Our mission is to accelerate human progress through developer collaboration. In pursuit of this mission:
We build the best developer products in the world. Every day millions of developers use REDACTED to create things that touch billions of people. To be at REDACTED is an awesome responsibility. We build the best products we can because so many people are counting on REDACTED.
We create superfans. Our aim is to build products and create experiences that wow developers. This is true for every function in the company. In everything we do, we should apply a high level of care and attention to the developer's experience. We are customer obsessed, and we put developers first.
We do the best work of our lives. Life is finite. We all have choices in how we spend our limited time on Earth. At REDACTED, we choose to spend our time striving for excellence. We demand excellence of ourselves and our teams. We have a growth mindset and constantly look for ways to improve. At the end of each year, we want every Hubber to be able look back at what they accomplished for developers and feel proud.
A high-performance culture is a place where high performers thrive and teams achieve amazing things together. Different people can be high performers in different environments. At REDACTED, we build the conditions for a high density of high performers.
Demand excellence. The purpose of a high-performance culture is simple: to deliver the best products and experiences to our customers. Excellence does not happen automatically. To get excellence, you have to demand excellence – from yourself, and from the people you work with. At REDACTED, we do not settle for "good enough;" if you want to do good-enough work, there are a million other companies you can join. At REDACTED we choose the path of best customer experience, not the path of least resistance.
High performance isn't comfortable. When you set a high bar, it forces you to confront whatever is standing between you and excellence. Whether that's a challenging puzzle, an unstated assumption, a disagreement with a colleague, the desire to please everyone, or your own mistakes – you have to confront it and overcome it if you want to achieve excellence. That can be hard to do. But it's the only way to do something truly great, and it's the only way to experience the personal and professional growth that comes from challenging yourself, struggling, and succeeding.
A high-performance culture is the prerequisite for our mission. As a global product, REDACTED should be built by a diverse global team of high performers.
To deliver high performance, we're building four key skills: Focus, Tempo, Judgment, and Accountability.
Do fewer things at higher quality. When REDACTED builds a product or enters a market, our aim is to wow developers. We may not always be first, but we aim to be best. And the only way to be best is to do less. This means raising the quality bar, and saying "no" more frequently than is comfortable. Our doctrine is: core before more. We use our OKRs and Engineering model to fund the most important work to capacity.
Focus on what matters most to the customer. At REDACTED, we put developers first, we try to understand their needs better than they themselves do, and we strive to solve their most critical problems with exceptional experiences. Put yourself in the developer's seat. What should their experience be, ideally? Think of REDACTED as a restaurant; while a ladle of slop dropped in a bowl might technically deliver the correct number of calories and nutrients, the best restaurants intentionally shape your experience from the moment your hand touches the door.
Think of tempo, judgment, and accountability as three points of an equilateral triangle. Each point symmetrically supports and constrains the overall framework of how we work.
Tempo. Tempo is the clock cycle of your team. It is about setting the cadence of work. This looks different in different teams. Some projects need the CPU to burst to 4.5GHz; others can run single core at 1GHz. The goal isn't to overclock the hardware. It's about working with urgency and consistency. The way we do this is to shrink our base unit of time. Reason about your work in hours not days, days not weeks, and months not quarters. Ultimately, tempo is about how long you spend in uncertainty. A week is ~2% of the year – waiting 2 weeks for a decision means 4% of your year is lost. Instead, break your work and your decisions into smaller pieces. This is what we mean when we say ship to learn — drive quick, iterative decisions, ship often, and encourage calculated risk taking. High performers make things happen surprisingly quickly.
Judgment. The goal is not to drive at breakneck speed into a ditch, or to continue to iterate rapidly on a bad idea. So, tempo must also be paired with judgment. Great judgment ensures we make the right decisions. It is how we hold our quality bar high across our products. Judgment isn't a matter of seniority nor is it born — it is based on experience and expertise. Our leaders empower people who have shown great judgment to make decisions. As a leader at REDACTED, your job is to support the good decisions and step in as an editor to guide the team when a bad decision needs to be corrected. Leaders set the bar for great judgment on their team.
