Written by
Emma Collins
Published on
Sep 8, 2025
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Why culture became a priority
In most companies, culture is treated as something abstract—an invisible background force that only gets discussed when things start going wrong. We wanted to take the opposite approach. From the first lines of code, we decided culture would be a product in itself, designed deliberately, tested constantly, and refined like any other feature.
The reason was simple: the way people work together matters as much as the work itself. Decisions about transparency, accountability, and pace don’t just shape morale, they shape outcomes. A team that hides mistakes or avoids hard conversations will eventually ship products that reflect those same flaws. A team that values openness and learning will move faster, not slower, because trust reduces friction.
One of our engineers summed it up well:
“We realized culture isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s infrastructure, like servers or code reviews. If it’s weak, everything else wobbles.”
That mindset made us approach daily practices differently—not as rituals to tick off, but as the scaffolding for how we wanted to grow.
Transparency as working default
Our first major decision was to embrace transparency as the baseline. Too often, decisions disappear into private conversations and leave everyone else confused. By logging and sharing every significant decision, we turned what used to be opaque into something everyone could see and learn from.
We didn’t want bureaucracy, so the system had to be light. A short decision log in a shared document. A roadmap that anyone can open, not a private slide deck. Weekly updates written in plain language. The tools were simple, but the effect was compounding. Over time, transparency shifted from an exception to an expectation.
To illustrate how that looked, here’s how we structured our decision records in the early days:
Owner | Decision |
|---|---|
Product Lead | Prioritize dashboard redesign |
CTO | Delay mobile release by one sprint |
Founder | Introduce roles (Admin, Editor, View) |
The log wasn’t fancy, but it changed conversations. Instead of asking “Why did we do this?”, people asked “How can we build on this?”. The difference seems small, but it fundamentally improved trust.
Balancing speed and care
Startups often glorify speed, but speed without care is expensive. Shipping something broken or irrelevant might feel like progress, but it only creates rework later. We wanted speed, but not chaos.
That’s where the principle of clarity came in. Moving fast for us meant taking a breath to define the problem before touching the solution. In practice, that looked like short planning notes, quick discussions about trade-offs, and a willingness to say no to half-baked ideas. Sometimes this slowed the start, but it accelerated the finish.
Recoveries also became a test. When something broke, we didn’t want fear or silence—we wanted reflection. Postmortems became routine, even for small missteps. Instead of blame, the goal was learning. Over time, these small habits made urgency feel less like panic and more like practiced focus.
We even used inline rules as reminders in documentation, like no feature is final until it’s documented or every bug deserves a visible postmortem. These little phrases acted as cultural shorthand, easy to reference and hard to forget.
Leadership as culture in action
Leaders don’t just enforce rules—they embody them. If transparency is demanded but founders make private calls, trust collapses. If accountability is preached but mistakes at the top are hidden, resentment grows. That’s why we made a commitment: leaders follow the same rules as everyone else. Decisions from the founding team went into the same logs. Postmortems for leadership errors were just as visible.
Consistency mattered more than charisma. Culture is fragile when it’s based on slogans, but it becomes resilient when modeled in daily behavior. By keeping leaders inside the same system, we showed that culture wasn’t aspirational—it was operational.
Building for those who aren’t here yet
The final principle we adopted was to design culture for the future team, not just the current one. Every workflow we created would eventually be inherited by people we hadn’t even met yet. Documentation wasn’t only for today’s teammates—it was for the next wave of hires. Processes weren’t just to make current projects smoother—they were to prevent tomorrow’s chaos.
The result is a culture that compounds like interest. A single transparent decision log might not matter much. But a hundred of them create clarity as the default. One thoughtful postmortem might feel trivial. But dozens over time create a culture where learning is normal, not extraordinary.
By treating culture as infrastructure—visible, maintained, and improved—we gave ourselves a foundation strong enough to handle growth. And just like any infrastructure, its success isn’t measured by how often you notice it, but by how well everything else stands on top of it.
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