Clipboard Health's Company Values
These values help us decide whom to hire and promote, guide us as we tackle a problem, and show us who we strive to be.
Our mission: to lift as many people up the socioeconomic ladder as possible.
Why we exist: this company exists for our customers: the healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities whose lives we can improve.
In Summary: Curiosity, Initiative, Ownership, & Judgement
In more detail…
Noticing & Curiosity
We are annoyingly curious. We notice clues to issues or opportunities when others may not. We ask “why” and “how” many times in a row with the intention to get to the root of a problem or situation, because we really want to understand it deeply from first principles. We continually challenge our own understanding of our customers, our market, and our business. We avoid unexamined assumptions and think through our actions from first principles starting with the end goal in mind. We actively look for clues to disconfirm our deepest held beliefs and are continuously updating our mental model of the world. What was the reason, and what may have been right yesterday, is no longer so today.
Interested in working with us? See our open roles!
Initiative & Persistence
We have a Bias for Action. We know many decisions are reversible, and take calculated risks daily to deliver results today rather than tomorrow (much less next week) because our customers are suffering today. We are scrappy & self reliant, stretching ourselves to “get the MVP out the door today” rather than wade through meetings and coordination just to get a first version out. When we are a stakeholder, we Don't just say no; say yes to something else; we try to push forward towards a solution rather than just push back against a proposal with “but what about…” sentences. We will never have all the information we want to make a decision, and analysis paralysis can kill us as a startup. We are proactive & deep: when something goes wrong we ask root cause it deeply and extract all the learnings we can personally and for our team. We learn by doing, not by discussion in a committee. Speed matters. We don’t worry about “stepping on toes” - we don’t have toes here, nobody has a monopoly on work they’re not doing.
Ownership
We take full responsibility and accountability for our domain areas and our results, and we own the outcome. We believe that we have agency over what we do, and that no one else is to blame. We own up to where things fall short, and we figure out how we can improve our world through our actions alone. We seek and fix problems beyond our immediate designated areas, so nothing falls “between the cracks.” We fix problems we see quickly, and put processes in place to make sure they stay fixed and don’t happen again. We are proactive - we 1) notice subtle clues that may portend more systematic issues, 2) dig to find out the root issue, and 3) fix the root issue that improves our business for the long run.
FAQ: What happens when I need another team in the company to do work in order for my project to succeed, and they either say they can’t or don’t deliver on time or deliver something subpar?
Answer: Adjust your plan and broadcast your new plan widely, to at least your manager and all stakeholders, ideally more widely. You’ll say something, for example, such as “I originally planned [link to original SMART plan] that I needed the support team to build a separate Tier 2 team for this initiative by July 4th but it’s now June 15th and we’re not on pace to get there, so I’m now asking the Docs team to add this to their workflow by June 30th.” This is not “throwing someone under the bus” or “ratting someone out” - our customers don’t care about our internal niceties. This is merely you as the initiative owner broadcasting the tradeoff decisions our company is already making whether intentionally or unintentionally. Stakeholders have additional context on what else (in this example) the support team and docs team are working on, context on other teams that may be able to help, and sometimes will agree and say “yeah that makes sense” and sometimes will say “wait there’s another team that can help”. Do not let your initiative slow down or wither because a team you took a dependency on is slow or not delivering.
Judgment & Noticing
We are right a lot. We notice clues to issues or opportunities when others may not. We have strong judgment and good instincts. We are detail-oriented, at the correct level of detail for the situation. We know when to be scrappy experimenters and when to build hardened scalable solutions; very few items are in between. We work hard to disconfirm our mental models.
Think from First Principles
We don’t believe in asking “how can we be 10% better” because the status quo is the wrong starting point. Instead, we imagine the ideal impossible customer experience from scratch and back our way into reality. We seek the fundamental truths and reason up from there1. This applies to how we work as well: we re-imagine how product, operations, engineering, and every part of the org should be; not what they’re like in other companies and how we can improve on that.
A great example of First Principles Thinking:
Somebody could say, “Battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they will always be… Historically, it has cost $600 per kilowatt hour. It’s not going to be much better than that in the future.”
With first principles, you say, “What are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the stock market value of the material constituents?”
It’s got cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, some polymers for separation and a seal can. Break that down on a material basis and say, “If we bought that on the London Metal Exchange what would each of those things cost?”
It’s like $80 per kilowatt hour. So clearly you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell and you can have batteries that are much, much cheaper than anyone realizes.- Elon Musk[2]
Customer Centric
We feel each customer’s pain viscerally, even though we must fix things systematically. Talking to customers and fixing a particular customer’s job is everyone’s job. We obsess over how to improve customers' lives immediately and in the long term. If something doesn’t make sense for the customer, it doesn’t make sense for CBH, and we don’t do it.
