This handbook serves as a guide about Deltafy's core values.
The core to every successful venture is not a brilliant business model or product, but the culture it tries to mold.
We believe that everyone in Deltafy is a leader. In this case, autonomy must be granted for everyone to be one.
By autonomy, we believe at everyone's ability to steer their own ships while staying on the right direction. Specifically, we believe in everyone's ability to:
- take ownership.
- exercise self-leadership.
- use good judgments.
- make informed decisions and intuitions.
- express themselves freely.
- take initiative.
- stay resilient in times of ambiguity and uncertainty.
- learn and relentlessly strive for growth.
- provide, learn from, and absorb constructive criticism.
- ask for help.
Most important of all, we believe that it is everyone's responsibility to uphold universal moral principles, regardless of religion, culture, race, and political inclination.
Everyone is a thinker.
In this case, our culture of thinking revolves around two schools of thought: Idealism and Pragmatism.
We believe that idealism and pragmatism are complementary traits that everyone in Deltafy must possess. The primary mechanical force that will guide Deltafy in its pursuit is everyone's ability to balance these two contrasting aspects.
Everyone is encouraged to express brilliant ideas, solutions, and visions, regardless of how unrealistic they may be. At the same time, one should retain the pragmatism that is needed to introspect and examine one's own faults and errors, especially in one's own abstract ideas.
Constructive criticism is also essential and everyone must be open to receiving and learning from it. No mental realms shall remain unmerged, unchallenged, and unexamined.
We highly value a Socratic approach in thinking. In this case, when discussing ideas and strategies, it is recommended for everyone to participate, raise questions, challenge weaknesses, and reach consensus through good judgments.
It is recommended to practice the Socratic Method and the Harkness Method.
Contrary to popular belief, a high-performing team is not created through rigid structure and a strict playbook. A team's success should not be measured only by the value that individuals bring on the table, but also the satisfaction that every individual receives in the game and playing with the team.
There is beauty in chaos, and the beauty of nature itself is built from chaos. All magnificient things in nature share one thing in common: they are all formed by the coalescence of atoms with diverse intrinsic properties.
In the context of teams and organizations, we believe natural selection is at play. In other words, we believe that unbreakable team cohesion is built around chaotic systems, and chaotic and disorganized teams naturally amalgamate.
We highly believe that a very effective team is made out of diverse and autonomous individuals who make efforts in leading themselves, advocating for open communication and transparency, building healthy relationships, establishing respectful and healthy relationships, and aligning their values and goals.
Before delegating tasks, it is important to evaluate the idea, the tasks that will be involved in its materialization, and the lurking uncertainties that might impede the execution.
It is everyone's responsibility to bridge the gap between the skills required by a task and the skills that participants have.
Everyone should be assessed of their expertise in a certain skill, and everyone must be involved in helping someone gain expertise in that skill.
Even if an individual insists to have little to no intervention on how they will learn and develop their skills, their learning process must always be supplemented with flexible forms of guidance, whether it is through proper documentation, feedback, or mentoring. Every learner must have a teacher. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
A choir member should be able to follow, but a conductor is responsible of making sure everyone follows. In this case, we can ensure that teams grow with little to no blame.
Deltafy is founded by individuals who wanted to change the world and make an impact on people's lives.
It is indispensable for everyone in Deltafy to aim for making the world a better place and making everyone's lives better than it should be.
Human beings have the natural innate capacity to distinguish what is universally moral. In this case, respect for everyone (regardless of culture, religion, and race) is non-negotiable.
However, in circumstances where peace may not be an option, whether it is due to a living or a non-living threat (e.g. a sentient and rogue AGI), one must make efforts to protect humanity from subjugation and uncompromising evil.
We are strong supporters of the Lean Startup Methodology and the IBM Garage Methodology. The upcoming sections take inspirations from these two approaches.
We do not believe in a perfect business plan.
Business plans help answer the first questions that must be answered when evaluating an idea. However, they also rely on untested hypotheses. We believe that only the true conception of a product or service can test these hypotheses. In other words, a successful venture is defined by its execution, and technology should speak for itself.
In ideation, we trust everyone's judgment to evaluate his/her own idea, introspect for errors, and objectively foresee its future impact and potential.
Templates like the Lean Canvas and Business Model Canvas can be freely utilized. There are also frameworks you can utilize for evaluating ideas. There is the ICE framework, Bryan Eisenberg's TIR framework, and many others. Once again, it is up to your personal judgment on how you evaluate your ideas.
However, this is where our philosophy towards ideation diverges with the existing methodologies. Achieving high-growth is one of Deltafy's key objectives as a business, but it is also a startup that is born out of genuine intentions of helping humanity.
Profitability is a criteria that is only evaluated in the last phases of the idea validation process. We do not just focus on for-profit ideas, but we are also open to ideas that try to promote social justice and support sustainable development.
