Work Principles

This page used to be called “Work Values” in the past, but stated to grow beyond values, and actually listing more “how”¹. Also, unfortunately, word “value” became a bit overloaded and misused² by corpo-hr-marketing³.

I like to build and work at a remote-first organizations. That doesn’t necessarily mean being fully remote, on the contrary. The key goal of a remote-first organization is to deliberately develop communication channels. Mainly to allow seamless collaboration among people being remote and being in the office.

Why even bother? Values and principles are the glue that holds any coherent group together. Without deliberately thinking about and discussing them, you end up with a fragmented team plagued by high turnover and persistent bad moods for no apparent reason. A believe (and hope) that those listed below are a decent set for those who want to try walking towards a holacracy⁴.

Also, I wrote this text specifically for company and team contexts, so please excuse the deliberate and frequent use of “you” throughout – it’s intentional.

Values

There is no real need for anything special, values which we need to adhere to in companies are quite similar to those which are foundational for (democratic and functional) societies⁵:

• inner trust – It’s the kind of trust that allows societies to function smoothly because people believe that others will generally act in good faith, that institutions will operate fairly, and that shared norms and expectations will be respected. This holds for companies as well. Corner stone of any successful delegation and collaboration.
• critical thinking – the expectation that people will question assumptions, examine evidence, and think through problems systematically rather than just accepting things at face value. It’s about creating a culture where asking “why” and “how do we know this?” is valued, not seen as challenging authority. It is at core of being able to innovate as ideas are evaluated. I guess, the only real antidote against fake news, propaganda and (frequent, in many companies) gossip and slander.
• willingness to lift others up – honing the skill of helping each other. It’s not just about having helpful people, but about creating an environment where mutual aid is expected and valued. It helps with sharing information, rather hoarding it. Cross-collaboration becomes a second nature. “I told you so” is replaced with constructive feedback.
• courage – The willingness to act on our values even when it’s difficult. Corporations are not (at least yet) life-threatening environments.

Values are always aspirational. Sometimes we are better at living by them; some days we slack. But every morning I should wake up with the aspiration to live and work according to them. We also should not relativize them. Relativized values are not values at all – they’re mere preferences. Also, conditional values create conditional cultures⁶.

Principles

While the organization strongly benefits from vision, strategy and needs consistent leadership (on every level), its execution depends strongly on day-to-day, granular behaviors and decisions made by individuals. Yes, how we manage calendar⁷ or communicate on Slack has a material impact on efficiency of the company.

Transparency and Openness

Helping others should be a priority, even when there’s no obvious connection to your immediate goals. Being on a different team doesn’t disqualify you from offering insights, assistance, or suggestions to others. However, the people responsible for the work retain decision-making authority over how it gets done. They should take every suggestion seriously and explain their reasoning – whether they implement it or not.

For more on decision-making visit Who should decide?.

Transparency

We default to transparency, meaning that we should make everything accessible by default⁸ and only solve for limited access rights in special cases⁹. Place files in shared drives (Team Google Drive for example). Another great place to regularly share information are tickets or written standups.

I have no doubt that people would share access to documents when asked. But that’s typically too late and prevents such documents from being discoverable through search. Not to mention the unnecessary delays this introduces.

This level of openness can feel counter-intuitive for new team members. Invest extra time in explaining why we practice extreme transparency. Engage in open dialogue. Go the extra mile to enable sharing rather than restrict it.

Openness

Being open and honest with each other is a very critical component of our success. Nobody knows everything. Be open for other ideas and views. Be open to learn.

Our favorite mantra is – “strong opinions, loosely held”¹⁰. We have opinions, but we are ready and willing to change them. Especially, when a better solution is proposed or view is proposed by somebody else. We are not about ego¹¹, but about the common goal.

Most learning and progress is hidden in our failures – foster them and make sure, that all postmortems are blameless  and accessible. We have to make sure, that we maintain a safe harbor for everybody, and otherwise we may be missing an important voice.

WHY? WHY? WHY? and maybe WHAT? and HOW?

Always try asking yourself why multiple times . The number loved by many is 3, but do not hesitate to ask 5 times or just twice. Anything what is appropriate¹².

When writing a request (ticket, Slack message, email…) try to provide wider context – why, what and then (maybe) how. Either skip the “how” completely or make it just a suggestion to allow the responsible person to come up with the best solution.

