Our Philosophy

Purpose

To provide a foundation for all we do at Countable (processes) rooted in why we do it (philosophy).

Scope

Covers our company’s purpose, vision, values, and principles, as well as covering our philosophies on transparency and management. We also provide references at the end that have influenced these philosophies.

Basics of Our Purpose at Countable

At the most abstract level, we want to solve the problem of information context. With more data available than ever, the problem becomes getting the right data at the right time.

To be less abstract, this typically manifests as:

  • Fixing feedback loops. Giving all stakeholders the right information at the right time to optimize decision making.
  • Put relevant data at users’ fingertips to enable automation and effective, efficient workflows.

Examples of how we embody this purpose:

  • Better Customer Journey Systems - Improve customer experiences using web technology. With faster feedback loops via prototyping, Scrum and tools which improve transparency.
  • Easier 3rd Party Web Components: Website Owners should be able to install and manage their website from a single place, instead of having to find and manage many 3rd party component management dashboards.

The purpose statement also says a lot by what’s left out. It helps us work towards the same goals as a team, and helps new clients and colleagues decide if we’re a good fit. We should refer to this mission to justify our projects and other pages of this manual.

Lesser purposes of the organization.

  • Provide an exciting, motivating place to work well, and on things we believe in.
  • Provide an environment optimized for learning quickly.
  • Continuously improve in how we approach our work.

Vision Statement

Do you have a problem that might be solvable using the internet?

Our technology is an industry-agnostic method for testing solutions quickly on the web. Our team developed and operates a cloud-based solution to user and data management in diverse settings including marine battery control systems, patient care, fisheries data management, medical devices, real estate and more. We’ve solved the core web technology problems faced by these organizations so they can focus on delivering solutions to their customers. We prototype your solution in weeks instead of months, based on an existing infrastructure that makes it easy to demonstrate benefits immediately.

One of the many deployments we’ve built and currently maintain in production is a patient engagement and queue system, which likely overlaps the scope with the ‘patient gateway’ requested by the Ministry of Health. According to its users, this system has dramatically improved automated patient access to health care while reducing per-patient cost by a large fraction.

Another of our products is a web-based widget platform that serves content to tens of millions of users per day on over a million webpages.

Our mission is to re-invent how web technology is prototyped and delivered and make it 10x easier for others to deliver their own missions using the internet.

Vision Statement (Original Draft 1)

Codify the many-faceted problem of web technology delivery, so it can be abstracted away and simplified to allow everyone to better focus on their customers. This should be done in a way that caters to the situation of a business implementing the technology.

Back story

From Clark Van Oyen, Founder at Countable Web Productions.

Web Technology Is Still A Dark Art

Over the last decade my journey has involved systems for building out web technology for businesses. This is largely still a dark art with unique challenges. The best developers with this capability are increasingly rare and the competition for their time is fierce. Even if you do land the right person, they’re likely to still miss some key aspect such as:

  • Understanding business priorities and effectively encoding them in the nuances of the code and the software development process.
  • Properly mentoring others to fill their role later
  • Using techniques, platform, tools and architecture that others can understand and later take over.
  • Having a basic knowledge of security, privacy, copyright law of libraries, and other subtleties.
  • How to approach Testing, Deployment and Operational pipelines.

Finding Good Developers, keeping them around, assembling great teams, transitioning their knowledge, and aligning their work with finding product-market fit is very difficult and attempting it is expensive.

The Vision

What if we could codify web development over time to continuously spend more time on the “good” stuff, focusing on your customers and opportunities? What if you could have just a little access to all the right deep domain knowledge in the context of your business? And, what if we could do all the basic things right by default without needing a team of amazing specialists.

This is the core idea behind Countable Consulting. To develop the processes and tools to abstract away the multifaceted problem of building a web technology team with conventions to get the little things right by default.

Values

alues are ideals that our team members share. This helps us improve communication among one team. Knowing these values are held, many things go without saying (and that’s efficient). Values also help us find customers and new employees who will get along with us.

  • Challenging but supporting each other.
  • Act based on real feedback and data from customers and peers.
  • Continuous improvement.
  • Building trust based on shared goals.

Values Survey

We surveyed our team on what values they hold most highly, and the results are:

communication (18 points)
usability (16 points)
feedback (16 points)
Several other items were tied at 15 points: learning, organization, clarity of vision, empathy.

