Community comes first: our team values

This past year at Dribbble has been pretty amazing. At the beginning of 2017, the Dribbble team consisted of 8 people; we’ve now grown to a team of 20+! Naturally, our company has been evolving. It was during this process that we quickly realized the importance of nailing down our team’s core values as a team and company — We needed to document what is most important to us, to share with the community and our new hires.

Team Dribbble: January 2017

Coming up with our company values was a group effort. Although these values have been a part of the culture and mindset since day one at Dribbble, they’d never been formally articulated or shared publicly. So, we got the team together in January and spent several months refining ideas and concepts that came out of a group brainstorming session where everyone got a chance to share what they’d like to see listed among our core values. We knew right off the bat that we wanted to keep them short and sweet so that they could be meaningful, memorable and actionable. We ended up with these 6 core values:

1. Community comes first — A designer-first focus is at the center of everything we do
2. Lead with passion — We love what we do and we do what we love. We are driven, take ownership of our work, and hold each other responsible.
3. Continue to grow — We keep learning, teaching, and growing individually, as a company and as a community.
4. Quality over quantity — We have a craftsman’s attention to detail. We don’t ship work we aren’t proud of.
5. Try new things — We seek constant and never-ending improvement. We test new ideas and take intelligent risks. We aim to improve what matters most.
6. Bring good vibes — We are positive, respectful team players. We build each other up, and are always ready to go the extra mile to help one another.

Having clear company values has been valuable for us in so many ways:

• They serve as a foundation for our organizational culture and have nurtured the sense of community we have among our team.
• They help us decide how and what to build. In all our product decision making, we refer back to our core values and do a gut-check on whether we’re acting in a way that’s consistent with what’s most important to us as a company and community.
• They help us decide who (and how) to hire — it’s important to us to work with people that share our values! We talk a lot about our values with our candidates in our interview processes, to make sure that their joining the company is the best decision for them and for us.

Looking back at 2017, it’s exciting how clear a role our values have played in our accomplishments. There have been times where, after gut-checking our decisions against our values, we’ve moved release dates back, to make sure we’re one hundred percent happy with what’s being released. There have been moments where we’ve gone back to the drawing board entirely. There have been some awesome new features released, and there have also been some amazing new additions to our team!

Team Dribbble: October 2017

Being true to what’s most important to us and sticking to our values has helped us learn, grow, and do some pretty killer stuff as a company this year. We’re looking forward to 2018, and the opportunity to continue making Dribbble better than ever!