I am a strong believer in writing. Not saying that people should not talk or meet in person, quite the contrary. My conviction is that writing is thinking¹³, which also means that I am vehemently against leading through presentations. Slides are way to vague to discuss details and links among ideas. I talk more about this in written narratives.

Fairness and Honesty

Be always fair to each other. Expect that others are not trying to cause harm. Always make your best to evaluate people accurately. That doesn’t mean being dishonest, or unnecessarily politically correct.

Say thanks

Don’t forget to give credit where credit is due. But just “thank you” in a company/team-wide channel will do a lot.

Say sorry

If you’ve made a mistake, apologize. Apologizing is not a sign of weakness, but one of strength. The people who are active inevitably make mistakes. When we share our mistakes and bring attention to them, others can learn from us. The same mistake is less likely to be repeated by someone else.

This concept extends to postmortems, as we have mentioned above. Always have a ticket(s) tracking issue(s) and their resolution, as well as write down postmortem. Especially for high-profile emergencies (such as downtime of production systems).

Assume positive intent

Always keep in mind, that we frequently fall victim to the fundamental attribution error . In a nutshell – we blame circumstances for our own mistakes, but others for theirs. To fight this urge, we should always assume positive intent  in interactions with others. Especially when this interaction happens over electronic channels (email, chat)¹⁴.

Providing feedback

Providing feedback is not an easy thing. Receiving feedback is even more challenging.

Little life-hack: Try to say “thank you” as a first thing after receiving feedback¹⁵. It will help with not getting overly defensive.

When providing feedback, always focus on the work itself, emphasis business or technical impact, never the person. Make sure that you provide at least one recent and clear example. Try to factor in external factors (maybe the person is going through some family crisis, for example).

Every feedback we give needs to be constructive¹⁶. Make an extra effort to deliver feedback kindly. And receive feedback with the open mind. Empathy get you a long way here.

Nobody has 100% delivery, consider if the particular issue is even worth providing feedback. Especially, if one is in a position of power (e.g. a manager). Negative events are typically taken way more (6x) seriously  than positive ones.

• When having a feedback on somebody’s interaction with you, go directly to that person.
• When you have a feedback about someone’s performance (e.g., you think they are not doing their best), it’s often better to talk to their or your manager. As you may not be fully aware of the complete context.

Being direct means to be transparent with each other. It doesn’t mean being mean. We strive to be a bit like Ben Horowitz – being both straightforward and kind .

Zero-sum games

I hate zero-sum games and strongly believe that life and business is not (doesn’t need to be) a zero-sum game.

• When Apple created the smartphone, they didn’t just steal market share from existing phone companies—they created an entirely new category that expanded the total addressable market exponentially. Everyone from app developers to accessory makers to telecom providers benefited from this new ecosystem.

• Open-source software demonstrates how sharing knowledge creates value for everyone. When companies contribute to projects like Linux, they all benefit from improvements they couldn’t have developed alone, while reducing individual development costs.

• When you help someone learn a skill or navigate a challenge¹⁷, both people benefit – the student gains knowledge while the mentor deepens their own understanding, builds confidence, and often gains fresh perspectives. The act of explaining something to others actually strengthens your own mastery.

• In strong relationships, both partners become better versions of themselves through mutual support, shared experiences, and emotional growth. Rather than one person sacrificing for the other, both individuals flourish more than they would alone while creating something meaningful together.

• Contributing to your neighborhood, local causes, or community organizations creates value that extends far beyond what you put in.

Diversity

Diversity is a critical asset. Having people from different countries and cultural backgrounds gives us tremendous advantage in finding alternative solutions and new market opportunities. We don’t select candidates because we’d like to go partying with them. We hire and reward employees based on our shared values, as described on this page. Values fit is the important piece, not a culture fit. We actually want to avoid everybody behaves according to one culture, especially if such cultures are not inclusive. For example, a brogrammer culture .

Let me be explicit: we’re not for everyone. We have a specific set of values that won’t resonate with all people. We also believe these values help build better companies and a better world. If someone consistently works against these principles, the right thing is for them to move on.

Unexpected and unconventional things make life more interesting. Talk about hobbies and passions. Share pictures of weekend projects. Send us a postcard from your travels. Coffee breaks and Donut/Soup calls are an excellent place to share those.

Delivery for the Long Term, but with Urgency

We care about getting rid of work which can be replaced with automation as well as we try to avoid duplication. Amazon states it nicely  with:

Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed expense.

