Rigid cultures snap under pressure. Pliable cultures adjust and bend, but they don’t break.

Every company and team faces constant change. Markets shift, customer expectations evolve, and technology stacks can become obsolete overnight. Some teams crumble when their old ways no longer work. Others adapt, recalibrate, and keep moving forward. The difference often comes down to how pliable the culture is. A pliable culture doesn’t resist change or ignore it, it absorbs shocks, learns from them, and grows stronger.

What Does Pliability Mean in Teams?

Pliability is the ability of a team or organization to adjust quickly without losing its core identity. It’s resilience combined with adaptability: the capacity to bend without breaking. Pliable teams have a growth mindset built into their culture. They see challenges as opportunities to learn, and they treat change as the norm, not something to be resisted or feared.

In a rigid culture, admitting that the team needs to change is seen as a threat or a failure. In a pliable culture, admitting that the team needs to change is seen as an opportunity for growth.

Why Pliability Matters

Startups and creative organizations operate in environments where predictability is rare. A rigid culture may feel stable in the short term, but it creates fragility. When something shifts, whether it’s market demand, funding, or technology, the lack of flexibility turns small shocks into existential threats.

A pliable culture, by contrast, makes it easier to:

• Pivot to new strategies without losing momentum
• Bounce back from failures
• Keep morale steady during uncertainty
• Practice calm urgency

Simply put: pliability allows teams to stay focused on long-term goals while adapting to short-term realities.

How to Build Pliability in Your Culture

1. Encourage Transparent Communication: Teams need psychological safety to admit when something isn’t working. Transparency breeds trust which lets you implement change faster.
2. Acknowledge Failure as Part of the Process: When a change happens, call it out. Don’t act as if nothing occurred, explain that this is all part of the process and it is expected.
3. Create Proper Incentives: Do not build incentives around structures like how many people report to a given manager or how many resources a team has. Incentivize outcomes that make it easy for leaders to embrace change instead of protecting their status quo.
4. Stay Humble: Leaders set the tone. If you embrace change and show how to adapt, the team will follow. Make sure leadership models strong team first behavior and show the individual sacrifices needed to make a shift.

Hiring for Pliability

Building a pliable culture also means hiring people who thrive in ambiguity. When evaluating candidates, look for:

• Growth mindset: Do they talk about what they’ve learned from failures?
• High Potential: Are they excited by new challenges?
• Curiosity: Do they ask “why” as much as “how”?
• Grit: Can they stay positive and constructive in high-stress situations?

Hiring only for experience can create brittle teams. More experienced individuals may be more set in their ways and be more comfortable within a rigid structure. Hiring for pliability helps build teams that can evolve with the business.

Final Thoughts

Change is inevitable. The only question is whether your culture will resist it or grow with it. Pliability is not about being unstructured or constantly hedging, it’s about building resilience into the DNA of your team. With the right mindset, processes, and people, you can create a culture that bends with change but never breaks.

The biggest mistake companies make with management is treating it as the next rung on their current career ladder rather than a leap to a totally new ladder.

At Proletariat, we often talked about creating a formal manager training program. We didn’t fully implement it, but we built some practices that helped us support new managers as they stepped into one of the hardest transitions in their careers. Becoming a manager isn’t just climbing a rung on the ladder, it’s changing ladders entirely. You stop being measured by your individual output and start being measured by your ability to help others succeed. That’s a career change, not a promotion.

The Six-Month Trial Period

One of the most useful practices we had was giving new managers a six-month window to test whether management was right for them. During this period, they weren’t locked into the role forever. They would start by taking on a single or small number of direct reports to help ease the learning curve. If they found they didn’t enjoy or excel at managing, they could move back into an individual contributor role without stigma or penalty (and this actually did happen!). This reduced the fear of failure and gave people the freedom to explore whether management aligned with their strengths and career goals.

Another opportunity for training managers is to have them take responsibility for an outsource team or contractors. Some parts of the role are different, like there is no need to do career management with an outsource team, but it can be a good taste of the management path.

