Our Values
Values are easy to write and harder to live by, so we have kept ours to the few that genuinely shape how we work and that we are willing to be held to.
We have tried to avoid the usual wall of aspirational words that no one could disagree with. These are the few things that actually guide our decisions, including the difficult ones.
Honesty, even when it costs us
We tell people the truth about what they need, which sometimes means talking ourselves out of work. If a smaller fix would serve you better than the big project you came for, we will say so. If a technology is the wrong choice, we will tell you, even the fashionable ones. We would rather keep a client's trust than win a piece of work we did not believe in.
Quality that lasts
Anyone can build something that works for a demo. We build things that are still working, still secure, and still maintainable years later, because for the organisations we serve a tool that breaks is not an inconvenience but a real cost. We would rather do less and do it properly than more and leave it fragile.
Real partnership
We do not hand over a project and disappear. We stay involved, we support what we build, and when the time is right we help our clients become independent of us rather than dependent on us. We measure our success by whether we left an organisation stronger, not by how long we could keep billing it.
Sustainability in the work and in the way we work
We build efficiently and host on low-carbon infrastructure, because the organisations we serve are often working to protect the planet and their tools should not undermine that. We hold ourselves to the same standard we build to, running as a lean, low-impact company rather than only talking about sustainability to clients.
Autonomy and collaboration
We are built as a flat, open organisation in which the people doing the work make the decisions about it. We think this produces better work and healthier working lives, and it keeps us close to the people we build for. It is a value about how we treat each other as much as how we treat our clients.