Key Principles

Summary

If you think of our values as a north star, you can think of our key principles as our map for getting there.

A key principle is a building block to one or more values.

Document First

Write it or lose it. Having a single source of truth for everything we do helps us effectively communicate and build up institutional knowledge. This is the foundation that makes an async first, remote workplace culture possible and gives everyone a way to participate in the decision making process.

Values:

Lookup

Information isn't useful if it can't be found when its needed. Lookup focuses on making sure that humans can find - both for the individual that authored the information as well as other people (usually the wider Dendron Community) that might make use of it.

Values:

Examples

Over Communicate

Things get lost in translation. Especially across timezones and across messaging apps. When in doubt, followup.

Values:

Examples

  • when you send out a PR and haven't received a response within 24h, ping the PR owner in case they've missed it
  • when you are writing documentation for some new process, make sure the rest of the team knows about it by scheduling an async
  • when you get a message, acknowledge reading the message via a response or a đź‘Ť
  • when you merge a github branch and have some outstanding comments, also ping the submitter

Earn Trust

Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.

Amazon Leadership Principle

Adding on to this, earning trust means showing up on time and following through on promises that we make

Values:

Bias for Action

Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking. Amazon Leadership Principle

Values:

Zero Cost Features

A zero cost feature is platonic ideal of a feature that has zero cost after launch. Zero bugs, zero issues, zero questions on how to best use or integrate, zero maintenance. The best way to approach this principle is as one would a rainbow - as a direction to go vs an end to accomplish.

Values:

Examples

Don't Rely on Good Intentions

We don't want to rely on people's good intentions for the successful execution of a feature or process. This isn't to say people don't have good intentions but rather that we all make mistakes and the best system is one that makes those mistakes impossible (eg. a statically typed language doesn't rely on humans to get types correct).

  • To effect this, we want the following (in order of least desirable to most desirable, improved upon iteratively as a process becomes more critical):
    • One off process -> SOP -> Executable Script -> Pipeline Automation

Values:

Examples

  • making sure that next steps are captured in the daily journal vs simply verbally acknowledged
  • writing sops for processes that might need repeating and turning those sops into executable scripts if they become too complicated

Be Early

Being early means pro-actively preparing for things instead of reacting. Instead of rushing to things at the last minute, allowing space for things to go wrong.

Values:

Examples

  • showing up 3min early for a meeting
  • leaving comments on meeting notes ahead of a meet

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