• Our Purpose explains why we exist, our Mission defines where we’re going, and our Values guide our tough choices (Purpose, Mission, and Values).
• This document defines a short list of principles we use to work together. They are visible to a casual observer and apparent in our day-to-day practices.

We document

<aside> ✏️ We take the time to write things down because it helps us move faster.

*- Meetings always have an agenda, shared in advance.

• Every system has a one-pager, explaining its purpose and design principles.
• Notes are public by default, catalogued in Notion and shared with the company.*

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We believe that a team’s documentation practices are one of the best predictors of its velocity. The best-performing teams we’ve been on have been zealots about documentation, and the opposite is true for the worst. When documentation is healthy, new folks onboard quickly, meetings are a good use of time, and workload is balanced across individuals — and that’s just the beginning.

We know that this doesn’t happen automatically, nor is it free. Everyone has to take part, we must hold each other accountable, and we need to make these investments even when they slow us down in the present. That’s okay, because documentation is real work. And, yes, sometimes things should be simplified or automated first, but that’s no excuse to do nothing. We start by choosing action.

Like our other principles, this one is not an absolute. There will be times when we decide not to document, but we will restore the balance shortly thereafter.

We move at the pace of customer discovery

<aside> ⛵ Our product development process moves in lock-step with customer discovery.

- We validate problems through customer discovery before starting new initiatives. *- Schedule at least one customer meeting every week that anyone can join.

• Anyone can suggest questions and topics for upcoming customer calls.*

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Ours is a path beset by traps. Many people have tried to solve the Marketing ROI problem, and many have failed. We will be successful not because we are smarter or work harder, but because we are more disciplined and because we ask the customer the right questions. Like any software company, we experiment and iterate to find the right product to bring to market. However, compared to other companies, we need to make larger investments in customer discovery to know what we should build. Our intuition, alone, won’t get us where we need to go.

This means that, most of the time, when we have an idea we would be better off talking to a customer than building a prototype. The customer doesn’t know what the solution to their problem looks like, but they do know what their problem feels like, and if we’re not 100% sure they’ve already told us, it’s time to ask.

We’ll validate concepts through user testing before we write code, and not the other way around.

We ship it when it’s done

<aside> ✅ We prefer success criteria and transparent progress to deadlines.

*- We debate prioritization, success criteria, and solution design — not timelines.

• Individuals broadcast their plan and progress, so no one has to ask.
• Timelines are approximate and set by the responsible engineer (not the founders).*

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We care a lot more about velocity (moving fast) than predictability (knowing when things will be done). We believe that the most important factors impacting velocity — things like number of engineers, their knowledge, the technical architecture — often have no impact on the predictability. Beyond that, when companies try to improve their predictability, they often hurt their velocity. People become stressed out, lose focus, and get less done.

So we focus on moving fast. To make this work, we expect a few things from each other:

• Clear success criteria and transparent decision-making. While we can’t always know the “when”, we must understand the “what”, the “how”, and the “how complex is that?” to support each other. We share decisions widely to keep everyone informed.
• Proactive progress updates. We break our work up into small pieces so that our velocity will be apparent, and we share achievements as they happen. This keeps our communication focused on “what’s happening?” rather than “when will it be done?”.

We will, of course, have some deadlines we can’t avoid. We’re not pretending that we won’t. However, deadlines will be for the times when we don’t have a choice. The rest of the time we will ship it when it’s done.

We bring our constructive energy

<aside> ☀️ We keep the mood positive, even in difficult conversations.

*- We take responsibility for our failures, learn, and move on.

• We take the time to check in with each other and show we care.
• We regularly conduct blameless postmortems to get better.*

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We are committed to keeping a positive and buoyant (while genuine) work environment. We adopt a few principles to achieve this:

• We are all responsible for how we impact our peers. We believe that both positive and negative energy spread quickly on a team. We all have a choice about the tone we strike, and we choose a positive one. This also means that we avoid creating distractions for our peers. External events impact us at work, so they shouldn’t be ignored, but we should limit how much of our attention we give them to keep ourselves focused on our mission.
• Most of the time, bad news isn’t bad — it’s a learning in disguise. When something goes wrong, it’s usually a mistake, an accident, or out of our control, and we can learn from it. Teams exist to compensate for individuals’ weaknesses, and mishaps are often opportunities to improve how the team works. We should react to them accordingly.
• We experiment. To win, we will need to test as many ideas as we can, and we know that many of them won’t work out. An experiment that doesn’t drive its key metric isn’t a failure. If we learn something from it, it’s a success, because it gets us one step closer to finding the idea that does.
• We celebrate our wins, large and small alike. If we’re not having fun, it’s not worth it, and we fuel ourselves by keeping the good times going.

Of course, not everything is positive, and we can’t always be happy. If we’re not real, no one will respond to any positivity we try to spread, and if we don’t discuss our failures openly, we’ll never improve. Even so, we expect ourselves to keep these moments constructive and focused on the mission.