Console’s mission is to help developers find the best tools. As part of that mission, we spent time thinking about what kind of culture would best help us achieve it.

We came up with four values:

• Developer first.
• Transparency.
• Simplicity.
• Considered discussion.

Our first Culture blog post covered our Prime Directive: developer first. This blog post explains the second: transparency.

Transparency

Following the hacker ethic, at Console open access is the default. Internally, very few things are private. This means documentation, metrics, and discussion are all open. Good decisions require all the facts and we want our team to contribute their skill and experience at solving problems.

We will

• Share key business metrics internally, such as costs and revenue.
• Explain and discuss what is going well and what isn’t going so well.

We will not

• Share issues where we are one of several stakeholders e.g. team personal issues, or commercial agreements with our partners.

Examples

Our internal Basecamp is a good example of how we're transprent - we discuss and share a lot of data, including a weekly status update highlighting all our key metrics - however, that is not public transparency. The best example of that is this blog! Our monthly status updates reveal what's been happening each month, and we include both good and bad. We've also written about how our internal systems work, with most of the code available on GitHub.

It's not quite the same as an open source project where everything is in the open - our transparency setting is not quite 100% - but we're trying to get as close as possible.