Delivery mindset

We believe in being pragmatic and moving fast, spending our energy on the right things, shipping code and then rapidly iterating on it.

Behaviours:

• We simplify our work, focusing on getting it to the user as early as possible.
• We practice continuous delivery
• We are trying to make the change easy, before the easy change.
• We aim to solve problems rapidly, prioritising them based on their impact.

Inclusiveness & Respect

We believe that our culture is important, and we all contribute to it regardless of our role or level.

Behaviours:

• We ensure to treat everyone we encounter with respect independently of their skillsets and levels of ability
• Every one of us has multiple interactions with a variety of people across the department and company every day. Each one of those is an opportunity to express and refine our culture. This written statement of our culture is shared, and anyone can contribute.
• We respect the opinion of others and are gracious in our interactions, whether meeting physically or digitally, whether friend or stranger, whether employee, customer or commenter.
• Our experiences and backgrounds differ, and therefore so do our perspectives, areas of expertise, and levels of experience. All in all, we pull each other up, not bring each other down.
• We value and respect all differences in all people (seen and unseen). We aspire to inclusive working experiences and an environment that reflects the audience we serve, where our people take up career development opportunities equally, their voices are heard and contribute to our future. We aim to hire, retain and advance people from underrepresented groups.

Working as a team

We believe that the team is everything and our lowest common unit, set up with the necessary skills to succeed.

Behaviours:

• We fail and succeed together as a team.
• We are independent, accountable and share responsibility. We conduct ourselves with humility, kindness and a calm manner. We debate ideas, not people and we share constructive feedback openly.
• We take the time needed to listen to and help our colleagues with any problem they might have from anywhere within the business.
• We value the experience of people in the team and the different constraints within their lives.
• We celebrate success and positive behaviour, recognizing everyone’s contribution while treating every moment including tasks and failures as a learning opportunity.

We are data informed

We believe that to be responsible in our impact we must be informed by data.

Behaviours:

• We base our decisions on analytics and experiments to reach consensus having heard everyone’s voice.
• We measure our success through data analysis and not through the highest paid person's opinion or the loudest voice.

Empowerment

We believe that all of us want to - and can - make a difference to the Guardian.

Behaviours:

• Meeting the needs of people we encounter across the Guardian is consistently encouraged across all levels of engineering.
• We trust engineers to build the right things, collaborating closely and transparently with other teams.
• We own the problem, not the spec. We don’t wait for decisions to be made for us, we are an empowered engineering function and you are an empowered engineer. We use that power responsibly as we are conscious some decisions may need to be signed off and work collaboratively with our stakeholders.

Technical Excellence

We believe that embracing technical innovation and excellence can help us make a difference.

Behaviours:

• We think we can better achieve the Guardian's objectives by having a deep understanding of the technology we use and adopting some emerging tools and solutions before others. See below few illustrating examples from our history:
  • We were one of the first companies in UK to adopt scala
  • We were one of the first companies to use continuous delivery
  • We were one of the first legacy companies to move entirely to the cloud (AWS)
  • We were a pioneer of the concept of microservices
• We maintain our technical advantage through continuous innovation
• We will be at the forefront of tech, always being curious, innovating and continuously improving.

Knowledge sharing

We believe that it’s our responsibility to upskill one another, sharing our knowledge, learnings and mistakes.

Behaviours:

• We practice pairing to help share our knowledge, grow our skills, and facilitate collaborative decision making.
• We value pairing as a skill which we encourage people to grow, working together to find the styles which are most effective.
• We make time for individual-learning & career development with personal development being our priority.
• We write code for the most junior, not the most senior.
• We actively share at all levels of users and stakeholders, whether it's our knowledge, work, planning or approach.

We care

We believe in our values and what the Guardian stands for. We are not driven to simply deliver the implementation of a specification, but delight in working collaboratively to achieve an objective. We are enthused to do whatever we can to deliver value to the Guardian.

Behaviours:

• We seek to be a pioneer in the way things are done in the business and aim to be seen as a model by other teams and departments.