Tech + Product Leadership Values

This article was written by Ed Conolly, who leads the tech teams at OVO, who are building the intelligent energy company of the future. 

Towards the end of 2017 we spent some time as a leadership team working on our key values. We've been growing a lot as a business, taking on more engineers and engineering managers. Rapid growth can be a difficult thing to handle, so we decided that to continue to have a productive and aligned leadership team it would be a worthwhile exercise to agree our key values. It's also a useful tool for us during the hiring process, to make sure we're bringing in new employees who share our core values.

We see our values as sitting in the chain of mindset -> values -> principles -> practices (something you may be familiar with from Agile). It's from these values we'll be able to create our principles and practices and help create a certain mindset which permeates all our actions as a management team.

So here they are, our leadership values:

Curiosity

A strong desire to learn and acquire knowledge through experience

Action

Proactively effecting change

Collaboration

Working together

Clarity of Purpose

A compelling and clear reason for the direction and strategy of our work

Transparency

Not hiding or controlling information

Trust

We believe that others have the right intentions and do the job to the best of their ability

There's still work to be done to really embed our values but agreeing as a group what's most important to us has been a really useful exercise.