Skip to main content

Values

Our organization - mission & values​

Mission: Improve the lives of the people we serve by solving public problems differently

And by "differently", we mean: using participatory, evidence-based, and data-driven approaches and methods.

The following values are shared organization-wide (not just within the engineering practice). You can expect all your team members to subscribe and adhere to these values.

As our organization, we are:

  • human-centered: we put the user at the center of our problem-solving process, and we design with the people we serve, not just for them
  • agile: we solve problems iteratively to allow us to measure results, learn fast, and deliver impact as soon as possible
  • data-driven and research-backed: we use data and research to guide what we do, and how we do it
  • cross-functional: we leverage diverse skill-sets (product, engineering, design, data, communication, and policy expertise) and diverse tools (technology, process, policy, communication) to solve problems
  • collaborative: we work across teams, departments, agencies, levels of government, and nongovernmental partners to advance our work

XP values​

The following are the Extreme Programming (XP) Values. We don't follow XP as a methodology/philosophy at large, but we have found that the values laid out in XP are well-aligned with our engineering discipline and we find them useful to leverage for our engineering values.

Everything we espouse and try to do should fall from a commitment to these values. And when we disagree with a teammate about the best practice or path forward, returning to these shared values as a baseline of agreement can be a useful tactic for resolving disagreement and finding compromise. This is not just your responsibility as an individual, but something that we should be able to expect from others.

  • Communication: We care about fast, clear, succinct, well-formed communication.
  • Simplicity: It's easy to build a complex mess of software. It's hard to build simple software.
  • Feedback: Software is best built through a process of learning, not up-front planning. Feedback enables us to know what works and what doesn't, and allows us to use those learnings to adjust future action.
  • Courage: It takes courage to do the right thing, to choose the hard thing over the easy thing, to tell stakeholders difficult truths, to take calculated risks, to ship a Lean-yet-unfinished slice of your code to production. Note: this goes hand-in-hand with respect & psychological safety, to create a space where we can be safely vulnerable to be courageous.
  • Respect: We need to respect each other to give and receive effective feedback, to communicate kindly, and to collaborate fully. We assume positive intent & we place kindness first. As well, self-respect is key to a healthy team.

Last updated: Jul 2, 2026