Tools and Resources for New Managers

We didn’t throw new managers into the deep end without support. Each person had access to:

• Books and podcasts: Practical resources on leadership, coaching, and communication.
• Mentorship: A more experienced manager who would meet with the new manager regularly to answer questions and share lessons learned. As the CEO I also met with every new manager to make sure they felt supported.
• Structure: The six month trial period had several built in check points to ensure progress was being made and that all sides felt like everything was working well.

The goal wasn’t to make them perfect managers in six months, it was to help them understand the realities of the role and whether they wanted to keep doing it. Being a great manager and leader is a lifelong pursuit and we wanted to encourage people to get started on their own path.

Balancing Management and Individual Contributors

Too often, high-performing individual contributors are “promoted” into management by default because managers are more highly compensated. This can create three problems:

1. Unhappy managers: People who don’t enjoy the management work feel stuck
2. Weakened teams: Direct reports don’t get the support they need because managers are under skilled or disinterested
3. Undervalued individual contributors: ICs that don’t choose management feel underappreciated and that they don’t have a strong career path inside the company

This means you need a clear path to advancement for individual contributors to continue to grow in their career and compensation without having to move into management. By reframing management as a career change, you give people permission to opt in for the right reasons. That builds a culture where leadership is intentional, not a requirement.

Making Management Training Scalable

Even without a full “management bootcamp,” companies can build lightweight structures that scale:

• Shadowing: Let new managers sit in on important meetings and be part of the performance review process before running their own.
• Clear expectations: Define what success looks like in the first 30/60/90 days of managing.
• Feedback loops: Get feedback from their team early and often to guide the growth of the new manager.

The structure doesn’t have to be heavy. The point is to make the transition explicit and supported, but also not final.

Final Thoughts

Great managers don’t just appear. Managers are not born, they are trained. Great team members are supported and given the freedom to decide whether leadership is truly for them. By treating management as a career change, not a promotion, companies can avoid the trap of undertrained management and instead grow leaders who want to lead.

Building a team culture that resists the siren song of staying busy and instead focuses on the areas that truly matter is essential to success. That sounds easy, but finding product-market fit and doing the most impactful work is an art and science all to itself.

To further add to the challenge, even if a team is doing the right work, if it is going about it the wrong way it may drive burnout, be unsustainable, or simply be too expensive. There is a balance to build a culture that can produce the right thing and do the work in the right way.

Defining the Busyness Trap

In many teams, especially as companies grow, activity is often mistaken for achievement. The “busyness trap” occurs when teams (and their leaders) focus on and reward effort, hours, and well-oiled process more than meaningful results. It’s easy to get swept up in the momentum of doing, without questioning if what’s being done actually matters.

Which Quadrant Is Your Team In?

• What are your goals?
  Are your goals set up to judge if the team is doing the right work? Ensure you are not focused on output but are instead focused on outcomes.
• What metrics are actually moving?
  Are your biggest achievements linked to business goals or customer value? If not, you’re drifting into the wrong work quadrants.
• What do you celebrate?
  If praise goes to late nights and beautiful slide decks, but not to outcomes, you may be stuck in the busyness trap.
• How’s your team morale?
  If people are exhausted, but proud of the results of their heroics, you might be doing the right work the wrong way. If morale is high but results are flat, you’re likely doing the wrong work the right way.
• Where’s the tension?
  Are PMs arguing over priorities, or are project managers lamenting constant firefighting or missed deadlines? These areas of friction indicate where you should look to improve.

The Cultural Costs of Busyness

At first glance, busyness can look like a healthy culture: everyone is in motion, no one is sitting idle, and there’s always something to show for the week. But the cultural effects of the busyness trap are often counterintuitive and quietly damaging.

Filling the Gaps Instead of Focusing on Impact
In many organizations, there’s a strong desire to ensure no one is “blocked” and idle time is seen as a waste. When a project hits a delay, team members are encouraged to find any available work, regardless of its importance. Over time, this leads to a culture where being busy becomes more important than working on the highest-value problems. People become skilled at “snacking” on side tasks or low-impact projects just to stay visibly productive.

