culture-craft_skill

Overview

This skill designs team culture and sets standards of excellence using frameworks inspired by David Singleton (Stripe) and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot). It helps founders, PMs, and people leaders define values, create rituals, and hire for culture-add to make culture a competitive advantage. The output is actionable: values, rituals, hiring criteria, and measurable definitions of excellence.

How this skill works

The skill inspects team goals, current behaviors, and hiring practices to produce a compact culture blueprint. It maps core values to specific, observable behaviors, recommends rituals at weekly/monthly/quarterly cadences, and creates a checklist for hiring and feedback loops. It emphasizes transparency, ownership, bias for action, and long-term thinking while prioritizing culture-add over culture-fit.

When to use it

• Launching a new team or reworking a team charter
• Defining or refreshing core values and behaviors
• Designing rituals that reinforce desired behaviors
• Setting measurable standards of excellence for performance reviews
• Hiring and interviewing to prioritize culture-add

Best practices

• Limit core values to 3–5 and tie each to specific behaviors and examples
• Define excellence as observable actions, not abstract traits
• Build simple, recurring rituals that make values visible (weekly demos, monthly retrospectives)
• Hire for culture-add: seek complementary traits and avoid homogenous ‘fit’
• Create feedback loops and visible dashboards to measure adherence

Example use cases

• Create a Team Culture brief: values, excellence definition, rituals, hiring cues
• Audit hiring processes to replace vague ‘fit’ questions with culture-add assessments
• Design a quarterly ritual that promotes cross-team ownership and transparency
• Translate product-operating principles into daily engineering and PM behaviors
• Create a checklist to onboard new hires into expected ways of working