austinbv

I actually violently agree with you... it's one reason I never really wanted to write it down. I think culture is so evolutionary that any document is either historical or aspirational. We tried to write these as more behaviors than values. Be exothermic, it's neither a goal nor history it's just who we are.

but I see your point

We are a bit bigger than 2 or three folks :)

we talk about this in our onboarding. Its why we have two guiding docs, values & operating principles.

The values are active and hopefully not aspirational, master your craft, listen first, learn why. We stole from the famous netflix deck to create them and they boiled out of our first few employees.

The operating principles are different. They came from a couple sr folks while we were hiring pretty aggressively. They had the job of training and onboarding and wanted to encapsulate how we engage more tactically. I like them, my favorite is exothermic, i would have never created them though, which is cool to see.

good catch. Fixed

These were not designed by leadership. I am pretty cynical of values as well, and these bubbled out of a few sr engineers who cared about helping new folks assimilate to our engagement style quickly.

happy to talk more about it

We often say, values are the sum of all the people who have ever been or are at Focused.

We try really hard not to make them aspirational. I will say leadership didn't make these they came from our engineers.

I am the CEO & owner of Focused.io. It's pretty cool to see my site on the front page when I check HN in the morning and a page posted by someone I don't know at all... I think.

I can give a backstory on these if you're interested but they weren't designed my me, or actually anyone on our leadership team. We are a small company (think around 60 folks) all engineers and super client facing. A couple years ago a few of our more Sr staff wanted to document the "guiding principles" on what made someone at Focused... good. Like how we show up. I tend to think corporate values usefulness extends about as far as a wifi password but this group and specifically one person was super persistent and passionate about writing down why he felt we were a unique bunch...

I am happy to answer questions or discuss them. Any cool to see