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
- 09.Be the change you seek
- 10.Be a coach
- 11.Give and receive fearless feedback
- 12.Continuous learning
- 13.Fail fast. Be experimental
- 14.Change is good
- 15.Make fast decisions
The what, not the who
Close mantra ↑When something goes wrong, focus on what happened rather than who to blame.
Fear makes people cover their tracks and blame individuals. It is impossible to do good technical work that way. Borrow from the engineering practices behind aviation safety: mistakes and incidents will happen, so understand the full chain of events.
Treat failures as the company’s responsibility, not one individual’s fault. A safe working environment lets everyone contribute and, counter-intuitively, creates responsibility and accountability at every level.
- No subject should be taboo.
- Prefer team discussion to private chats when the issue affects the work.
- If someone drops production, include them in understanding and fixing it.
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