New Values

Background

Level is a bold, small start-up with an ambitious vision and a visionary CEO. I joined as employee number 66, just into year two of the company being around. While we had some of the foundation of our products and features, we hadn’t yet cemented a culture of how we work. 

As we grew as a company and expanded our scope, we needed to make sure we were getting our priorities straight and scaling the right way. We needed to work out our values.

The challenge

Determine not only the scope of the values, but write them in a way that was clear, concise, and familiar. 

The process

Define the purpose. Values can do a number of things: reflect how you want to work, the kinds of things you want to work on. They can be visionary or aim to summarize how you’re working right now. It’s important to determine the problem you’re trying to solve, before you start to solve it. For us, the values needed to show how we work together and how we prioritize what to build. 

Stakeholder interviews. Once I had a purpose, I began having conversations. I spoke with leads from cross-functional disciplines (PM, Design, Eng, Data Science), to get their organic takes on what values they saw at Level. From there, I began to distill these into themes.

Distillation and iteration. With themes in hand and a purpose to realize, I facilitated conversations with a marketing and PM lead, as well as our CEO. In those meetings, I reframed and refined the work, running through a few rounds of “say it straight, then say it great” to get to the gist of the value first, before making it ready for prime time. 

Finalize and illustrate. Once we had the values written and done, I briefed and gave creative direction to our brand designer for an icon system. She then turned the concrete ideas into abstract icons, to pair and ship!