We also tried keyvalues.com and this was our consensus selections together.

Key Values Exercise

Good Questions To Ask

What matters most to our product (Cortico) customers?

What matters most to our corporate clients?

  • Strategic business goals
  • Increasing ROI, saving costs.
  • How can we create feedback loops with clients?

What matters most to our public sector clients?

What do we really want as a team?

  • Flexible hours and location, good feedback, good mentorship and guidance, clear objectives, interesting projects.
  • Working to make remote work better.

Principles

The purpose of this page is to address a specific issue with our OKR process, wherein by focusing exclusively on some OKR we neglect some important assumption we should have had all along. ie, by releasing fast we neglect privacy.

We list principles below in order of descending priority.

We may measure some of these principles, making them into “committed OKRs”.

  • Results are sacred - Processes, Roles, and other inputs are flexible and can be changed when necessary to achieve results.
  • Ownership - Take ownership, or be aware of who has taken ownership for any outcome we attempt. Tell each other “i’ve got this.”
  • Privacy through simplicity - We MUST always be confident that anyone’s private data is secure. When it comes to security private data, you SHOULD use the simplest solution as it’s the most likely to be implemented correctly. The best is to never store private data. Then, if you must store it, minimize the number of people who can access it, and the ways the can access it.
  • No complacency - If something is unclear or suboptimal, we make some noise about it. Also, we should ensure there is a strong feedback loop between peers in a team, and between us, our clients and their customers. The output of what you do SHOULD be highly visible to those it impacts, and to you. Give, receive, and act on feedback as frequently and immediately as you can.
  • Audacity - We SHOULD do work that excites us and has a chance to change its industry.
  • Transparency - We SHOULD do everything in the most public place that doesn’t endanger someone’s privacy or property.
  • Continuous Improvement - Always work to make things a little better than you found them. Many small improvements add up.
  • Prototyping We publish simple but working models of products to real users, as a part of planning them, within weeks not months.
  • Impact - We strive to help as many people as possible as a side-effect of our work.
  • Consistency - We avoid arbitrary inconsistency. Create tools to automate and enforce consistency.
  • Modelling - We reduce complex phenonemna to simple predictive models. Help everyone on your project visualize the desired outcome.
  • Diversity - We MUST encourage diversity of thought, treat everyone with respect, and work to avoid non-meritocratic bias.
  • Usability - We create software with an enjoyable, engaging user experience. Don’t make the user think, wait, or do a task unnecessarily.
  • Asynchrony - We prevent people needing to ask us for things, by putting all information and assets in a place our team can predict.

Transparency Policy

There are data indicating transparency is important: “90% of job seekers say that it’s important to work for a company that embraces transparency.” (Glassdoor U.S. Site Survey, January 2016; *Updated from 96%, Glassdoor survey, October 2014).

Our transparency policy is, any information that we don’t have specific and serious concerns about being released is to be made public.

Further Reasons for Transparency

  1. To avoid secrets. Unnecessary secrets have a cost to the organization because everyone must focus on managing information access rather than other business activities (which create net value unlike hiding information).
  2. Trust. Between any parties working with or within the Company.
  3. Alignment and Clarity. We will be incentivized to design processes which benefit everyone. And failing this, at least expectations will be laid out.
  4. Learning. To help us learn from others, and others to learn from us.
  5. Experimentation. An experiment on practical corporate transparency limits.

Caveats

  1. As mentioned elsewhere, the need to be clear about what information is Confidential and careful it’s not released along with everything else.
  2. The cost of publishing everything on public channels. This should be mitigated by automating by convention and tools.
  3. The cost of ensuring what’s released is clear and interpreted how intended.

Examples of Things We Release Publicly

  • Our operations manual
  • Financial and legal templates
  • (soon) Our corporate subreddit which acts as an advisory board
  • All our brand materials / assets for our company
  • Most (hopefully one day all) of our own source code

Exceptions (Sensitive Data)

We’ll note specific exceptions here, where data is considered sensitive and the minimum necessary people should have access.

  • Passwords to shared accounts
  • Clients’ information (code, correspondence, documentation), or information about clients which they don’t already have public.
  • information on, or belonging to, any users of systems we develop.
  • Employees’ details other than their name, job description, photo, and things they’ve chosen to release.