Accountability. Tempo and judgment only work if there is accountability. Part of this is just knowing who's accountable for the decision – who's driving the car? It can't be a committee with a dozen hands on the wheel. Instead, a single decision maker must fully own the outcome for a project. A good leader will get steering inputs from their team and subject matter experts, but ultimately they make the decision and are held accountable to the results. Results is the operative word here. We evaluate results, not activities. Consistently good judgment should be rewarded with more decision-making responsibility; consistently bad judgment, with less. Mistakes will happen and we will learn from them; no one has perfect judgment, and failures along the way may not matter if they lead to a great result. But accountability requires that people in positions of decision-making authority be held accountable to learning as well.
Now that we know what we're trying to achieve (focus, tempo, judgment, accountability), we need to talk about how we'll achieve it.
As companies get bigger, they adopt abstractions like KPIs and OKRs to help people digest what's going on. These can be useful tools, but abstractions can hide important details. This is what we have to avoid. If you are responsible for something, you must look into the details, to see the actual customer experience, to know what's really happening. Whether you're a VP or an IC, if you want to do the best work of your life, you must collapse the abstractions between yourself and the details of what you're building. Often this means looking at the demo – the actual customer experience. But this principle applies to every function of the company, even to teams not building user-facing functionality. The imperative is to dive deep into the details and not to solely rely on business abstractions.
We are adopting a DRI model at REDACTED. A DRI (directly responsible individual) is a single named individual who is responsible for a project. They set the tempo, apply their judgment, and are accountable to the project's results. In any project, you should ask, "Who is the DRI?"
Above all else, the DRI owns the outcome. Whether it's up, down, or around, as a DRI you find a way to overcome obstacles and deliver amazing work. Owning the outcome forces a DRI to dive deep and understands the tradeoffs. Our aim is always to build the best experience for customers, not just what's "allowed" by the org chart.
How leaders help DRIs. As a DRI dives deep, we expect leaders to do so as well. You aren't a general manager — you're an expert leading experts. You should have the expertise and immersion in the details to meaningfully engage in the work done in your teams. Just like setting the bar on great judgment on your team, we expect you to serve as editors for the DRI. When they struggle, you serve as a coach. And, occasionally you may need to step in to ensure the DRI has the context and judgment to achieve the best possible outcome for customers. Because, as a REDACTED leader, you are ultimately accountable for the outcomes of your team.
DRIs can be changed without a reorg. A DRI with consistently poor judgment or results will be removed from that position. That doesn't necessarily mean they shouldn't be at REDACTED. Maybe they should be working on a different problem or be in a different role. But they shouldn't be the DRI of that project. The flip side of this is that a person who consistently exhibits superior judgment and results will be rewarded with more and more responsibility.
DRIs can be anyone and come from any team. We choose DRIs based on their abilities, not their place in the organization. Whether an IC or VP, a qualified DRI is chosen based on their superior judgment, tempo, and accountability.
The linchpin of all of these components is how we make decisions. If you think of the taxonomy of decision making as:
| Top down | |
| Consult and decide | ← Need to be here |
| Delegate | |
| Consensus | ← Too often here |
Our default decision making methodology is for an empowered DRI with great judgment to consult and decide. We expect DRIs to consult with subject matter experts and contributors to the project. A good DRI will foster the best ideas no matter where they come from. Then, they make an informed decision so the team can move forward. A great DRI will be excellent at persuasion, and often their decisions will feel like a consensus. But ultimately the DRI is accountable to the decision, and consult and decide empowers the responsible individual to make the call. After that, PRs are welcome.
| Good DRI behaviors | Bad DRI behaviors |
| Consults with the right people | Doesn't consult the right people |
| Surfaces the best ideas from everywhere | Hoards information |
| Makes great decisions in a timely manner | Tries to please everyone |
| Communicates decisions clearly and persuasively | Dictates decisions without reasons |
| Makes mistakes, corrects them, and learns | Doesn't bring the team along |
| Takes personal accountability for results | Makes bad decisions too frequently |
| Takes calculated risks | Doesn't learn from experience |
| Risk averse | |
| Indecisive | |
| Defensive | |
| Doesn't take accountability |
Clarity on decision making makes work much more satisfying. Either you are making the decision, or you know who will.
REDACTED is important, the world is counting on us, and we owe it to ourselves to demand excellence of one another. Your task is to raise the bar on the quality of the experiences we deliver to developers. And the way to do it is a high-performance culture that enables great decisions to be made with focus, tempo, judgment, and accountability.