Our Сompany Manifesto

I believe that a good manifesto acts as a reference point for assigning priorities to tasks and activities, making deliberated and reasonable decisions and behaving in the company’s best interests.

By creating your manifesto, you make sure that all the team members are on the same page with you and share proper work expectations.

A company manifesto is by NO MEANS a set of bureaucratic rules and formalities.

It should be inspired by a company’s culture and give the team a gist of corporate beliefs and vision, oblige your employees to do what they don’t feel like to.

Many top well-known companies have created (and even publicly shared) their great manifestos. You can check those by Apple, Google, Mozilla, Nike, Zappos.

We’ve decided to do the same thing.

When thinking of our manifesto, we kept in mind some essential points to stick to.

A good manifesto should:

• highlights issues or areas to improve;
• contains unambiguous and clear language;
• avoids specialized professional vocabulary;
• is concise and combines related concepts in one fundamental principle;
• does not include words “effectively”, “consistently”, “reliably”, “should/must“;
• is written to guide actions;
• is formulated in a way allowing to see if actions conform to the stated.

Here is our manifesto:

Keep promises. No matter what.
Reveal your creativity. It’s there, trust me.
Do work beautifully. Inside and out.
Act independently. Don’t seek for supervision.
Share experience. And be ready to gain it.

Some accompanying notes:

1. We always keep our promises to ourselves, each other and our customers. If we make a commitment on tasks, projects, terms, there is no doubt that we’ll fulfill it.
2. We strive to come up with new unorthodox ideas, experiment, get initiative. We do not come to work to simply spend 8 hours, we’re eager to be inspired and inspire others.
3. We take Apple as one of the best examples of implementing style & design in every aspect from OS, apps, devices to gadget assembly and packaging. We aim at the same approach and try to keep everything we do beautiful and professional. It applies to all stages of project development: estimation, reporting, documentation, architecture and infrastructure, code, UI/UX etc.
4. We want each team member to do without any project management. Everyone is encouraged to directly communicate with clients, solve any arising issues with them, keep clients and the team updated on tasks progress, offer alternative solutions.
5. Finding out new things and getting unique experience is an inseparable part of our workdays. We appreciate if the team members share what they know and are open to perceiving new information via presentations, blog posts, meetings, tweets, chats or anything else.

That’s how we see the principles to guide our team both inside and outside the office. Though we’d agreed on the manifesto points with the other co-founders, we felt a bit fidgety when presenting them to our guys for the first time. But we breathed easy after seeing them share our ideas and approve of the whole thing.

Do you believe that a company needs a manifesto?