Instead of focusing on profitability, we want everyone to approach ideas like engineers. We validate ideas in terms of mechanics and practicality. We focus more on the overall cost of pursuing an idea and how the costs can be optimized before considering the potential returns. We believe that the utility of an idea should justify whether it is profitable or not, or impactful or not. We prefer to build instead of making promises.
At the end of the day, every idea is a collection of hypotheses that must be tested and validated. A highly comprehensive business plan only tends to obscure the actual beauty of an idea and the value it can truly deliver.
When testing an idea is not possible (possibly due to lack of resources or subject matter expertise), uncertainties must be gradually cleared over time, and such uncertainties would require different strategies to be dealt with. There are a few strategies, such as:
- using thought experiments and supplementing them with existing literature/knowledge (useful in understanding the hypothetical/theoretical aspects of an idea).
- dissect an idea into multiple components and work on the most challenging ones (useful when it is reasonable to immediately invest resources and/or time in the idea).
We do not impose strict structures when it comes to idea validation. It is important that ideas should not stay untested for a long time, and idea validation should not impede the materialization of the idea. In addition, we prefer less structure on idea validation as we want to give a lot of room for expression, especially if an idea focuses more on social justice instead of a for-profit product/service.
We also highly trust everyone's judgment when it comes to identifying whether an idea is feasible or not, as long as there is an open communication channel and environment for evaluating ideas.
While we encourage the adoption of frameworks and best practices, we also believe that strong adherence to convention, structure, and authoritative knowledge impedes one's openness towards new ideas and lessens the room for growth.
Generally, the product development process in Deltafy is a build-test-learn cycle. In other words, it is an iterative cycle of building, upgrading, testing hypotheses, and responding to user feedback and demands.
Each iteration is dictated by user feedback and test outcomes. This is for the purpose of what is validated learning (i.e. validating an idea directly from customers or users) and it is employed in methodologies like Scrum and Agile.
The idea of a perfect product is also a myth. One must not fear embracing a state of "forever beta" (a state where the product can't achieve complete perfection and it is in a relatively endless cycle of development).
We should also not be afraid of doing things that don't scale when left with no other feasible options, especially when it is the only way to test a hypothesis.
To enforce a fail fast-fail safe culture, it is important to crush the notion that failures are absolute failures. Failures are important components to success and they help a lot in improving future development iterations. A failure is only considered an absolute failure if it brings no value and there is nothing to learn or gain from it.
However, this type of culture is known to encourage mediocrity by overlooking the actual costs of failure. However, autonomy and self-leadership are two things that help solve this problem. While we are open to the idea of failing to achieve good outcomes, we believe that (1) failure is a partially controllable variable and (2) sustainable development is a team and individual responsibility. There are a few things to keep in mind:
- Everyone must be aware of sunk-cost fallacy. Everyone should have a good intuition of when to stop trying, especially when the costs already outweigh the benefits.
- Engineers must be wary of premature optimization. You can read more about premature optimization from this paper. In short, one should not:
- optimize too much when such optimizations are not highly needed.
- optimize too early when the setup is not yet ready for such optimizations.
- Failure can be engineered in three (3) ways:
- have safety mechanisms in place to minimize the impact of such failures.
- have testing mechanisms in place to detect potential causes of failures.
- make failure predictable.
We also believe in the significance of chaos engineering when testing a system's reliability. While it is not yet applicable at Deltafy's current scale, we are open to ideas of engineering a product to fail when it is possible and when it is truly necessary for growth and for testing a product's resiliency.
Innovation is not efficient and it is a painstaking process that often involves a lot of experimentation. Most of the time, there is no certainty in whether these experiments will yield favorable results or not.
R&D is highly important to us, and we believe in the necessity of experimentation in uncovering new insights and gaining a better understanding of a problem. We also look at experimentation as the best way to learn, and we encourage people to freely take their time to learn, even if it means they have to experiment for better understanding.
Time is a finite resource that each and every one of us who are bound to the laws of nature must manage. In the context of work, we trust everyone's ability to use their own good personal judgment in managing it.
It is paramount for people to gain satisfaction from the things they do. In this case, everyone must be granted the flexibility and opportunity to build until they manage to achieve satisfaction and take pride in the things they manage to accomplish. There are only two (2) rules: take ownership, and build sustainably.
The culture that Deltafy tries to foster is not a salary, and we do not see culture as some form of incentive for people to work better or to be more productive. Rather, we want to develop a culture that encourage behaviors that will help transform brilliant hackers into better thinkers and leaders.
We can say with certainty that the culture we are trying to build is one that does not encourage good behavior and professional conduct to parasitize its constituents. Rather, we are building a culture that puts mutualistic growth at its utmost priority. We strongly believe that Deltafy will never function without a solid team, and this team will only solidify by focusing on the growth and autonomy of each and every individual.
We are all ships sailing towards the same horizon.