Culture and Principles

Rogue Divisions was founded with the ambition to change the world. To execute well we have defined a set of enabling principles that guide our culture, values, and day-to-day operations. Informing how we approach our work and interact with each other.

Enabling principles

These enabling principles are more than just words on a page. We will work hard to integrate them into our actual behaviours and processes. Although we still have much room for improvement, these principles guide us in creating a high-performing yet ethical company culture. They empower us to build products that truly make a difference.

Transparency

Transparency is vital for trust, collaboration, and progress. We strive to be open about our goals, strategies, challenges, and decisions. Everyone has access to the information they need to do their job effectively. We're honest about our mistakes so that we can learn from them. Say what you mean, do what you say.

Unusually high trust

Our company is an unusually high trust environment: we assume good faith, disagree kindly, and prioritise honesty. We expect emotional maturity and intellectual openness. At its best, our trust enables us to make better decisions as an organisation than any one of us could as individuals.

Intensity with kindness

We bring energy, focus, and urgency to solving important problems. But intensity does not mean callousness. We collaborate with humility, trust, and compassion for each other. Colliding with reality can hurt, no need to add to the sting.

Ownership

We take full ownership and responsibility for the work we do, no guardrails. Leaders provide direction and support, but trust team members to drive projects forward. Individuals are accountable for outcomes, not just inputs. We step up, take initiative, and avoid finger pointing. We make choices based on what is best for the overall organisation and our shared mission. Egos are checked at the door. Everybody has absolute responsibility for the end result. A lack of communication is a lack of performance, every misunderstanding is our fault.

Rigorous thinking

We make decisions based on careful analysis and reasoning from first principles. We seek out critiques of our own views and thoughtfully consider perspectives that challenge our assumptions. Interrogate requirements and constraints.

Are we sure that’s true?
What if this were possible?
What would need to be true for this to be possible?
How confident are you in that conclusion?
What evidence do you have for that conclusion?
Why is that? (Repeat ∞)

Bias toward action

Build fast, do it now. Optimise v1 for now, manual before automation, temporary brokenness > permanent paralysis. Pace of innovation is the rate limiter in the long run. Speed creates information and momentum. Proactive not reactive. Make decisive, concentrated bets. Best in the shortest period with the least obstacle, if you can take stuff out and get where you want then do.

We celebrate trying the simple thing before the clever, novel thing. We embrace pragmatism - sensible, practical approaches that acknowledge tradeoffs. We love empiricism - finding out what actually works by trying it - and apply this to our research, our engineering and our collaboration. We aim to be open about what we understand and what we don’t.

Continuous improvement mindset

We believe our work is never done. There are always opportunities to iterate, enhance, and push ourselves to new levels of performance. We question the status quo, experiment with new approaches, take calculated risks, and don't settle for complacency. Fail fast, learn faster. Do not improve what can be removed or simplified.

Aggressive optimism

“We have a duty to be optimistic. Because the future is open, not predetermined and therefore cannot just be accepted: we are all responsible for what it holds. Thus it is our duty to fight for a better world.” David Deutsch

Customer centricity

Understanding our customers' needs is our highest priority. We build products and services that solve real problems for real people. Customer needs and feedback drive our roadmap providing invaluable insights that shape our product design and direction. Remember, customers do not just mean clients, people who view our content are our customers too. 

Tools not rules

Use modern 21st century information system tools to replace traditional control boards as forum for discussion and integration – use a paradigm more similar to social networking