Working principles · 01—32
Mantras.
Hard-won mantras shaped through experience: building Newicon, working with teams and pursuing personal projects.
Some are original, some are borrowed or adapted from people and companies I admire. They are not commandments. They are prompts: useful ways to challenge an assumption, unlock a conversation or find a better next step.
01—08
Transparency and trust
09—16
Empowerment and growth
17—30
Innovation and engineering
- 17.The simple, not the complex
- 18.All requirements are wrong
- 19.Challenge constraints
- 20.Don’t #!@$ the customer
- 21.Pragmatic, not dogmatic
- 22.Use first-principles thinking
- 23.Aim to be less wrong over time
- 24.I don’t know is a superpower
- 25.Build rather than buy core skills
- 26.Ask why, why, why, why, why
- 27.Automate
- 28.Organise around the value stream
- 29.Be bold and break things
- 30.Make it visual
31—32
Focus and communication
Async by default
Close mantra ↑Activity can feel like productivity. Managers can spend a day pinging people, answering quick questions and talking, while the people doing deep engineering work lose the uninterrupted time that work requires.
Engineering hours are not equal. A protected block can produce more than an entire fragmented day. A message that takes seconds to send can impose a much larger cost on the person receiving it because they have to rebuild the mental model they were holding.
Champion asynchronous communication. Write things down with enough context for people to respond when they reach a natural stopping point. When a problem genuinely benefits from rapid back-and-forth, workshop it together deliberately.
- Emergency: phone call.
- Needs real-time collaboration: workshop it together.
- Everything else: asynchronous.
- 32.Pick up the phone