We first wrote an internal culture document at Increase on 2019-10-09. It was labeled as a draft since we weren’t sure what principles would hold true as we scaled. Now, 4 years later, we’ve found the way that we work allows us to process tens of billions in payments. Internally, this document will always remain a draft.

The central tenet of our culture is empowerment. It drives the way we make decisions, share knowledge, and make changes. It allows us to move with urgency. Ownership, transparency, and trust are key underpinnings for empowerment.

At Increase, we make decisions by owner, not consensus. There is a single decision maker for almost every decision: technical design, product pricing, hiring, and third party integrations to name a few. It ensures that one person is responsible for the ultimate outcome. While the owner may not initially have all the information they need, it’s their job to solicit feedback and move us forward. We frequently use decision timeouts with a default decision to ensure owners aren’t blocked and to allow others to provide time-boxed input. We’ve found this model to scale well with our organization.

A necessary pre-requisite to empowerment is transparency. At Increase, we commit to transparency by working in public. In practice, this looks like draft pull requests, work-in-progress documents, notes written and shared for every meeting, and emails sent to lists. There’s no opaque-box’ing from any function (except, of course, for personally sensitive information). This ensures that everyone (including future employees!) have access to the information that went into a decision.

Transparency requires clear communication. We operate in at least two complex domains: technology and financial services. Both have their own jargon and acronyms. Whenever possible, we rely on primary sources and avoid shorthand communications that can act as a barrier to information, question asking, and understanding. (In other words: expand acronyms!)

Building trust with both our users and our partners is critical to growth. We maintain trust by keeping our promises, acting with honesty and integrity, and operating responsibly. Whenever we have an opportunity to go above and beyond to build trust, we should take it.

Empowerment also hinges on trusting others at Increase, and trusting they trust you. We’re still a small team, in the early innings of a long journey. We navigate it best by consistently being empathetic, humble, and kind.

Operating this way comes with overhead. For example, disagreeing with an owner’s decision but committing to it can feel uncomfortable. There’s often a temptation to carve out a sub-decision, show how two domains of ownership are contentious and therefore require consensus, or re-open a decision a short period later with a different owner. We’re certainly imperfect but we watch when we’re doing these.

We also watch out for read-access not equating to write access, drive-by comments[0], costly casual curiosity, and psychological safety. If wide transparency becomes fundamentally at odds to psychological safety, we’ll choose psychological safety.

These tenants are not perfect or complete. We’ll add to them and revise them over time. If this way of working resonates, we’d love to hear from you.