Values

We released these company values at Puerto Vallarta back in 2022. They describe much of what makes the company unique.

For the full walkthrough of our company values, watch the presentation from the winter 2022 offsite. The prezo (linked in notes) also covers the thought process that went into devising them.

It’s in the AIR 💨

Tremendous is designed to be a low-process culture where people can make decisions about their own work and get things done.

People here are expected to drive their work forward, making decisions along the way and pulling in help as they need. Our management style is to provide context around problems and give individuals a ton of freedom in figuring out how best to solve them.

Process is where there’s a series of checks and approvals before doing X. We avoid process when possible, especially when it comes to creative work.

High-autonomy cultures do have issues

But these are worthwhile tradeoffs.

Some chaos is a reasonable cost for speed and diversity of decision-making. Employees who can make decisions about their work are happier. And mistakes are fine too, since most of our projects are asymmetric bets with high upside and low downside.

The last benefit of an autonomous culture is that it attracts talented people who want to be able to make decisions about their work.

Readings

Intentionality describes how we approach our work: with thought and care placed towards the decisions made along the way.

This applies to all pieces of output: designs, technical architecture changes, vendor selection, role definition, etc.

What this means in practice is usually that for each piece of substantive output, there’s a doc explaining the problem we were trying to solve, the options we considered, and the why behind the selected approach.

Newcomers (and prospects) comment on the quality and depth of our documentation– design briefs, technical briefs, strategy docs, competitor research, persona docs. This is a byproduct of a culture where we approach problems thoughtfully.

But the end-result is better output, with an attention to detail that most companies aren’t able to produce.

One price we pay for this approach is that we spend a lot of time writing. It might seem laborious to some. It can also be scary to subject our approaches to a problem to peer critique.

That said, the documentation-first approach ensures better outcomes. Investing time up-front to be thoughtful about approach enables us to move long-term fast.

It also makes professional development a cinch. Watching talented teammates explain how and why they do stuff makes it incredibly easy to learn from them. And when you do the same, subjecting your own approaches to peer review, you’ll be guaranteed to grow.

Plus, an organization of good writers makes it easier to maintain a .

Readings

Explanation

Rationality explains how we come to decisions: with humility and reasoning.

When we’re unsure or in disagreement about what to do, we use logic and data to find a path forward. This only works because our team seeks the correct answer in earnest.

We all have pre-existing beliefs about what the solution to a problem might be. These hunches are super valuable! They come from experience and our brain’s constant pattern matching.

People at Tremendous are expected to behave as scientists. This means being open to being wrong, and updating perspectives in the face of new evidence or data.

Most people aren’t built this way. Confirmation bias is part of human nature, and even the best-trained people find themselves at times succumbing to it.

But being in a culture of people who are all earnestly seeking truth is incredibly enjoyable. Resolving disagreements becomes a matter of sharing data, and working together to interpret it. It also flattens the hierarchy– ideas are evaluated on their merits, rather than their source.

Readings