opportunities
-In-Person "Fikas" and Offsites: Despite having a global presence across 17 offices, Smartly emphasizes intentional in-person connection. This includes "Fikas" (Swedish-style coffee breaks) to connect counterparts across different companies and team offsites for planning and personality mapping
Smartly recognizes employees' work through visible impact, value-based awards, peer appreciation, structured growth, and performance-based rewards. Recognition is closely tied to Smartly’s culture of ownership, collaboration, client impact, scalability, and trust.
Recognition through ownership and impact: Employees are recognized when they Own the Outcome by taking accountability for meaningful work and delivering measurable results. Strong performance is not only about completing tasks, but also about creating impact for customers, teams, and the business.
Recognition through Smartly Awards: Smartly celebrates individuals and teams through formal recognition programs, including the annual Smartly Awards. Team awards such as The Golden Frog recognize cross-functional collaboration and major business achievements, while individual awards such as The Purple Koi highlight behaviors connected to Smartly Values.
Recognition through peer appreciation: Smartly encourages everyday recognition through Smartly Recognize, a global peer-to-peer appreciation platform where employees can publicly shout out colleagues and award points that can be redeemed for rewards. Milestone awards also celebrate personal and professional moments such as Smartly anniversaries, birthdays, marriages, and family additions.
Recognition through growth and advancement: Smartly recognizes strong performance through clear, evidence-based development and promotion processes. During Performance & Development rounds, employees are evaluated on both results and how they demonstrate Smartly Values, with advancement tied to concrete examples of impact.
Recognition through bonuses: Smartly also uses monetary recognition, including spot bonuses, impact bonuses, merit increases, equity, and special awards such as the CEO Award. These rewards recognize exceptional work, strong value alignment, and contributions that go above and beyond expectations
Overall, Smartly recognizes employee work by combining everyday appreciation with formal awards, career growth, and performance-based rewards. The recognition culture reinforces what Smartly values most: ownership, scalable impact, collaboration, customer focus, and trust.
Smartly Employee Perspectives
What are some of the growth opportunities available to you and your colleagues?
We pride ourselves on being a high-mobility organization, which means we aim for 33 percent of the roles that become available to be filled by internal talent. This means we are able to be a growth-led employer where employees can go through various cycles.
We do not believe in retention alone. It is an idle state where you are inadvertently suggesting the best you can do is hold on to an employee. Instead, through various development programs, stretch projects and an always-on approach to innovation, our intention is to provide a culture which inspires people to do their best work.
Outside of internal mobility, we provide a pretty broad learning and development agenda while also working with external speakers to come in and share their learning journeys.
How does a focus on growth boost morale?
We firmly believe that a high-performance growth-led approach was integral to our ability to reshape our whole go-to-market narrative as a company. The world of paid social and advertising has changed a great deal over the last 10 years. We needed to reimagine and renew our platform to connect better with our customers and transform the advertising experience.
The collaboration and focus on the art of the possible was invigorating for the organization, resulting not only in an upgraded platform but better companywide engagement. It encouraged people to think differently and stretch themselves. That is what adopting a growth mindset as a company can do. It becomes your biggest weapon and enabler in driving positive change for your customers and your people.
From an employee perspective, what advice would you give to employers interested in bolstering their growth opportunities? What are some initiatives that either work well or fall flat?
Be authentic and work from a solid base. You won’t be able to fix everything overnight, but listening to your people and actioning things that make things better makes the culture real.
Initiatives that are grounded in this philosophy will work well. For instance, with our employee voice survey, we decided we were going to be more intentional about how we communicate company strategy — including the frequency, which has had a positive impact in the last six months.
With that, consistency is key and sometimes you have to stay the course. Employees won’t always respond the way you hoped the first time as they wait to see whether the changes are real. Celebrate progress, big or small, and be as inclusive as you can with this as it encourages people to continue to grow.
Remember the benefit of growing and enabling your own people will often vastly exceed fixating on what you don’t have. Most companies have tremendous talent that wants to do well and make the next step up. We just have to create a culture where it is possible for them to realize their full potential.
Smartly Employee Reviews
What People Are Saying About Smartly
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Collaborative & Supportive Culture: Colleagues are often seen as talented, warm, and helpful, with teams rallying around problem‑solving and cross‑functional collaboration. Feedback suggests day‑to‑day interactions feel respectful and supportive, making teamwork a bright spot even when broader sentiment is mixed.
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Learning & Knowledge Sharing: Opportunities to take ownership of complex ad‑tech problems and steep learning curves are frequently highlighted. Company materials and employee quotes point to stretch projects, internal mobility aims, and knowledge‑sharing norms that enable growth.
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Healthy Workload & Retention: Hybrid/remote options and generous time‑off and wellness practices are noted as meaningful for work–life balance. Benefits and flexibility appear to support retention for some roles, even as experiences vary by team.
Smartly's Benefits
Established employee awards to honor work and contributions
Quarterly engagement surveys to gauge employee satisfaction
Flexibility provided during personal challenges
Has employee-led culture committees
Managers trained on identifying and mitigating employee burnout
Offers an Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
Offers company-sponsored happy hours
Offers company-sponsored outings
Global, regional and team
Offers Employee Resource Groups
Offers fitness stipend
Health & Wellness benefit monthly
Offers team workouts
From yoga, to football to going to the gym
Offers wellness initiatives designed to combat burnout and mental fatigue
Offers wellness programs
Provides employees with ability to schedule focus-time blocks
Works with employees to create a sustainable work pace
Engineering team utilizes pair programming
Hosts in-person all-hands meetings
In person and virtual options
Hosts in-person revenue kickoff meetings
Implements team-based strategic planning
Open office floor plan to encourage communication and collaboration
Uses an OKR operational model to clearly define goals and priorities
Utilizes an open door policy that encourages accessibility
Offers a remote work program
Utilizes a flexible work schedule
Utilizes a hybrid work model
