Start with strong principles

Somewhat recently, I started managing a newly formed team tasked with creating and maintaining visual communication at Pusher. We’re a ragtag team of great people with skills in various disciplines, including Design, Engineering, Product, Illustration, Copywriting, and Project Management.

Many functions and teams don’t create a set of shared principles until they’re larger or more mature. Whilst this is perfectly fine, we wanted to lead with principles; to establish early on which behaviours we considered vital to our success as a team, and to our potential impact on our company and customers.

Principles are important not just for the people you have on your team, but for helping to figure out who you want to join next. It’s for this reason that we’re sharing them publicly; if these are some of the principles you live by, we’d love to talk to you about joining us—we’re hiring for design and engineering.

Our team principles

These principles inform the work we create. When our actions come into conflict with them, we should question the work or admit that they’re wrong.

Start with the problem

We exist to solve business and customer problems. Question anything that seems in conflict with serving Pusher or our customers, and where it’s valuable, employ first principles thinking to get at the root of the problem we’re looking to solve. Ask how things will change if we’re successful.

Behaviours

• You question why we’re doing the work that we are
• You know how you’ll measure success of a project
• You hold the team accountable for creating impact
• You work to understand what the dependencies are
• You ask questions until you understand the problem
• You push back on work that doesn’t serve the goals

Always keep it moving

Fast growing businesses feel like different places every 6 months. We operate in a climate of ambiguity and need to take initiative in order to succeed. Inertia is the enemy of progress; we should always pick up the ball and keep running. Nothing is someone else’s problem.

Behaviours

• You don’t wait for someone to tell you what to do
• You ask for forgiveness rather than permission
• You explore things broadly and prioritise ruthlessly
• You fix what’s broken rather than comment on it
• You ask for support rather than struggle in silence
• You adapt quickly to new or challenging situations

Own the work you ship

What you ship is what matters. Our work isn’t the design deliverable, the illustration asset, or the code we write — we execute to ship things of value to Pusher and our customers. We’re here to improve things, and should own the work we ship to make sure it has a positive impact.

Behaviours

• You pay attention to results and what they mean
• You intentionally revisit work that could be better
• You ship work that’s right over work that you like
• You refer to the customer more often than the craft
• You make sure we’re shipping what we intended to
• You communicate results and what you’ll do next