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# System prepended metadata

title: Cultural Values

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# Cultural Values

People values
- who you should hire, exit and how you should treat each other
- how you work together
- how you trust each other


Product values
- what prod do you build
- how you respond to threats and opps
- how do you treat your customers

Process values
- how do you make decisions
- how do you measure progress
- how do you hold people accountable

Culture is living of the values (where most companies values go astray)

articulating values

living values

changing values

The values aren't yours, they are the tribes values, be inclusive. The values must come from the group.


don't hire people that think the same way you do. Don't surround yourself with yes men, weed out people who are not compatabile with beliefs.




# The Ways

These are some of my observations of our cultural values as well as some that I try (and mostly fail) to embody daily.

A team's cultural values aren't really decided by one person or a small group, they are organic and ever evolving. They WILL change slowly as we grow.

I see them broken down into a few categories:

## People

- Lead by example, respect will be earned, exemplify
- Be the hardest worker in the room, outwork everyone, chase excellence relentlessly
- Be fearless, nothing is set in stone or sacred
- Have extreme passion and drive without ego
- Align the success of others with your own
- Be a good person, do the right thing
- Challenge respectfully, always
    - actively avoid confirmation bias/yes men & women
- Maintain a learner mindset: curious, accepting, open-minded, comfortable with not knowing, questioning of assumptions, etc
- Stay humble and hungry, remember the green couch.
    - Always remember where you come from and know where you're going
- Call out people who don't represent your values, on the spot; Respectfully realign
- Give and take critical feedback
- Meet people where they are at, assume positive intentions, perception is reality.
- Everything that you do should be done with intention
- Communication is key (quality not quantity)
- Win the game while making time to enjoy the journey
- 

## Process

- Every decision should be weighed against business value, product first
- Execute quickly, stay flexible, and continuously improve
    - Planning has tons of value but avoid paralysis by analysis
    - Testing makes changes quicker
- Lead with action and not words, set goals with timelines/timebox, ALWAYS deliver (set clear exectations)
- Collaboration should be front and center
- Identify feedback loops and obsessively determine ways to automate/minimize/remove them
- Teams should have trust and take extreme ownership
- Weigh opinions of consistent performers more heavily than others
- Ask why recursively until you understand the root of the problem and the whole problem domain.
- Lean towards simplicity and consistency
  - every dev has their own ways of problem solving but reducing complexity improves exponentially
  - keeping things consistent makes things easier to maintain and refactor
- Small teams owning the as much of the process as possible (including devops) are nimble and successful
- Don't be wasteful
- Documentation should be living, if people are asking for more then something is probabily broken

## Product

- Chase business value, lead by user/customer data
- Evolution over Engineering in the beginning, will shift as you grow.
- Maintain extreme flexibility as you grow until your find product market fit. Then you can lock things down a bit more.
- Set clear expectations with customers up front
- Communicate what you're doing internally with your customers

## Books
READ: Made to stick - how to tell a story and articulate ideas that 
READ: Setting the table