The Illusion of Progress
When leaders equate busyness with progress, teams may optimize for activity instead of outcomes. The real danger: it becomes impossible to tell if you’re actually moving the business forward. The team’s output might increase, but its relevance to customers or the bottom line may steadily drop. This disconnect can persist for months (or longer) if leaders aren’t disciplined about tracking which metrics actually matter.

Hidden Lack of Focus
A culture that celebrates “always having something to do” subtly discourages hard conversations about prioritization. Instead of facing trade-offs or saying no to low-priority work, teams scatter their energy and dilute their impact. Over time, strategic focus erodes and morale drops as people see their efforts spread thin across too many initiatives.

Busyness as a Social Signal
In some teams, the appearance of busyness becomes a form of signaling: long hours, packed calendars, or constant status updates are seen as proof of commitment or worse. This culture can mask underlying problems, like unclear priorities or ineffective leadership, because everyone appears dedicated — while the company drifts away from what really matters.

The Outcome Problem
Ultimately, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. If teams are judged by how busy they are, rather than by the outcomes they deliver, it becomes nearly impossible to identify when the wrong work is being done, even if it’s executed perfectly.

Escaping the Trap: Finding the Right Work

1. Revisit what matters
Product managers and senior leaders must continually clarify what the “right work” is. This is not static and requires real goal setting and tracking to determine success.

2. Assign projects to outcomes
Before launching any initiative, ask: What metric will this move? How will we know if this is successful?

3. Trim the busywork
Stop or shelve projects that aren’t advancing the strategy, no matter how well-executed. Encourage teams to challenge legacy work and understand why.

Escaping the Trap: Balancing the Right Way

1. Build sustainable systems
Project managers (or leads) should treat the process as a product that can and should be improved. It is their job to measure, analyze, and improve how work gets done without deflecting the team away from doing the right work.

2. Celebrate “how” as well as “what”
Recognize teams who hit results and do it with sustainable habits. Encourage a culture that does not rely on late night heroics but is also delivering results.

3. Listen to the teams
Teams often know the issues and challenges in their work, but may not know how to fix them. Listen to what is working and what is not working and put the focus on areas that everyone agrees could be improved.

Final Thoughts

True performance comes from balancing the right work and the right way. The cost of getting this wrong is real, it will kill your project, company, or team.

A strong culture is built on clarity about what matters and ruthless honesty about where effort is truly making a difference. Leaders must do the hard work relentlessly avoiding busyness as a sense of accomplishment and build teams that resist the trap.

What Are Desire Paths?

The concept of desire paths originates from landscape architecture: an informal trail created when people repeatedly take a shortcut across grass instead of following the paved walkway. These paths tell us what people actually prefer, which is usually the most efficient or convenient route, not necessarily the one that was designed. It is also not a path that is taken only once, but one that is used repeatedly, often by multiple people, to the point that it becomes the standard.

In leadership and management, desire paths emerge when team members ignore a formal process or tool and invent a simpler, better way to get work done. They can represent problems within the culture, or opportunities to improve the organization, depending on how leaders respond.

Why Desire Paths Matter

1. Reveal real behavior and needs
   Desire paths expose where official systems fall short. They show how people really use tools, workflows, processes or communication channels.
2. Signal where to innovate
   When patterns repeat, the informal becomes functional. Noticing these routes lets you turn proven shortcuts into the next iteration of your process or organization.
3. Strengthen trust
   Responding to desire paths tells the teams their voice matters and their leadership is paying attention.

What to do about Desire Paths

1. Identify

• Watch for informal workarounds. Observe how the team uses tools, workflows, processes, communication channels, and meetings. Specifically note patterns and repeated behavior.
• Ask and show interest with team members to understand why they’re bypassing official systems.

2. Analyze

• Determine if the behavior works. Ensure that the shortcut is actually getting to the correct destination without any other issues.
• Understand why the desire path is being used. Ask: “Why is this more efficient?”
• Diagnose if the formal path is the issue and if it can be improved. Consider: “What prevents following the formal path?”

