Creating Team Principles
Canopy is growing very fast.
That means we are hiring fast. And this means we have a greater risk of losing our way and our values as a team. Adding team members at a rapid pace can quickly alter the way a team behaves if one or two of those members don’t align to current values, behaviors and standards… have you ever heard the phrase “herding cats?”
We all have a set of personal values whether we can define them or not. These values echo who we are, what we believe in, define our goals and generally predict our behavior. Teams also have values whether we can define them or not. At Canopy, we decided to define these team values early on in order to prevent us from being shepherds of cats.
Defining the team values
According to Stephen Covey, values are defined as “Beliefs and opinions that people hold regarding specific issues or ideas, and are ultimately internal, subjective, and malleable.” Each designer has a particular set of values — how they interpret design overall as well as their own design work. For example, designers value quality differently; some believe the success of the final design as the determining factor for quality while some believe quality means making the best decisions possible with the given information at the time and some believe quality is a combination of the artifact and the process.
Prior to going from from two designers to seven in eight months we sat down and defined the values we wanted to own on our team, what values can we agree on? What values will we look for in the interview process? These values should act as the buffer when interviewing candidates. They should help us assess the alignment of a candidate quickly and help us ensure that we are asking the right questions during interviews in order to understand the candidates values, beliefs and behaviors. As an added bonus, we shouldn’t have to force the candidate to perform lame homework exercises that only waste everyone’s time because we truly understand what we are looking for, not only from a design process side, more importantly — their behavior.
We started by defined a small set of values:
- Designers should believe that collaboration creates a better products.
- Designers should believe their design is much more than their deliverable.
- Designers should believe that frequent feedback is vital to making great design decisions.
- Designers should believe in the business goals and their importance.
- Designers should believe that mentoring others is just as important in their day-to-day activities as creating beautiful, usable designs.
- Designers shouldn’t believe that their time is more valuable than others.
- Designers should believe that openness, honest collaboration and respect facilitates the creation of a great working environment.
From these values we could begin to interview candidates properly along side examining their hard design skills so that we could hopefully prevent hiring mistakes.
Solidify them as principles
After creating this first set of values, more values were added and the list got rather lengthy. We needed a shorter list, a list that was easy to remember and a list that was more firm. Values are held beliefs that are movable, malleable but what we really needed was hard principles that can withstand the test of rapid growth and iteration. So, we decided to narrow this value list down and solidify them in strong, opinionated principles.
We designed our principles by defining the opposing values of each — taking a cue from the Agile Manifesto. This makes remembering and honoring these values easier to understand by explicitly defining the values we don’t want along side those we do.
Here are our current team principles:
Decision quality OVER outcome quality. The quality of a design or a designer should not be judged by the success of failure of the outcome but rather determined decision making best practices.
Mentorship OVER dependency. We may have stronger skills or expert knowledge is certain aspects of our jobs, but we should proactively mentor and teach others to be better rather than force everyone to use our expertise.
Practicality OVER theoretical. Design actually doesn’t make everything possible. Instead of focussing on high level design theories we get our hands dirty in the practical operations of design so that we can produce a product we can sell.
Collaboration OVER isolation. Collaboration and communication happen as frequently as humanly possible. We collaborate with other designers, developers, product managers and all other cross-functional teams on a daily basis to ensure that we are making the right decisions quickly and not marrying ourselves to our own personal ideas.
Wholistic product ownership OVER feature ownership. Despite working directly on feature development teams we own the entire design of the product —expressing pride in all aspects of the product, not just the parts that we have designed ourselves.
Generosity OVER selfishness. We are a team of designers that understand the best products are created together and not by the brilliant ideas of one individual. We are generous in giving our expertise, time, skills and feedback to others and we should be humble when receiving feedback and criticism.
So far so good. I’m proud to belong to a great design team that has taken the time to define who we are and who we want to be. Each member of the team, regardless of experience and skill level, are thoughtful about how their behavior impacts the product and the Canopy team as a whole — there is no herding of cats going on.
