Personal tenets

This is a personal list of tenets, which help me think through my priorities and help me make difficult decisions.

I don't expect others to have the same priorities or make the same decisions. These tenets are specifically aimed at my personal strengths and weaknesses.

I want to stress that these help make tough decisions. They are less useful for situations where the choice or tradeoff is clear.

Unless you know better, favour...

People over _

Everything we do stems from people and is meant for people. Their needs take precedence. Favour choices that empower, enable or elevate people over most other choices.

Transparency over clarity

If others know about your challenges, they can help you overcome them. Favour communication choices that allow others to know what is going on over those that try to reduce noise.

Momentum over correctness

It is more important to keep moving than to guarantee correctness at every step. Favour the choice that builds more momentum.

Learning over short-term success

Sustainable success requires lessons to be learned and experience to be built up. This is more important than continual short-term success. Favour the choice that enables you to gather more knowledge.

Feedback over intuition

You can't build a successful business without exposing yourself to customer feedback. Favour the choice that gives more exposure to that feedback.

Iteration over polish

Building the right thing in the long term requires iterating on product decisions. Favour the choice that allows you to try something new with the product over polishing an existing feature.

Delivery over control

We can't scale by trying to do everything ourselves. Favour the choice that maximises delivery over the one that maximises your ability to control details.

I'm currently struggling with the following (circa 2026-06)

Learning over short-term success - this implies an "obvious" point that we still want long-term success. I'm having a hard time resolving the trade-off between tactical successes which compound into longer-term success, vs strategies that pay off in the long run despite the lack of outut in the short term. The former is generally way more attractive to me - it helps me know I'm delivering my value often. However, I know the latter exists and I can't easily recognise when to engage in it.
Iteration over polish - the key to this one is about getting your stuff out there. However, I feel there's something to be said about truly great experiences and products needing some level of stability and focus so that you can notice and pay attention to detail. I found that going hard on iteration is in tension with this stability and I'm not confident about when to make space for that stability.