3. Respond

• Pave the desire path when the pathway is efficient and likely to persist. Formalize it.
• Fix the official path if friction or complexity is leading people off course. Or, if the behavior causes issues, examine and improve your original design.
• Create a new path when the desire path and official path need to find a compromise.

When Desire Paths Should Be Formalized

• The path is widely used and effective.
• The shortcut aligns with organizational goals or improves efficiency.
• There’s a simple, low-impact way to integrate it without adding new complexity.
• The team sees it as helpful, not rebellious.

When to Push Back

• The desire path leads toward siloed work or bypassing approval flows or other requirements.
• Use is limited to a few individuals or contexts, not a systemic workaround.
• The behavior is driven by avoidance or resistance, not problem-solving.

Final Thoughts

Desire paths are signals that the organization or process doesn’t match how teams want to work. They’re not failures. They’re feedback. If a desire path is formalized that is a good thing, it means that the organization has continued to improve.

Rather than fight every shortcut or hold rigid to the original plan, leaders should observe where paths are forming and ask: Should we pave this? Or redesign the official route? By being open to change and willing to iterate you can build trust with your team. They know that you won’t force them to march down the official path just because you said so, and instead are ready and willing to find a better route, even if it was not the one you charted.

When a team can keep their cool when everything seems out of control, it is a true super power.

Calm urgency is one of the most effective traits a team or leader can cultivate. When you achieve it, you unlock a culture that can move quickly without losing focus or composure. Teams with calm urgency handle crises with efficiency, meet ambitious deadlines without chaos, and adapt to change without losing momentum.

This approach is built on resilience and trust. It requires more than just moving fast, it requires the ability to maintain clarity, composure, and collective purpose, even as pressure rises.

Why Calm Urgency Matters

Whether a team is facing an ambitious goal or a crisis, urgency is required. Startups, by their nature, have a limited lifespan. For teams or individuals to execute at the top of their game they must operate with a sense of urgency.

However, urgency often comes paired with panic, chaos, finger pointing, or burnout. If that happens too often within a culture it can forge strong resistance to change or an inability to manage team stress.

In organizations that master calm urgency, people are willing to stretch and take risks because they trust their leaders and each other. That trust keeps the pace steady and the outcomes strong, without sacrificing well-being or quality.

How to Build Calm Urgency as a Leader

Breath Before Reacting
In high-stress moments, the most effective leaders pause. This space before acting helps clarify the real priority, reducing the likelihood of panic-driven decisions. As a leader it is your job to train yourself in ways to manage impulsive reactions. Find techniques that work for you, like box breathing.

Cultivate Self-Awareness
Regular self-check-ins help you notice fatigue, stress, or frustration before they derail your leadership. Leaders with strong emotional intelligence set the tone for calm, focused action. Understand your limits and realize that if you cannot operate the rest of the team will suffer.

Balance Urgency with Optimism
Stay focused and professional but remember it will often be your job to remain optimistic. It can be exhausting to maintain urgency and consistent low level stress can lead people to have a bleak outlook.

Communicate with Purpose
Communicate seriousness and expectations clearly, but remain calm and collected. This steady tone builds team confidence and prevents unnecessary anxiety. When urgency is required, be explicit about why it matters and what the next step is. Avoid raising alarms without cause, only trigger urgency when it’s truly justified.

How to Build Calm Urgency into Your Organization

Scenario Plan
Establish clear criteria for when urgency is warranted, such as product launch or compliance deadlines. This prevents urgency from becoming the default.

Compartmentalize
If some parts of the team are not needed to manage a major crisis, do not pull them in. Let them focus on the areas that are most important to them. If you, as a leader, have built trust then they should be able to carry on without concern.

Encourage Smart Escalation
Empower teams to act until real risk or payoff emerges. Escalate only when necessary and avoid micromanagement. Provide clear guidance when you expect to be included and trust your team to handle themselves.

Eliminate Internal Dissension
High stress can lead to infighting. That is the easiest way to destabilize a sense of calm. Nip any issues in bud and step in to mitigate and deescalate. If the team is busy fighting amongst themselves they are not making the progress required.

