Render

Our Operating Principles guide our work and decision making at Render. It is a manual for new hires and a handy reference for the rest of us.

Obsessive Focus on User Experience

• Everything user-facing is beautiful and intuitive. We elicit surprise and delight through the tiniest of details, and show our customers we care.

• We minimize the amount of thinking, reading, and clicking Render users need to do. We do the laborious work upfront so our users don't have to. We serve to abstract over complexity.

• We treat Render users the way we'd like to be treated. Customer service is core to UX and a big differentiator in a crowded market like ours.

Quality over Scope

• Work quality is non-negotiable. Scope, release schedule, and team size can all be tuned based on the situation and customer needs.

• Reliability, uptime, and system predictability are all critical components of quality work. It takes years to build a brand known for reliability, and just a couple of incidents to destroy it.

• Bugs and human errors are often a result of faulty assumptions or lack of rigor in delineating error and edge cases. We minimize and verify assumptions and take the time to do things right.

Continuous Learning

• Much of what we're doing hasn't been done before. We sustain world class performance by picking up concepts and ideas quickly and as needed. We collectively subscribe to the growth mindset.

• Failure and mistakes are healthy as long as we're making new ones. Each failure should be examined dispassionately, objectively and without blame and treated as an opportunity to improve.

• We are incessantly curious about technology and people. We stay on top of industry trends and work to advance the state of the art in the field. We are also a social organization, and we work collectively to observe and optimize organizational behavior.

Constructive Conflict

• The best ideas and outcomes often emerge from vigorous debate amongst diverse viewpoints. We encourage intellectual disagreement when conducted with mutual trust and respect. We believe in building on each other’s ideas.

• Being eventually correct is much better than being consistently incorrect, and we focus on getting to the right answer through reflection and discussion, instead of trying to be right the first time. We debate ideas, not people.

• We practice intellectual honesty and strive to see things for what they are, instead of what we wish for them to be. We give each other permission to challenge our point of view.

Global Optimization

• We leave things better than we found them. This includes code, internal and external documentation and company processes and tools.

• We lean on each other: the people at Render are the heart and soul of the company, and we offer and seek help liberally.

• As we grow and priorities begin to compete, we work together to do what's best for our customers and our company long term.