Jun 1, 2022

Our Core Values

Johannes Landgraf Sven Efftinge

Developers architect our future. Moving software development to the cloud is the next logical step in automating our software delivery pipelines on our path to build the developer experience company.

With Gitpod we want to remove all friction from the developer experience to be always ready-to-code and make software engineering more collaborative, joyful, and secure.

As we scale the company around the globe, we started to formalize our culture, write down what we stand for and how we will move towards our purpose. We hope this helps you to understand who we are.

This is what core values are about. Core values define who we are. They are an authentic representation of where we are coming from and a guiding compass on where we are going. They are horizontal to our work, our community, and the products and services crafted on Gitpod. As we are growing, who we are matures side-by-side and while some of these values stay with us, others will need to be adapted over time.

We, not me

We show up for the team, not for ourselves. We trust and empower each other. We make heroes and unblock others.

• Psychological safety and diversity of gender, race, thought, and otherwise are foundational for high-performing teams. When people feel safe and know they are valued for who they are, everything they produce becomes excellent. We make equitable space at the table.
• Ego is the enemy - we think more about each other than ourselves. In turn, you get a team that is rooting for you every single day.
• Asynchronous work allows for more time to build and less time wasted in meetings. It is inclusive for our global team and enables collaboration, no matter the timezone.

Integrate, don’t dictate

We are humble and kind. We first seek to understand, then be understood - with products and people around us.

• Orthogonality is baked into our product design and How we work. We don’t build new solutions if there is an existing widely adopted one. We strive for sane reusable abstractions that can be composed in ways we haven’t anticipated. We build on the success of others.
• Our community is the heartbeat of Gitpod. Their feedback drives our product and helps shape how and what we prioritize. We are committed to fostering connection by supporting and empowering our community.
• Build in the open. Transparency helps build a community of trust. Openness creates access between Gitpod and our community helping us stay ahead. Public when possible, private when necessary.

Students of the game

We build and learn in the open - always with curiosity. We invest in our personal and professional development.

• A culture of feedback helps us grow. With positive intent and selflessness in mind, we freely and respectfully give and receive feedback to better ourselves and Gitpod as a whole.
• We stay entrepreneurial developing resilience and agility. We commit to being stretched and increase our tolerance in adversity.
• We operate as managers of one, taking personal responsibility for commitments, growth, and development. Everyone takes ownership of their responsibilities and is accountable for accomplishing them.

Ship skateboards

We tackle hard problems with simple solutions that delight. We commit and ship the minimal viable change, then iterate quickly.

• Ship it. We can produce value only when we put our work in front of users. Work in progress amounts to cost; loose ends never pay back those costs. Only when we ship things does our work pay off.
• Minimal viable change. The simplest and quickest solution to a problem is often the best solution. We break problems down as small as possible to create the biggest impact. We build skateboards, then cars and we don’t stop there.
• Impeccable agreements. Trust with each other is vital to ship. We are committed to doing what we say we’ll do and communicating when something changes.

When we announced the core values during our (first ever!) offsite in Portugal in March 2022, we gave every Gitpodder an actual Gitpod skateboard with a print of our value 3D icons and a hanger to put the deck on the wall. We’ve also included the icons as Emojis in Slack and we already start seeing new habits from Gitpodders asking during their day to day work: ‘What’s the 🛹 for this problem?’