Final Thoughts

Calm urgency is a leadership and team advantage that combines deliberate speed, clear priorities, and steady composure. When urgency is rooted in trust and resilience, teams not only move faster, they make better decisions and sustain their performance for the long haul.

If you want to help your team work with greater impact, start by modeling calm urgency yourself. Set the pace, communicate clearly, and create an environment where your team feels confident to move quickly, without sacrificing their well-being or the quality of their work.

Are you building an organization to create the right product or the right product that the current organization can build?

There is a turning point where every leader can feel like they go from building a product or a business to building a team or an organization. This can feel like progress, but the more established an organization becomes, the more you must keep your organization flexible.

In High Output Management, Andy Grove uses an example of a breakfast factory where customers can have eggs, toast, and coffee. Imagine the breakfast factory has built an entire organization around optimizing the fastest/cheapest/highest quality ways of boiling eggs, making toast, and pouring coffee. Now imagine that the market shifts and customers now want breakfast burritos. Do you rewire the organization to make breakfast burritos by training new chefs (and getting new ingredients and equipment) or do you attempt to wrap the toast around the eggs to make something burrito shaped?

Hopefully you all know the right answer. That is where BAPO comes in.

What is BAPO?

BAPO stands for Business → Architecture → Process → Organization.

Jan Bosch introduced this concept in his paper called Software Product Family Evaluation and later expanded on it with his essay titled Structure Eats Strategy, arguing that high-performing companies must start with business strategy, not start with the existing org chart and work backward.

How to Apply BAPO

The right time to apply BAPO is whenever there is a major strategy shift or product iteration. When that happens

• Business: What is the best possible product or service we can provide for our business?
• Architecture: What technology, tools, or infrastructure is required to build that product or service?
• Process: What behaviors, practices, and ways of working are required to use the architecture to build the product or service?
• Organization: What skills, roles, individuals, and teams are needed to execute the process and use the architecture to build that product or service?

In practice there are often existing people, processes, and architecture that can be salvaged or changed to support the new strategy. You may also need to hire people to own the decisions on the process or architecture. That is perfectly fine.

The point of BAPO is to remain flexible and ensure that the organization, processes, and architecture all serve the business strategy.

Watch Out for OPAB

It is incredibly difficult to build a team, establish processes, and set up core architecture. However, none of that matters if you are building the wrong thing. Whenever you go through a business strategy shift the change should reverberate through every layer of BAPO. While it may be painful to drive this sort of transformation, it will be worth it if it gives your team a better chance of building that successful new product or service.

Final Thoughts

Companies are built around solving problems for customers. BAPO is a reminder to not fall into the easy path of maintaining existing systems when the problems or the solutions change.

BAPO is a powerful idea that can be a strong starting point of leadership discussions. Use it periodically to review how the architecture, process, and organization are all serving your business goals. Whenever possible, build for flexibility and don’t be afraid to constantly iterate and update these areas as you grow.

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

That quote seems dismissive and overly simple. However, anyone that has been forced to make decisions in high-stress high-stakes situations will know it is true. Scenario planning emerged from military experience, where leaders like Eisenhower anticipated battlefield chaos by running through multiple “what-ifs.” The process of scenario planning is something any leadership team should use as a way to prepare to make hard decisions.

Scenario planning isn’t about building a perfect blueprint. It’s about training your team to act fast, remain objective, adapt quickly, and avoid getting blindsided.

Why Use Scenario Planning?

• Manage high uncertainty: Team face shifting markets, emerging tech, and sudden constraints
• Explore action plans ahead of time: When time is short there is often not time to fully brainstorm and interrogate many different tactical schemes
• Remove emotion: By picturing difficult outcomes leaders can have an easier time remaining objective
• Plans rarely survive contact with reality: Like von Moltke’s century‑old advice or modern battlefield lessons, no strategy survives contact with the enemy.

When to Use Scenario Planning?

The best time to scenario plan is well ahead of when you would actually need to make the difficult decisions or execute the strategy. However, you also want to be close enough to the event that you can have a reasonable understanding of the context and circumstance around the decisions that the team will need to make.

