Why betterment and adaptability matter more than raw engineering skills

Scaling Parafin, scaling ourselves

Parafin is scaling rapidly. As our team grows and our product set expands, we’ve had to step back and reflect: what makes someone successful at Parafin? Based on my own experience and the collective wisdom of our engineering leadership, two traits consistently rise to the top: betterment and adaptability. These are the force multipliers that help us thrive in an environment that changes every six months.

What is betterment and adaptability?

• Betterment: The practice of improving systems, processes, and people around you—often without being asked. It’s about proactively spotting opportunities for improvement and acting on them. Examples include writing onboarding docs, simplifying workflows, mentoring teammates, or proactively reducing technical debt. Betterment is how we build compounding progress, where small improvements stack up to meaningful change.
• Adaptability: The ability to thrive in uncertainty and navigate change. At Parafin, adaptability is not optional, it’s essential. As a fast-growing startup, we’ve gone from one product to three in just a few months. Expanding our product set has forced us to rethink many of the fundamental assumptions in our core systems so we can build and launch new products quickly and scalably. If you’re fixated on past assumptions, you’ll struggle; if you embrace adaptability, you’ll thrive.

Why this matters

Raw engineering skills, from coding to system design to efficiency, are important, but they’re table stakes. What separates good engineers from great ones at Parafin are the qualities that elevate teams, not just individuals.

• The multiplier effect of betterment: Betterment doesn’t just make you better; it makes the whole system better. An engineer who improves onboarding saves every new hire time. Someone who reduces workflow friction multiplies the output of the entire team.
• Why raw engineering skills aren’t enough: Modern engineering isn’t about lone geniuses. It’s about teams solving hard problems together. Brilliance without adaptability or betterment can create friction rather than momentum. Team impact > individual brilliance.

Thriving through adaptability, from our engineer Maya

A recent example at Parafin illustrates this well. Maya, one of our engineers, was put in an incredibly tough position: continue the development of a brand-new product and launch it with a new partner. Historically, we had either launched existing products with new partners, or experimented with new products on existing partners. Doing both at once was far more complex. To make things harder, the product’s Product Lead left the company midstream while competing priorities on our core product shifted engineering resources, which led to notable knowledge and resourcing gaps.

Maya joined a new team and domain under uncertain circumstances. Instead of being overwhelmed, she leaned into adaptability. She learned new skills, unlearned habits that didn’t apply, and worked across functions to close gaps. Her ability to adapt and drive betterment helped deliver the product launch successfully. That kind of adaptability is what thriving at Parafin looks like.

How we spot and foster these traits

We don’t just hope for betterment and adaptability, we intentionally seek and nurture them.

In hiring: We’ve built a repeatable approach to spot these traits. For example, when candidates describe past projects, we don’t just ask what they built. We dig deeper: How did they work with others? What challenges did they encounter? How did they adapt when things changed? We look for evidence of ownership, trust-building, and a bias for improvement, not just technical correctness.

In our teams, we cultivate these traits by:

• Encouraging accountability and ownership.
• Running blameless retrospectives where we learn without blame.
• Building trust intentionally, through consistency and empathy.
• Removing glass ceilings: We give people challenges that matter, no matter their “years of experience” or “level,” and provide the platform to show what they can do.
• Celebrating small wins that compound into betterment over time.

These practices don’t just strengthen delivery, they make Parafin a more rewarding place to grow.

A call to action

If you’re an engineer reading this, ask yourself:

• What’s one way I can improve the system or environment around me this week?
• Which teammate is struggling or could use my help?
• What’s one important but unowned problem I could take on to make an impact?

Betterment and adaptability aren’t just nice-to-have qualities, they’re what make engineering careers more exciting, relationships more rewarding, and teams more impactful.

At Parafin, we celebrate these traits as much as raw coding skill. If this resonates with you, we’d love to have you grow with us.

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