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Why Treating People Like “Universes” Built a Thriving Team
Published May 22, 2025 · 17 views on YouTube
How Did Howdy Reach a 98% Retention Rate with a Fully Remote Team?
Howdy built its retention around treating every employee as their own “individual universe” — with their own family, obligations, and aspirations — rather than as an interchangeable output producer. Beyond paying well and offering strong benefits, the company invests in understanding each person and created a dedicated mentor program focused entirely on people development.
What Is Howdy’s Engineering Mentor Program?
Howdy built a group of “engineering mentors” made up of former technical managers and technical leaders who now focus on people development rather than product output. Each engineering mentor is capped at 20 people, and their entire job is supporting the folks on their team. Howdy describes people in this role as tending to have a higher EQ than someone focused purely on shipping product.
Where Did the Idea for Engineering Mentors Come From?
Howdy co-founders Jacqueline and Frank adapted the program from Y Combinator’s group partner model, which they experienced firsthand going through YC in winter 2021. A YC group partner is a former founder who achieved something substantial — a sizable exit, going public, or repeating that success — and is assigned to mentor a limited number of companies. Jacqueline described office hours with group partners as having their problems solved “within two-word sentences” because the partners had walked in their shoes. She and Frank set out to recreate that experience inside Howdy.
What Does Howdy Measure to Track This Program’s Success?
The engineering mentor program’s core KPIs are developer retention and developer happiness, tracked through ongoing eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score) measurement alongside retention numbers.
Can This Approach Work Outside of a People-Focused Product?
Jacqueline acknowledges the model can feel like a heavy lift for companies whose product isn’t people, but argues the institutional knowledge saved by investing in every individual is tremendous — and that even non-people-focused companies could adopt a similar philosophy of assigning someone who has “walked in their shoes” to support each employee.
Full video transcript
Howdy has an impressive 98% retention rate and a fully remote workforce — a very impressive number. Jacqueline was asked what her secret is to keeping employees engaged and committed for the long term.
Going back to when she was talking about how this can scale linearly: one of the things Howdy realized is it’s going to sound lame, but it’s something companies always lose sight of — every single person brought onto the team is their own individual universe. They have their own families, their own obligations, their own trials and tribulations, their own aspirations and inspirations. So Howdy wanted to build the company to be able to support the individual on a one-person basis. What kind of support did they need? What was the infrastructure they needed?
Of course, Howdy pays employees well, though not exceedingly well — but they give great benefits. The philosophy is: can we take care of the basics of the person first? Pay them well, give them great benefits, and then start moving up through the levels — learning about this individual person, what they need, and what they’re aspiring to.
What Howdy decided to do was build a group of folks called engineering mentors — people who were technical managers or technical leaders at companies before, and who now focus more on the people development side. They tend to have a higher EQ than someone specifically trying to drive product output. These engineering mentors, former engineering managers, only take on up to 20 people, and their whole job — literally their whole job — is focused on the 20 folks on their team.
Howdy adapted this from Y Combinator. When Frank and Jacqueline went through YC in winter 2021, they realized what makes YC so successful is that every company gets a group partner. A group partner is a former founder who did something substantial with their company in the past — whether that was a sizable exit, going public, or doing it multiple times. To be a YC group partner is to be a well-known founder of the past: someone who has walked in your shoes and done what you’ve done, and who only mentors a certain number of companies and founders. Anytime Frank and Jacqueline went to office hours with these group partners, it was as if they were solving all of their problems within two-word sentences — and it was so nice to have that.
So Jacqueline asked Frank how they could create something similar for Howdy within the Howdy ecosystem. They adapted this engineering mentor program from the Y Combinator group partnership program, where the whole KPI is around developer retention and developer happiness. Howdy constantly measures eNPS and retention around it. The whole idea is: can they continue, as they grow and get bigger, to treat every single individual person as the individual universe that they are?
Jacqueline noted this can be hard for companies whose product isn’t people, because it can seem like a heavy lift or heavy resource commitment. But she says the institutional knowledge saved by investing in every single person who works with you in this way is tremendous — and that even companies outside of people-focused products could adopt this similar philosophy. Imagine how much better everything would be for every company out there if one person — not a people manager role, but someone who has walked in employees’ shoes and done what they’ve done — supported each individual. Jacqueline attributes a lot of Howdy’s secret sauce to this program adopted from YC.