We’ve spent quite a bit of time creating and fine tuning our core values and guiding principles.
Our values, principles, and purpose won’t change but they’re not written in stone either — over time, we’ll continue to tweak the explanations and add stories to provide context on how our team is living out these values and principles.
Core Values
The qualities that our team embodies; we aspire to align with and live these values.
Integrity
We believe in being honest and having strong moral principles, while remaining undivided and united together. We have integrity as individuals and unity as a team.
Curiosity
To be successful as a software team, we must always evolve and learn, and innate curiosity is central to this. A strong desire to know and learn drives everything we do, and leads us toward continuous improvement.
True Grit
Is it persistence? Is it resilience? It’s more — it’s courage, resolve, and determination in working towards an objective, especially in the face of adversity. It’s not carrying on for the sake of continuing, but proceeding with conviction towards a mission.
Empathy
Software is, by its nature, designed to be useful to others. In order to do this well, we must be able to understand and internalize the feelings and struggles of people using our products. Consider things from their point of view and put yourself in their shoes to understand their perspective.
Generosity
We believe in abundance and in giving or sharing more than is expected or required. We’re generous with our teammates in giving time, patience, and knowledge; generous with our customers in sharing help and expertise.
Guiding principles
These are expectations for the way we operate day-in and day-out. Our decisions should be filtered against our values and these guiding principles.
- Love the customer. Be on the customer’s team and on their side; understand and empathize with their problems, then optimize for solutions to them. Anticipate their needs and aim to delight.
- Communicate. In our distributed team, communication is oxygen. Communicate early and often, and if you’re unsure whether you’ve communicated something enough, you haven’t.
- Always be learning. Be curious, and excited to learn from each other and our customers. Seek continuous iteration and improvement.
- Think in terms of first principles. Always question assumptions and why we do something the way we do it.
- Strong opinions, weakly held. Be committed to a belief, but entirely open to changing your mind in the face of strong evidence to the contrary.
- Passionately share knowledge. Be willing to share knowledge and be a mentor to teammates, customers, and partners.
- Build genuine relationships. We focus on being open, honest, authentic, empathetic, and helpful. We seek to be engaged deeply in our relationships within and outside of our team.
- Take ownership. “Not my job” isn’t part of our vocabulary. If you can solve the customer or a teammate’s problem, do it.
- Pass the newspaper test. If any of your actions were published in the newspaper tomorrow, make sure you’re proud of the way you’ve acted.
- Bias towards action. Be willing to act without complete information. Experiment. Use your best judgment and execute, then adjust as necessary later. Disagree and commit.
- Optimize for quality. You can only pick 2: time, quality, cost. For us, the choice is simple — we will always spend more to achieve higher quality and consistent improvement.
Purpose
Why do we care about these values and live these principles?
Our purpose is to level the playing field for eCommerce growth.
While not every online store will succeed, we will give them a fighting chance to compete by simplifying enterprise-level tools and strategies, and making them available to every merchant.