I have found scenario planning to be most valuable about 1–3 months before a major event like a product release or the start of a fundraising process. It can also be helpful to do on regular intervals as you pull your head up to take stock of your current strategy.

Scenario Planning Process

1. Choose your key uncertainties
Review the potential variables that will impact your decision-making. Ideally these are measurable and objective.

Product launch example:

• Number of Users
• Conversion (First Time User Experience funnel)
• Retention

2. Create distinct scenarios
Choose the number of scenarios that make sense given the variables. I have found it to be helpful to start with four and then expand as needed.

1. Best Case: what if everything goes right?
2. Base Case: what do we think is most likely to happen?
3. Worst Case: what if everything goes wrong?
4. Absolute Worst Case: what if absolutely everything goes wrong? (in my experience most teams do not actually think about a true disaster scenario but they should)

Product Launch example:

1. Best Case: More users than expect with high conversion and high retention
2. Base Case: Expected number of users with expected conversion and retention
3. Worst Case — Users: Low number of users with expected conversion and retention
4. Worst Case — Conversion: Expected number of users with low conversion and expected retention
5. Worst Case — Retention: Expected number of users with expected conversion and low retention
6. Absolute Worst Case: Extremely low number of users with Extremely low conversion and retention

3. Map decisions and plans
For each scenario, think through what to do. I like to get extremely specific on the details while discussing the key decision points to fully explore the right trigger for the team to use to execute a plan. There is some value in preparing the core parts of several of these plans but most likely none of these scenarios will play out exactly as you describe them.

Spend additional time talking through the true worst case. Be ready to make hard choices when needed and know exactly where you will draw the line so that if it happens you can move quickly and unemotionally to the right decision.

Product Launch example:

1. Best Case: Pour more fuel on the fire and accelerate! Hire faster, spend on marketing, raise more capital, etc.
2. Base Case: Stay the course and keep executing on the current product roadmap
3. Worst Case — Users: Increase marketing spend or shift the marketing message
4. Worst Case — Conversion: Shift the product roadmap to focus more on conversion
5. Worst Case — Retention: Shift the product roadmap to focus more on retention
6. Absolute Worst Case: Hard pivot, do layoffs, make major changes

4. Review and update
As you gather more information or as other variables change it is useful to revisit the scenarios and triggers. Allowing the team to get comfortable with all the possible outcomes can make it much easier to execute quickly and improvise when needed.

Final Thoughts

Scenario planning isn’t about predicting the future, it’s about being ready for it.

There is tremendous value in practicing making a decision and talking through potential outcomes well ahead of time. Not only can the team take additional time to discuss decision triggers and plans, but they can also spend time building out the infrastructure needed to execute on those plans.

Remember that even the best improvisers practice constantly. And do not underestimate the value of premeditatio malorum.

The most important job of any leader is to communicate the direction.

When you’re just starting out, communicating direction is easy. You’re in the room with every decision. You’re talking directly to the whole team every day. Everyone knows where you’re headed because you’ve said it ten times that week.

But as your company or team grows, alignment gets harder. New teams form, the existing team scales. Middle managers step into leadership roles. Context gets lost, and the clarity that once felt easy starts to fade.

This is where many teams get misaligned and start rowing in different directions, not because the direction isn’t strong, but because they stop communicating it well (or because some team members disagree, which is a whole other topic). It doesn’t matter how coherent or strong your direction is if you fail to convey it across the whole team.

What is “the Direction”?

Great question. This is not the grand Vision Statement on your website. It is the direction you are all headed right now. This can be the current goal or the vision for the product or any information that is critical for the team to make decisions and do their job.

1. Communicate the Direction Consistently

If you want everyone to move in the same direction, your deputies need to be just as clear on the vision as you are.

When you’re consistent, your leaders can reinforce and cascade that message. Without that consistency, the direction starts to splinter, every team creates their own slightly different version, and alignment breaks down.

Tip: Use the same language. Don’t “reframe” the direction for different audiences or teams. You want everyone from leadership to ICs to be using the same words and phrases when they describe where the company is going.

