The Birth of DelightRoom Principles

The First Step to a Healthy Culture: Establishing Organizational Core Values

I don't really need to explain the importance of "organizational culture" these days—everyone knows it. A healthy organizational culture is essential for driving "sustainable" performance. I've heard that even Amazon prioritizes a solid culture over a brilliant strategy. Why? Because people are the ones executing that brilliant strategy, and culture is the environment that enables them to execute it well. Simple logic.

The real question is how to build that organizational culture. Here at DelightRoom, we’ve developed our own unique culture over the years. But it’s not like we had this detailed master plan drawn up from day one—it just naturally took its current shape over time. After all, culture is inherently a vibrant blend of the different personalities of our members, and it flexes and shifts depending on the organization's context. It's definitely not a topic where you can just force a predetermined answer.

Nevertheless, just like our personal "values" in life, we can establish broad directions that don't easily change (though, sure, a massive incident might shift them). That's where organizational culture starts. We call these our "core principles."

DelightRoom has always had these largely unchanging values (our cultural direction), and they've only grown stronger and more resilient thanks to constant feedback from our members. However, as our headcount gradually increased, the power of word-of-mouth started to wane, and occasionally, it even backfired (hello, misunderstandings and miscommunications). It was finally time to start thinking deeply about how to efficiently build and scale a healthy organizational culture.

Creating Simple Core Principles

1. Extracting Core Keywords

We needed to put our unique values in writing. True to our flexible nature, we’ve always valued various concepts while building our product and organization, but now we had to distill them down to the absolute most important ones. We pictured our organization’s ultimate "success" and asked ourselves, "What cultural traits led to this success?" Because we were organizing existing behaviors by priority rather than inventing rules out of thin air, a bunch of core values popped up effortlessly. Using the framing, "Our Delighters act like X. We think like Y," we began extracting the keywords that fit perfectly in those blanks.

2. Reconstructing Keyword Sentences

At first, we listed the keywords as nouns, but later reconstructed them into verbs. Framing sentences as verbs rolled off the tongue better, making them much easier to quote in everyday conversations. Among the many drafts, some combined two or more principles, but those ended up long and lost their intuitive punch. So, we let go of our greed and compressed them as concisely as possible.

3. Endless Rounds of Revisions

When you debate for a long time, Value A and Value B eventually start to blur together, and you fall into the illusion that the current draft is "good enough." Just when we thought we were wrapping things up, we'd review it in the next meeting and realize it still felt clunky. Because we were having deep discussions about intangible values—something that would have a massive company-wide impact—we realized it was crucial to tackle these debates only when we had clear minds and peak concentration.

And just like that, our DelightRoom Principles were completed.

Early on, we used the working title "Let’s Delight," but we ultimately decided that a more formal and intuitive term was fitting, officially naming them the "DelightRoom Principles." (Instead, we kept Let’s Delight as a subtitle.)

Looking at the final result, I couldn't help but feel that the everyday vibe of a Delighter was perfectly captured in this single document.

From the first principle representing our product team's VoC meeting and SDD (Support Driven Development) culture, to our problem-definition-focused product planning culture that obsesses over the "Why" rather than the "How," our growth-addicted culture of stepping out of the Comfort Zone, and our fiercely positive culture embodied by shouts of "Let's go!" and "Okay!"—it really hit me that these principles are a mirror reflection of our daily lives.

Two keys to a healthy organizational culture
- Simple core principles: This post
- Consistent mechanisms: Next post

Once you have your core principles, you need to build mechanisms to embed them into every nook and cranny of the organization. After all, core principles that are disconnected from the reality of the organization aren't really core principles at all. Fortunately for us, these principles are already deeply woven into most aspects of our daily routine. In fact, it’s exactly because we reverse-engineered these core principles from our well-established daily habits. We essentially extracted them from existing phenomena rather than creating them out of nothing.

However, just as our principles state, we constantly think about and experiment with better approaches (Always Strive for a Better Way). It's only by stepping away from what’s familiar that we can unlock massive, previously unknown growth (Grow beyond Comfort).

How can these core principles—which perfectly capture our everyday lives—contribute to our performance even more impactfully?

We’ll dive into the story about those mechanisms in the next post. :)

⏰ We're looking for folks to join DelightRoom and help build this organizational culture with us 🙌