Strategy

There is a problem with people’s digital privacy. Our world is increasingly gripped by mass surveillance and cybercrime, which puts people’s data and communications at risk.
At Secure Group, we believe everyone has the right to their privacy and we aim to give them back control over it by making accessible solutions for individuals, businesses, and organizations worldwide. We achieve this not only by providing security-focused products like encrypted mobile devices and enterprise solutions but by educating people and innovating. To achieve this is easier said than done and that's why we need the help of brilliant people.

Our Mission

Today, our data is widely available to many parties, who can get our information in both a legal way (through platform ownership or by purchasing it) and an illegal way (through hacking and data breaches). And with the growing threat of cyberattacks, the measures that were in place have proven to be ineffective.
At Secure Group, we envision a world where the control over personal data will be placed in the hands of the users, who will be able to choose who has access to it. We listen to our customers and understand what their worries are. To create an intuitive and easy-to-use product that fulfills the security needs of our clients, we focused on:

• reinventing the mobile world through innovation
• mitigating any risks that would threaten cybersecurity
• stand up to mobile giants like Google and Apple

How can we do it? Success in this ambitious goal can only come with the help of brilliant people from around the world. To attract those experts and get the best out of them, we not only ensure we pay top of the market for their skills, but we created a unique way of working by revolutionizing the traditional management model.
Many organizations are still run as stiff, hierarchical “command and control” systems, in a world of networked, flexible, and purpose-driven individuals.
This management model can be effective in the short term, but it makes organizations slow and restrictive and can lead to toxic office politics, unfairness, and a disruptive work environment. This approach to management does not align with Secure Group’s strategy and vision, and we responded by adopting a flexible and agile approach, which gives employees genuine autonomy over their tasks.

Context, Not Control

We focused on three things while laying out our management model:

• innovation drives the most value in a product-led business, so we made it our main priority
• eliminating micro-management, as it doesn’t work
• we had to successfully convey the company’s business vision and development strategy across the whole company to align teams’ goals

As a result, we replaced the command and control approach with a Context, Not Control mantra. This approach gives our talent the freedom to manage their tasks and find the best way to support our vision and help us achieve our goals. We believe this will attract mature people and give them the environment to be creative and innovate.

Strategic Management

But how do we manage all our projects and goals without micro-managing our teams and projects? With the help of a Strategic Management model.
We use Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard to communicate what we are trying to accomplish and give full top-to-bottom visibility to everyone, improving company-wide understanding. This allows us to align everyone’s day-to-day work with our strategy, prioritize projects, products, and services, and measure and monitor the progress and KPIs towards our strategic goals.
Giving each department its own Strategic Map and Balanced Scorecard makes our strategy comprehensive and helps the team focus. This gives us context, which leads to maximum performance. This leads to the ideal scenario of Context, Not Control, which leads to maximum performance.

Balanced Scorecard

The model separates the organization into four sections and states what objectives, KPIs and actions should be developed for each. Those four sections are:

• Financial – this considers the financial performance and the use of our financial resources.

• Customer/Stakeholder – this views the performance of the organization from the opinion of the customer and the key stakeholders.

• Internal Processes – it measures the effectiveness of the organization through the quality and efficiency related to our products and key business processes.

• Organisational Capacity – looks at the organization’s performance through its employees, culture, technology, and other key areas.

Using those models and the Jira tool, we allow all our employees to have full visibility of our strategy. This communicates in a visual way our whole system and allows people to track the relationships between the processes and their effect on our strategy.

Jira

The tool we use for managing projects in Secure Group is Jira. We use the system in such a way that no matter which tasks our employees are working on, everyone has the visibility of which part of the strategy it's been affected.
The Jira projects, Kanban boards, and Scrum boards are distributed as follow:

• Department projects: consist of tasks related to the relevant department processes' improvement. All tasks are linked to an initiative, strategic goal, strategic map, strategic theme, and the relation graph can be seen in the tickets.
• Process projects: consist of tasks related to cross-department processes and are usually used company-wide
• Product projects: consist of tasks related to all of our products such as bug fixing, development of new features, product stories, and improvements.

Culture Code

At Secure Group, we value innovation, and people who can deliver it. We have a diverse community of bright people from different backgrounds, who work together to achieve a shared goal.
To ensure unity, we created our Culture Code. It is built from seven values that are key to our mission and business model. If our colleagues follow the code, then they can enjoy great freedom in their daily tasks.

Those seven core values are:

• Responsibility
  

We support accountability and ownership of projects, and we trust our employees with the freedom to do amazing work on their own terms. For this to be possible, we need people who can take responsibility for their actions and deliver quality work on time.

• Devotion to learning
  

We want to be surrounded by people who strive for self-improvement and are constantly looking to better themselves. Our work in Secure Group is very dynamic and often involves many tools. The ability to manage a steep learning curve is essential.

• Remarkability
  

To fit at Secure Group, you can’t be average or just good – you need to be great and stand out from the crowd. We want to work with amazing people, who have skills we can’t find anywhere else.

• Respect
  

Secure Group is a diverse community and being open, respectful, and open-minded is crucial for fitting in with our culture.

• Collaboration
  

Secure Group needs to work like a well-oiled machine, with all the parts supporting each other. Collaborating and communicating well is the only way we can achieve our common goals.

• Adaptiveness
  

The security industry is dynamic. Market laws, rules, and regulations are changing rapidly, and we need people who can be on the cutting edge. Learning quickly and adapting to the needs of customers is necessary for our business to succeed in the long term.

• Innovation
  

This is at the core of our business. Constant improvement in the rapid waters of the industry is key for delivering a quality service and achieving our vision. We expect our employees to always be looking for ways to make a positive change to the company.

CAP

Even though we strive to gather dedicated and reliable people, we realize sometimes people can lose their focus on our mission.

To help re-establish the link between our goals, we have implemented the Corrective Action Plan – or CAP. It is a procedure that highlights areas in which an employee needs to improve and asks them to come up with an action plan for this. This way we give our people a chance to realign with our culture and take corrective action before we take further measures.

Conclusion

The current digital landscape is ripe with errors that can be exploited and can put users’ data at risk. We imagine a world in which the digital privacy of individuals is in their own hands, and we have a plan to build that future. We cannot do it alone - we need the right people to support us on this journey of growth and innovation. Secure Group is a demanding workplace, but also one that will allow you to express your greatness, work the way you perform best, and push you to your limits.