🛰️ Signal Boost

Build Values Like You Build Systems — With Purpose

A strong team culture doesn't emerge from thin air. It's the result of deliberate design, not good vibes and trust falls.

When engineering leaders skip the work of clarifying and reinforcing values, they leave teams vulnerable to misalignment, slow decision-making, and internal friction. But when you intentionally design your values around your specific goals and environment, you unlock clarity, autonomy, and high performance.

Context Is Everything

The right values for a startup in growth mode will likely clash with those needed for a legacy enterprise in optimization mode. If you copy values from a company with a different business model, stage, or market, you risk building a culture that doesn't serve your needs.

Values are a function of context—and your context is unique.

Consider two high-performing teams I know. One works on core infrastructure and prioritizes resilience and thoroughness above all else. The other focuses on product growth and values speed and experimentation. Both teams ship excellent work, but each operates from a fundamentally different compass.

The infrastructure team asks: "What could break?" The growth team asks: "What could we learn?" Neither approach is wrong—they're optimized for different outcomes.

Your Cultural Operating System

Your values are not branding. They're the behavioral spec your team uses to make decisions, collaborate, and resolve conflict.

That's why alignment isn't just about picking values you like—it's about choosing ones that reinforce the outcomes you're optimizing for. And then operationalizing them in ways people can see and feel in their daily work.

If one of your values is "customer obsession," how does that show up in your sprint planning? If you value "technical excellence," what does that mean for your definition of done? Abstract values without concrete behaviors are just wall art.

The Implementation Challenge

Values need consistent reinforcement and practical feedback loops—not just slide decks and motivational posters. Leaders have to model them before anyone else will. That includes surfacing misalignment, holding one another accountable, and recognizing when the culture is drifting from what you want it to be.

I've seen teams where leaders preached "transparency" but held closed-door strategy sessions. Where they championed "learning from failure" but only celebrated wins. The gap between stated and lived values is where trust dies.

The Engineering Mindset

The bottom line? Don't treat values as a formality. Treat them as a critical piece of engineering design.

Just like you wouldn't ship code without testing it, you shouldn't expect values to work without deliberately designing, implementing, and iterating on them. If you don't intentionally shape your culture, something else—often misaligned inertia—will shape it for you.

The question isn't whether you have values. You do. The question is whether you've designed them on purpose.

🔗 Lead Link

One standout article from the web that delivers signal, not noise.

Embodying a Great Engineering Culture — Mark Grebler

💡 Why it matters

Values are more than words. They’re reflected in habits, decisions, and tone. This article shows how culture sustains its shape when leaders deliberately live, reinforce, and correct values, making them feel real in day-to-day work. It offers practical insight into the “operational side” of culture design—exactly what you need when you want values to stick.

🛠️ Tactical Byte

A quick tip or tactic you can try this week.

Turn your values into behaviors.

Values like “ownership” or “transparency” are only useful if your team knows what they look like in practice. Without clear behaviors, values become vague ideals rather than useful tools.

Here’s how to make values actionable:

• Define 2–3 observable behaviors for each value. What does “taking ownership” actually mean in your org? Is it proactively raising blockers? Following through on commitments? Write it down.

• Use them in rituals. Values should shape how you run standups, retros, and 1:1s. They should influence how you give feedback, recognize success, and plan work.

• Reward visibly. Publicly highlight moments when someone exemplifies a value. This turns your values into a shared language of what “good” looks like.

Values don’t drive behavior. Clear expectations and consistent reinforcement do.

🎙️ From the Field

An insight, quote, or story from an experienced tech leader.

A friend of mine, let’s call him Marcus, stepped into a Head of Engineering role at a fast-growing logistics startup. When he arrived, the company had values written on the wall—things like “Move Fast” and “Crush It”—but none of those ideals showed up in the engineering team’s actual behavior. Dev cycles were slow, everyone was burned out, and collaboration between teams was almost nonexistent.

Instead of rewriting the values outright, Marcus began with observation. He talked with engineers at every level. He sat in on planning meetings. He shadowed customer support. And he started asking questions: What are we actually optimizing for? What behaviors are getting rewarded?

From that, he crafted a new set of engineering values—not slogans, but working principles. Things like “Solve for root cause,” “Communicate early, even if it’s uncomfortable,” and “Prioritize systems thinking over heroism.” He didn’t introduce them in an all-hands meeting. He rolled them out by modeling them himself and reinforcing them in 1:1s and retros.

One year later, those values are deeply embedded. Onboarding includes them. Engineers reference them in pull requests and post-mortems. The team didn’t just change its habits—they redefined how they work together, and how they win.

💬 Open Threads

Something to chew on, debate, or share back—open questions for curious minds.

• Have you ever worked in an organization where the stated values didn’t match the day-to-day reality? What impact did that have?

• What values do you believe are non-negotiable in a high-performing engineering team?

• When you’ve seen culture change initiatives succeed, what made them stick?