Thread by @jrhunt

(Thread)
One of my favorite things about teams at AWS is that they all have these little subsections on their internal wiki pages:
"Our Tenets, unless you know better ones":

Each one is typically an extension of an existing Leadership Principle but expanded specifically for the unique challenges and skills of that team.
amazon.jobs/en/principles

Sometimes the tenets are directly contradictory but they have caveats e.g.:
Quality over Speed
⭐️"We design and test with tremendous rigor to earn customer trust... unless:"
Speed over Quality
⭐️ "If a customer is in pain we react quickly to get them out of pain"

Here are a few of my favorites taken from all across the company:
⭐️Respect Interruption - Engineers need stretches of uninterrupted time to tackle hard problems
⭐️Talk with developers, not at them
⭐️Correct, durable, and available. These are table stakes.

⭐️Intuitive Performance: we do not hide complicated operations behind simple-looking interfaces.
⭐️Bit-wise can be byte-foolish

There's even a "Tenets Tenets" page to help your team derive your own tenets.
My favorites from that page:
⭐️Use tenets to focus your team on delivering value to the customer
⭐️Distinguish rather than elevate

Another common technique I've seen on "Team" pages is organization with subtitles like "bug us first if you don't know who to talk to" and "we actually do work please don't bug us"

What are your favorite team charters or team tenets?