2. Communicate the Direction Constantly

Repetition is critical.
By the time you’re tired of saying the direction out loud, some people on your team are just hearing it for the first time.

You need to repeat the direction daily, weekly, monthly, not because people are forgetful, but because you need to hit an effective frequency for people to remember. On top of that, new employees join, teams shift, perspectives change. Repetition keeps the message top of mind and actionable.

Tip: Tie everyday decisions back to the direction. Show how priorities, resourcing, and even what you say “no” to are guided by the direction. Make sure everyone understands why this is the direction.

3. Communicate the Direction Across Many Channels

Different people absorb information in different ways.
Some need to see it in a deck. Others need to hear it in a meeting. Others need to read it in an email.

That’s why you need to use all hands, written updates, standups, and any other chance you get to reinforce the message. The best leaders don’t just say it once they relentlessly reinforce the direction.

Tip: Don’t worry about being repetitive across formats. Being redundant across channels is a feature, not a bug.

When the Vision Changes

As your company grows, so will your understanding of the market, your customers, and your product. That means the direction will evolve.

If the direction changes, say so clearly and explicitly.

Explain:

• What changed
• Why it changed
• How it impacts current work, teams, and goals

Nothing breaks trust faster than pretending the direction didn’t shift. Your team is smart, they’ll notice. If you don’t name the change, they’ll fill in the blanks with rumors and assumptions.

Tip: Use direction changes as a pause. Take a moment to lift everyone’s heads up out of the weeds and reset. Often direction change can benefit from a stop of momentum to restart again on the new path.

Final Thoughts

If someone on your team is asked where the company is going and why, they should be able to answer without hesitation. They should be able to use this information to inform the tactical decisions in their daily work.

I have found that as a team scales more effort needs to be put into constantly communicating direction. Leadership is responsible for making sure the resources on the team are being applied in the most important areas. The best way to do that is to share the current direction clearly, consistently, constantly, and across every channel.

Startups live or die by focus. In the early stages, it’s easy to convince yourself that “culture” is something you’ll figure out later: after the product launches, after the next round closes, after you hire just a few more people.

But culture happens by design or by default. It starts forming the moment your team does.

I have seen early-stage companies ignore culture entirely, only to wake up months later with a team dynamic they do not recognize. I have also seen founders overengineer their culture docs, wasting time on broad generic ideas and marketing language that never impacts day-to-day work.

This post outlines the essential elements of culture every startup should define.

What Is Minimum Viable Culture?

Minimum Viable Culture (MVC) is the smallest set of cultural foundations that every startup should define early and update often. These foundations don’t require offsites or consultants. They require honest discussion and the willingness to write down what actually matters.

MVC is the minimum viable set of documents (or leadership discussions) that help your team act faster, communicate better, and stay aligned as you grow.

They should be short, actionable, and revisited every 6–12 months or whenever a major change reshapes your company. Think of MVC as a lightweight scaffolding for your culture, just enough structure to keep you focused, without slowing you down.

Here are the four components every early-stage startup needs:

1. Mission & Vision

Why does your company exist?

Your mission answers what you can be the best in the world at. Your vision is what you aspire to become in success.These two ideas help your team make decisions on what you will or won’t focus on and tell a compelling story to future employees, partners, and customers.

Read: Why Does Your Company Exist?

2. Core Values

What behaviors are expected or prohibited?

Your values should help employees make daily decisions. They should be specific enough to be lived, not just stated. They define what good looks like and where the line is when something needs to be addressed.

Read: Why Every Company Needs Core Values

Read: How to Write Your Company’s Core Values

Read more with these examples from Proletariat:

• Understand Why
• Decide Fast and Iterate
• Take Responsibility
• Exceed Expectations
• Be Respectful

3. Cultural Communication Guide

How do we work and communicate as a team?

Every team has unspoken norms and this document will make them explicit. Your communication guide should cover how you give feedback, make decisions, run meetings, and use tools like Slack or email. It promotes clarity, reduces drama, and speeds up onboarding.

Read: Culture Communication Guide

4. Compensation Guide

How do you reward and incentivize the team?

