Below is Polarr's latest cultural principles and forward, you can refer to the previous cultural values through the links in the bottom of the page.
<aside> 🔧 Maintainer: @Borui Wang @Derek Yan
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<aside> ☝ Last updated: February 26, 2024
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<aside> 💡 The goal of this revision is to make our culture principles more observable, simple, concrete, and universal. The previous versions are overly vague, philosophical, non-actionable, and non-inspirational. As always, our culture is an ongoing living doc and we always welcome everyone's feedbacks and are open to change.
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Despite individual differences in personal values and goals, we want a company culture and value system that our employees are proud of, and aspire to regardless of whether they’re working at Polarr, we want our culture to be beneficial to employees’ lives many years to come for their own personal growth. For our employees, making progress to our cultural ideals should be a rewarding and fulfilling experience at Polarr, and we always welcome new cultural values that complement our existing ones.
As managers and leaders in the company, we try our best to make sure everyone understands our culture, as well as promoting and celebrating employee stories in formal and informal settings that demonstrate our cultural values. When we hire, interview, onboard, mentor, promote, offboard people, we always use our cultural principles to inform our processes and decisions. For example, a strong cultural match between Polarr and a prospective new employee means an employee feels intrinsically fulfilled whenever they demonstrate and make progress to Polarr's culture ideals prior to joining Polarr.
Meaning - When making tough decisions, always ask who are the customers, are we truly understanding the needs of our customers and are we serving their interests in the best ways possible?
Meaning - The more diverse we are as a company, the better we can serve our diverse global community. Our differences are our strengths, and we seek to understand and honor the identities and experiences we each bring to the table. We constantly question how our work can help—or might harm—our colleagues and communities in ways we might not anticipate.
Meaning - We always think long-term, eliminate all distractions, and are not tempted by lesser, short-term opportunities that compromise longer term goals.
Meaning - If we don't allow ourselves to fail, we won't have opportunities to learn. We must provide a safe place for our teams to fail and learn from first-time mistakes, but the same mistake shall not be made twice.
Meaning - We create an environment where people feel comfortable to raise tough questions, voice direct and truthful opinions that might sound unpopular, and ask for help when we couldn't find help elsewhere.
Meaning - Without clear and concise written communication, context gets lost and the signal is buried in the noise. We always write clear PRD, meeting notes / actions, technical knowledge, and process down as clearly as possible.