We are here for a long-term play, not a hit and run. It is way harder to change the foundations, then the roofing. Long-term focus is not an excuse for a lack of urgency. It is about finding balance between staying stuck in pointless discussions and headless-chicken mode. Advent of agentic AI coding assistants allow for way cheaper prototyping and experimentation.

Measure results, not time

We care about delivery and achievement. Not if one spends 12 hours at the office. You don’t need to defend how you spend your day. Everybody is most productive at different times (and sometimes even different places).

On the other side, if you are working constantly for too many hours, talk to your manager to find solution.

Bias to Action – Ask for Forgiveness rather than Permission

While collaboration, running RFCs etc. is great, there is no need to brainstorm every single thing, or wait for consensus on everything. As we discussed at Who should decide?, there is a whole suite of problems (two-way door ones) which may not need it. There is even a strong evidence against brainstorming driven innovation . As they say “too many cooks spoil the broth”¹⁸.

Decisions should be thoughtful, but delivering fast means that we can make mistakes. We should not fear them, but be ready to fix them quickly. That informs our future design decisions (for example, prefer modularized design instead of monolith) – creating those escape hatches along the way.

Ownership

We expect everybody to own what they are doing. Owning the work, means that you are responsible for that particular piece to be moved forward. Be proactive in informing stakeholders when there is something you need help with, which you cannot solve on your own. Don’t just sit on tasks.

Keep the bigger picture at sight

When making decisions, always keep the bigger picture in mind. Optimize for the whole company, not just your team or yourself.

For example, if fulfilling your goal would negatively impact others—whether colleagues, teams, the company, or customers—raise this concern immediately. Such goals are likely misaligned with broader objectives.

Help others achieve their goals. When you’re blocking someone (they’re waiting for a decision, merge request review, or similar), unblocking them should become your top priority. This might mean handling their request directly or helping them find someone better suited to address it.

However, keeping the big picture in sight shouldn’t lead to analysis paralysis . Like everything else, this requires balance¹⁹. Sometimes immediate action²⁰ matters more than perfect optimization.

For more on decision-making visit Who should decide?.

Respect others’ time

Always try to be on time. People waiting for each other are basically just wasting their time. Avoid unnecessary meetings. Don’t use meetings to get permission, use it to get opinions, suggestions, fresh ideas.

When you believe, that meeting is necessary, then always:

• try to make attendance optional for as many people as possible;
• try to have meeting agenda linked from your meeting invite (aka make it available upfront);
• document the outcome (meeting minutes, ticket(s)).

If you want resolution from somebody, think about using written narratives. Actually, every interaction should be treated as a narrative – provide context for the question, make sure, that people understand your point.

Another random examples in no particular order:

• Think about multiplication effects, when sending one-to-many communication (like emails). If one needs 10 minutes to read that email, and it has 15 recipients, we might just burned 150 minutes.
• Put yourself in the readers’ shoes – instead of “that meeting”, “that ticket from yesterday”, or (way better) “ticket 12345”; provide links to things you are referring to. So, readers will not need guess and desperately search for them²¹.
• You can frequently anticipate certain question → address them straight ahead.
• Don’t treat asynchronous channels as synchronous. Don’t say “Hi” on Slack and wait for a reply. Treat it as a mini written-narrative.

On Hiring

“No hire” is (almost) always better than an “OK hire”. While this is frustrating and painful, it is way more advantageous long term to hire the right person, then to hire quickly and sacrifice quality of the candidates.

While new headcount is frequently the number one solution in many organizations, it is rarely the right one. When adding headcount, be thoughtful and create a proper job description (JD). JD is equivalent to job-ad in many organizations, but that’s only the first part of the JD. Obviously, JD should specify the type of work, requirements specific to the job. But it should also provide answers to questions like

• How is the person going to be evaluated, are there any metrics associated with the evaluation? How you (as a hiring manager) are going to judge performance in the first 30, 60, 90 days?
  • What would “exceptional performance” look like in this role after one year?
  • What are the early warning signs that this hire isn’t working out, and what’s our plan if that happens?
• What exactly is the person going to own? What is the impact on responsibilities of other people within the team?
• If we don’t fill this role for 6 months, what exactly breaks or doesn’t get done?
• What are the specific requirements for the job, going even to level of what should be asked during the phone screenings?
• Who are the key stakeholders this person will need to build relationships with?
• How is on boarding going to look like – who is going to be a buddy²², checklist, specific training, etc.