Let’s start at the top. Googling “design team values” will get you plenty of reference material, but what do we mean when we say values?

Well.

We’re approaching values as foundations for behavior that gets us the results we want. It’s about deciding how we want our team to design and collaborate, and arranging that into values to measure against. It’s about defining how we do design.

By writing out our values we codify our successes and our mistakes.

How do we "HOAGIES"?
 - Our team supports the company. Our values should support HOAGIES and **explain how** we uniquely embody them.

Avoid truisms
- “Ship great software quickly” doesn’t really mean anything. Of course we want to ship good software quickly, but how do we do that here at Faithlife?

The opposite of a value should be another value
- What will acting on a value cost us? What opportunities are we saying yes to, and intentionally saying no to?

Values are unique to the team
- We contribute to the company in a way other teams don’t. We operate differently than product design teams in other companies. What is it that we do differently?
- What are we trusted with at Faithlife? What aren’t we trusted with (and rightly so)?

Values should come from the culture we've already built
- How do we behave when we're doing great design?
- How do we behave when we're collaborating well?
- What are we proud of? What attitudes and actions are behind our most successful projects?
- What do we want to get better at? When a situation went south, how did we change our attitudes? Our behavior?
- How do we tend to define a successful or unsuccessful project?
- What unspoken values do we act out already?

Questions to help refine your ideas for values:
- How would it change our relationships or our interactions?
- Does it support the kind of work we want to be doing?
- How might it be misinterpreted?
- Would some but not all job applicants resonate with it?

P.S. Thanks for taking the time to do this. Our future selves will thank you.