Humble
We’re low ego. We care about getting to the best results, not about who is right. We care about how much we learned, not how much we know. We care about doing what’s best for the team & mission, not what’s best for ourselves today. We are gracious to each other. We look for ways to encourage and help when possible, even if it doesn’t fall in our “designated” domain. We readily admit it when we don’t know something, and act swiftly to rectify. We want to become better versions of ourselves, so we actively search for our own faults. We cherish feedback, seeing it as the gift it is to help us improve, and acting on it as appropriate with haste & vigor.
Uncomfortably High Standards
We have uncomfortably high standards for ourselves, our teams, and our peers. We believe in quality and speed. We surprise and delight our customers and each other with outcomes that are far better than expected. We imagine what a magical outcome would be, and aim for that, executing with exceptional effort and creativity. We set the standard for our industry in Operational Excellence. We push ourselves & each other towards something that seemed impossible just weeks ago. We are proud of what we create and our reputation with our customers, our industry, and our community. When customers work with us, or when a new employee joins us, we want them to say: “wow, every part of their organization is excellent.”
Unreasonably Fast
We set our operational cadence to “run”, not walk. When someone asks us if they can get back to us about something next week, we reply ‘how about tomorrow morning’ even if it’s unreasonable, because you’ll never know until you try. We’re known as the place that reaches out to candidates within hours of them posting their profile, and always first. When we promise something to a customer, instead of saying “next week” we say “in two hours” because it is easy to differentiate ourselves by being faster, yet so few bother to do it because slow is comfortable. We constantly ask ourselves: “can I get this done faster?”
Relish Discomfort
We have the courage to do what’s needed even if it’s uncomfortable; especially if it’s uncomfortable. Need to jump into analytics but know you’re weak at math? We put in the extra time to learn it and jump in with both feet. Need to tell someone their work wasn’t up to your high standards? We don’t look away or delay despite discomfort and instead act quickly & decisively without sugar-coating it.
See For Yourself
We Dive Deep. Touch reality yourself. We stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. We start at the lowest level of detail. We touch reality by seeing for ourselves:
We talk to customers, not just read other people’s customer conversation notes.
We listen to support calls, not just read reports or look at metrics.
We pull random (or particularly bad) ops & support tickets and read what happened, who said what, look at timestamps.
We read pull requests, not just ask managers how the project went or what happened.
We secret shop the experience our team is giving customers, i.e. by calling our own support number and asking for help on our own Clipboard account.
Our managers know their metrics deeply[3] & are excellent at the craft they lead[4]. They obsess over Metrics and Customer Conversations (see Letter to folks working with Bo) to better understand their business “to the metal” and make well considered data driven decisions when possible. No task is beneath them, or “above their pay grade”. We realize the one customer complaint they happened to hear about probably isn’t unique, and take it a clue to seek out the truth at scale.
Hire, Develop, and “Rehire” the Best
Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent and willingly move them throughout the organization including to other teams to learn & deliver. Leaders realize when they’ve hired someone unexceptional and unapologetically hand that person an exit package to make space for someone exceptional in that role. Leaders focus their precious coaching and development time on growing and rounding out exceptional talent so they can become the next generation of leaders, instead of shoring up underperformers hoping they’ll magically improve. Leaders know that with every new month, every new quarter, they are “rehiring” the person already in a seat for that seat for the next month or quarter, and their High Standards are no different for rehiring that person than for hiring him or her in the first place.
Accurately Self Aware
The more senior your role, the more you have to rely on your own self awareness (in addition humility, and asking for feedback). Though not necessary, most people will stop giving you the critical feedback needed to improve if you’ve been here longer, are their manager, or simply are perceived to be “respected” by others. Do you have a list of your own mistakes? Do you acknowledge them publicly so others can see & learn from your humility? Are you accurate in your self assessment? (Because generic humility or needless self deprecation is also unhelpful).
If I asked you what person A, person B, or person C who works with or for you thought were your strengths and weaknesses, would you get it right[2]? Have you asked them? (You don’t have to agree with them; self awareness is understanding how you’re perceived separate of whether you agree).
This article was originally published on our internal company blog by our COO Bo Lu. It’s intended as guidance for those who have just joined us as well as a tangible, accessible reminder of who we are for those who have been with us longer.
These values help us decide whom to hire and promote, guide us as we tackle a problem, and show us who we strive to be.