Be explicit about your philosophy on salary, equity, titles, promotions, bonuses, and PTO. Even a one-pager makes a difference in making thoughtful choices on decisions that are difficult to reverse.
Read: How to Write a Compensation Guide for Your Startup

Final Thoughts

One of the most important roles of any leader is allocating resources. Minimum Viable Culture is meant to establish the highest impact cultural tools with the smallest investment footprint.

Take the time to have these discussions and do the work to record the output. A focused leadership team could cover all of this ground in a single day offsite with the proper preparation and research.

Don’t spend too much time making everything perfect, just be ready to iterate. These documents will evolve, just like your company. That’s the point. But getting them in place early will give you a cultural foundation that scales.

This is the final post in my five-part series on the core values from Proletariat Inc., how we wrote them, how we applied them, and how they helped shape our team and culture.

We’ve covered:

• Understand Why — curiosity and transparency
• Decide Fast and Iterate — action and learning
• Take Responsibility — ownership
• Exceed Expectations — ambition and rigor

This week, we finish with a value that anchored all the others: Be Respectful.

The Core Value as Written

Be Respectful
Treat each other, the products, the players, and the company with respect. Empathy, inclusivity, diversity, and trust are critical to creative output. Assume intentions are good and come from a place of caring. Remember that we’re all in this together.

Why It Mattered

Creative work is built on collaboration and trust, and those things fall apart quickly without respect.

Respect doesn’t mean being polite or conflict-free. It means treating people like teammates, assuming positive intent, and holding each other to a high standard without tearing each other down.

In game development, and in startups in general, things move fast, tension is normal, and feedback flows constantly. Conflict is critical to finding the best idea. This value ensured we could have honest and direct conversations, where we aggressively attacked ideas but never attacked people.

What It Encouraged

• Empathy in feedback: Say the hard thing, but say it in a way that helps someone grow.
• Inclusivity in collaboration: Everyone’s ideas are welcome. Diverse perspectives make the work better.
• Care for the product and the players: Respect wasn’t just for teammates. We expected people to care about the work and the audience.
• Appreciation for the company: Individuals and teams felt aligned with the organization and everyone acted like an owner (because they all were).
• Trust on the team: Give people the benefit of the doubt. Assume they care, because they probably do.

How We Applied It

“Be Respectful” wasn’t treated as a soft value. It had practical, everyday implications:

• In art, design, and code reviews: Critique the work, not the person. Focus on impact, not ego. We wanted everyone to show work early but trusted them to take the feedback and apply it. (see my post about feedback structure)
• In meeting discipline: Everyone was given time and space, whether they were junior or senior, and regardless of role.
• In feedback sessions: We encouraged honesty and care. Be direct and critical, but say it from a place of wanting someone to succeed.
• In leadership: We modeled vulnerability, admitted mistakes, and respected the team’s time, focus, and well-being. We took critical feedback head on and showed we would not take it personally.

It also showed up in our community policies, in how we responded to players, and in the choices we made about the kind of studio we wanted to be.

What Made It Work

This value worked because it was woven into everything: hiring, onboarding, communication guidelines, and leadership behavior. This was all in the pursuit of creating an environment where the best idea wins.

“Be Respectful” was not about being nice, it was about building an environment where people felt safe, supported, and that they could do their best work. Often we need critical feedback and challenging coaching to push ourselves to deliver our best work, and that is what we strived for.

Paired with values like Take Responsibility and Exceed Expectations, we hoped to find a balance where the pursuit of excellence would not lead to unsustainable burnout.

Final Thought

“Be Respectful” was never just about avoiding bad behavior. It was about building the kind of team where people feel heard, trusted, and valued, because that’s when they do their best work.

Respect fuels trust. Trust fuels creative conflict. And creative conflict builds great products.

This value was actually not one of the original ones we listed for the team, we previously attempted to spindle the ideas of “Be Respectful” throughout the other four core values. After receiving feedback we decided to call it our as a fifth core value that could stand alone. In retrospect I think it belongs at the foundation of any team trying to do something hard together.

Thanks for following this series. If you’re working on your own company values, check out my guide on how to write them.