A Road Paved With ISMs

When Brian Caldwell and his team learned that they would be laid off from their company in Cleveland, Brian made it his mission to keep his team together. Enter Rocket Mortgage^®. Today on our blog, guest contributor and Team Leader Brian Caldwell shares his team’s journey to Rocket Mortgage^® and how our company philosophies, the ISMs, paved the way.

In early September, my team – the best team of developers I had ever worked with – found out that our office in Cleveland, Ohio, would be closing. The company we worked for, creating fuel pricing software, decided it no longer needed a U.S. development office.

We had just released a product we had been working on for a year, and it was gaining great traction with our clients. Plus, we were getting ready for an early adopter launch of another new product. So, when we got this news, we were taken off-guard.

I immediately realized that I had to find a way to keep this team together.

We went through a rigorous hiring process to find the right team members to move our technology to the cloud. We hired individuals with outstanding mental strength and problem-solving ability and with a great DevOps perspective. We had already overcome some major challenges together, and I had seen what this team was made of. When faced with obstacles, they responded collectively by taking initiative, collaborating and challenging themselves and each other in the best ways.

I’ve led software teams for almost 15 years, and I felt like I had just finished recruiting one of the best teams I’d ever seen. To see this team come together, then to see it break apart would be incredibly tough, and I knew there had to be a company out there that would love to have such a highly capable group.

One night, I was reaching out to a few contacts on LinkedIn, trying to find a place for my team, and I came across a post by Ted Neward – whom I had never met, but I guess we shared a connection. The post announced that Neward was joining Rocket Mortgage^® to form a Platform Strategy team.

His LinkedIn post read, “This means I will be building out a team of developer-architects that will be given the challenging task of charting out the strategy for the Rocket Mortgage^® Technology, both current state and future state.”

“What are the chances?” I thought.

Knowing it was a long shot, I sent Neward a message congratulating him on the new position, introducing myself and offering up what I knew was a crazy idea.

He quickly saw the value in keeping this team together and knew we had the skillset he was looking for. He reached out to his leadership team to gauge interest, and next thing I knew, I was on a call with Ted talking about what this kind of opportunity might look like. He told me Rocket Mortgage^® had an office in Cleveland, and while there was no presence from the Technology team there yet, there was some space and some interest in building a presence there.

Things moved quickly after this. Soon, my entire team was on a call with a Rocket Mortgage^® recruiter, which led to another conference call with some of the Technology team’s senior leaders.

At every step of the way, the Rocket Mortgage^® team members we talked to had a sense of urgency and a willingness to consider this unconventional move.

No one ever said, “I don’t know how we’re going to make this happen.” No one hemmed and hawed or said, “This isn’t how we’ve done things in the past.” While no one made promises to us right away, it was always clear we were advancing.

On September 17, I drove to Detroit for an onsite meeting, which left me feeling confident that our team would seamlessly align with the vision of the Rocket Mortgage® Technology team. There was a perfect overlap between our technical experience and the needs of Rocket Mortgage®, and we shared a deeply rooted philosophy around delivering working solutions. 

Before I made it back to Cleveland, I received a text message from the recruiter we’d been working with saying that they wanted to move forward with hiring my team.

The next day, everyone on the team received an invite to meet one-one-one with a Rocket Mortgage® recruiter. Within a week, we all had verbal offers. We spent our last few days together in our office packing up and planning our future with Rocket Mortgage®.

Exactly one month from my initial message to Neward, we all made our way up to Detroit for onboarding.

As we sat through our orientation on Monday, we marveled at the effort the Rocket Companies^® made to welcome us and set us up for success. As we learned about the ISMs, company philosophies that team members live by, we couldn’t stop talking about how we’d seen these demonstrated over the last month.

So many companies tout their culture and philosophy, but don’t really “walk the walk.” We knew that Rocket Mortgage^® did, because we had already seen the evidence.

We all agreed our favorite ISMs were “We’ll figure it out,” “Responding with a sense of urgency is the ante to play,” “‘Yes’ before ‘No,’” and “You’ll see it when you believe it.”

It’s thanks to these ISMs that my team is together today, making an impact through our work at an incredible company.

We stayed in Detroit for a week of onboarding, which continued to impress us at every step. Several team members and leaders dedicated time to arm us with knowledge about what we’d be working on. We learned about the work we’d be doing on property qualification, but also about the lifecycle of a loan and what the other release trains in our area were working on.

We’ve been with Rocket Mortgage^® for a few months now, and every day, we continue to see the ISMs in action. It’s heartening to work for a company that’s true to its values, and this inspires us to give our best and make an impact.

The ISMs are the company values that shape our culture and help our team members succeed in their roles. Learn more about our ISMs here.