Defining Your Team’s Values
There comes a time when a team needs to define its values. The motivation might be growth, a need for clarity, or a desire to communicate who you are. We felt the need to be explicit about our values as we continued to grow quickly. How could we scale our values if we didn’t clearly define them? This post is about the Grailed and Heroine engineering team’s process of finding and defining our values.
Phase One: Map the process
The first step was to clarify what we were doing and where we were going. We reiterated the problem we wanted to solve: a lack of a unified vision, one which aligns and informs how we work together; helps us recruit; and communicates who we are and how we conduct ourselves. They help us make decisions — for instance, should we build this ourselves or integrate with a third party? The deliverable was a document that defines and communicates these values.
With our motivation and destination in place, we laid out the steps in between (Phases Two — Five) and got started.
Phase Two: Ideate
In order to find our values, we started by being reflective and creative. Before getting started, it was helpful to clarify that these meetings were expansive — no wrong answers, the goal was to generate thoughts and ideas. We would do the narrowing down later (in Phase Three).
Over the course of two meetings, we attempted to answer who are we and what do we value? We did so by following this process:
- Ask one open-ended question
- For ~5 minutes, everyone writes their thoughts on post-its
- Post post-its on wall, and group similar ones together, forming “columns” of ideas
- Everyone votes for their top three columns
… using these open-ended questions:
- What is something great that happened to you on the engineering team, or within the engineering team, in the last month?
- Why do you think people apply to work on the Grailed engineering team?
- What are our strengths?
By the end of this process, we had a few most-voted-for columns, as well as examples that pointed to and reflected those columns.
Phase Three: Define and narrow
Given the most-voted-for columns and their examples, we began clarifying their titles and descriptions. For instance, what is the right official title for a most-voted-for column called “Thoughtfulness / excellence”? (We landed on “Purposeful and Thoughtful Engineering.”) And, what is a one-to-two sentence description of that value and what it means to us?
In Phase Five is (most of) what we made in this step.
Phase Four: Share with the team
During a bi-weekly engineering Town Hall, we shared these values with the team. It was fun sharing the results of much time and effort, and also helpful — a teammate who has been doing a lot of recruiting lately pointed out that we were missing Collaboration, a value we do have and one that comes up often in interviews, which provides context for the work and support system. It was an important gap to highlight and address because it was a value that came up during Phase Two, and that we thought was covered in v1 of Autonomy, but that wasn’t properly communicated to those not involved in the process. We iterated and improved our values based on this feedback.
Phase Five: Share with you
What have you done with your team? What worked and what didn’t? If this is a useful process, please use it and share your thoughts and learnings!
Thanks for tuning in.
