The document outlines the importance of articulating company values at Clara Labs, highlighting that values guide behavior and can be measured. It details a methodology for developing values through auditing, introspecting, and synthesizing, along with a draft of proposed values that emphasize initiative, constraint respect, feedback, and learning. The document also discusses the next steps for integrating these values into company practices and reassessing their effectiveness after a year.

2. Clara Labs Values 2017.06
Process & First Draft

3. Why Values & Why Now?
● Intentionality. Every company has values and culture, whether you try to
articulate them or not. If you articulate them you can measure yourselves
against them and guide / be guided by them.
● We’ve learned a lot about who we are as a business, product, and team. We
have scars, we have successes. Actual experience drives our articulation of
our values.
● The team is growing.

4. Values Methodology
● Now: Articulate
○ Audit - How do we behave?
○ Introspect - What do we think of ourselves?
■ Team
■ M&M
○ Synthesize - Distill into values.
○ Discuss & Refine
● Next: Integrate, Live, then Assess

5. What are Values?
A person's principles or standards of behavior; one's
judgment of what is important.
Behaviors we already exhibit and want to encourage more
intentionally.

6. What are our Values Criterion?
● Values are always a work in progress, hence versioning.
● Must be easy to ‘grok’.
● Must be memorable.
● Must be actionable.
● Must be distinct to Clara.
● Must reflect reality (no cognitive dissonance).

7. Discussion Points as we Review each Value
● Examples of this behavior at Clara
● Trade-offs

8. The Synthesized Values: First Draft

9. Take Initiative
● Just do it. If you don’t do it, it might not get done.
● If you See Something, Do Something; we don’t prescribe clear directives.

10. Respect Constraint
● The best solutions are the ones that well respect their constraints - time and
resource.
● You can only Respect Constraint by Focusing on the things that really matter.
Prioritize your work according to your constraints; execute solutions that meet
them.
● Be pragmatic, don't over-engineer.

11. Develop Testable Hypotheses
● Come forward with a way to say whether your work succeeds or fails; “you
must not fool yourself”.
● Building New Things requires skepticism of trends, generic thinking.

12. Design for Peer Review
● Spend the time to make sure it's easy for someone else to understand what
you did and why.
● Set up a framework that others can reason about, give them the information
they need, create a process they can follow: you want the benefit of our
collective understanding.

13. Solicit Feedback
● Systemically Listen to our customer, our CRA, our team.
● “Plead For; Try To Sell”

14. Focus on Learning
● If we Learn More, we Win. Most Startups Fail because they don't build good
learning feedback loops.
● Building the processes that get to right answers > having the right answer
one-off.
● Strong Opinions Weakly Held. Finding out you were Wrong is a success of its
own.

15. Be Persistent
● What we’re doing is hard. If you’re not thinking long term it’s not worth it.
● Things worth having are often scary and difficult. Lean in to it; build it like a
muscle.

16. Values - Discuss & Refine
● Take Initiative
● Respect Constraints
● Develop Testable Hypotheses
● Design for Peer Review
● Solicit Feedback
● Focus on Learning
● Be Persistent
Potential missing
Follow through
Consistency
Speed

17. Next Steps
● Finalize this Version
● More Intentionally Integrate (next year or so)
○ Interviews, New Hire Onboarding
○ Live the values, integrate into performance feedback (individually, group wise, company wise)
○ We already insist on and exhibit many of these values constantly, but we will do so even more
intentionally now.
● Reassess (~ a year from now)