Cieden

I worked with Cieden for over a year and a half, and I must say that this company does a stellar job in continuously improving within many key areas, from its daily operations to the overall quality of work provided to clients. This isn’t so surprising, though, because Cieden puts a huge emphasis on personal and professional development, which in turns leads to many improvements within the company, itself.

Cieden operates in a pretty decentralized way, allowing people to manage their own workdays and hours (within reason), and push for more clients or to work with less clients as they desire. Small teams are often formed and work with a team lead, who can have a specialization in UX, user research, business analysis, service design, etc., so designers can generally focus on pursuing one specialty or else jumping around to get more experience in others. I’d say that’s a really strong point about working with Cieden, in fact. The ability to try new things gives employees here the ability to further explore different areas within their own career path, but this also means that it’s important to work hard to make sure that you’re still doing a good job — even if it’s within an area that isn’t your own specialty!

The type of person who will do best at Cieden is someone with a lot of internal motivation to improve and grow *quickly*, as well as someone with strong time management skills, discipline, and a sense of responsibility for producing top notch work for clients. Because Cieden provides a lot of individual freedom in the day-to-day stuff, it’s really important for everyone to be disciplined and proactively make sure that they get their work done. People who need a lot of structure and like to focus on doing only one type of task might not be the best fit here.

Finding the right people who fit the company is important, after all, and I’d say that Cieden does a great job in this area. People here are very friendly, often go to lunch together, and even go on trips together (want to work remotely from Copenhagen for a week?! or maybe Portugal?! or Egypt?! that type of stuff is the norm here!).

And finally, over the past couple of months, Cieden has been working very hard on its sister company, called Rist, which seeks to provide educational video content and events related to IT and business. They’ve built out an entire production studio that looks amazing and are already producing some really cool stuff.

With all that said, here is a potential downside: Cieden works with lots of startups. Some of them are mature, but there are plenty of pre-seed and seed-stage startup clients that don’t have lots of name recognition or success yet. If you want to work with larger or established brands with more sophisticated teams and operations, this might not be the best place.