Work Ethos
This document is here to help me remember how I want to work when I am tired, under pressure, excited by a new idea, frustrated by ambiguity, or tempted to optimize for approval instead of impact. It is not a performance review packet. It is a compass.
I want to do work that is strategically useful, technically honest, and sustainable over time. I want to operate in a way that helps Growth win, helps the company make better decisions, and helps me become the kind of engineer and partner I would trust at larger scope.
Context I Want To Honor
- Company north star: Instacart ultimately has to make decisions in service of long-term profitable growth, even when short-term constraints are real.
- Growth reality: Growth work is a mix of harvesting and planting, experimentation and systems-building, local optimizations and cross-channel orchestration.
- L8 reality: The bar is not just shipping good projects. It is helping define pillar direction, sequencing the right work, improving production excellence, protecting team time, and tying technical choices back to customer and business impact.
Principles
I am a steward of outcomes, not a collector of visible work.
My job is not to accumulate projects or be seen in every important thread. My job is to help the pillar make the right bets, strengthen the systems behind those bets, and improve the odds that the work actually matters. Visibility can follow useful work, but it is not the point of it.
Problem selection matters as much as execution.
I do not want to spend my best energy fighting for crowded ownership or polishing work that is already solved. Before committing deeply, I want to ask whether the problem is genuinely important, whether it is under-owned, and whether I am actually well-placed to make it better. Good taste in problem selection is part of leverage.
I want pillar sightlines, not just local wins.
Local urgency is endless. I want to keep a bird's-eye view of the Growth roadmap, adjacent dependencies, company priorities, and the larger business story so I do not confuse motion in one team with progress for the pillar. A good local decision that damages the larger sequence is not actually a good decision.
Long-term value matters more than short-term optics.
There will always be pressure to optimize for what is easiest to explain in the moment: faster launch narratives, prettier output metrics, cleaner status updates, less conflict, less discomfort. I want to optimize for durable value, clearer decision-making, stronger systems, and the kinds of choices that still look sound after the immediate emotion or politics have passed.
Measurement is part of the work.
I do not want to treat measurement as a downstream reporting task or a tax added after launch. If a project matters, I should be able to explain what user or business problem it is solving, what signal would tell us it worked, what tradeoffs we are making, and what we will do if reality disagrees with us. Building the feedback loop is part of building the thing.
Apply the correct grip.
Some situations need force, precision, and urgency. Others need patience, optionality, and room for better information to appear. I do not want to over-grip and create fear, churn, or false certainty, and I do not want to under-grip and let avoidable ambiguity drift. Good judgment means using the right amount of pressure for the real stakes.
Reversible decisions should create motion.
When a decision can be changed, learned from, or iterated on, I want to move. I do not want to burn time seeking emotional certainty where practical learning would do more. I want to save extended rigor for one-way doors, platform commitments, reputational risk, and decisions that meaningfully constrain future options.
Truth early is almost always kinder.
I want to be clear about tradeoffs, capacity, quality, risk, and disagreement before confusion hardens into misalignment. Delayed honesty creates rework, resentment, and weak strategy. I want to be direct without becoming harsh, and warm without becoming vague.
Mission matters more than ego.
The point is not to be the most central person in every room. The point is for the work to succeed and for the organization to become stronger. I want to care more about whether the pillar wins, whether customers benefit, and whether the team is set up well than about whether the spotlight lands on me.
Protect attention and protect team time.
Attention is one of the scarcest resources in senior work. I want to be deliberate about what I amplify, what meetings I create, what work I make urgent, and what complexity I ask other people to carry. Protecting attention is not just self-management. It is part of protecting the quality of the organization.
Balance planting and harvesting on purpose.
Growth cannot live on either immediate wins or elegant future vision alone. I want to be explicit about what is harvest work, what is planting work, what is foundational, and what is speculative. Hidden planting becomes frustration. Hidden harvesting becomes stagnation. Good sequencing makes both legible.
Use AI where it creates durable leverage.
I want to use AI to increase decision quality, speed, debugging power, and system capability, not just to produce more text or more code faster. The bar is not novelty. The bar is whether AI helps us build better systems, reduce toil, widen access to insight, or create compounding advantage in how Growth operates.
Production quality is part of strategy.
At larger scope, technical quality is not separate from business impact. Reliability, latency, observability, safe rollout, incident handling, and maintainable abstractions shape what the business can confidently attempt. I want to treat production excellence as a strategic capability, not just an engineering hygiene topic.
Protect the team from avoidable chaos.
One of the most useful things I can do is absorb ambiguity, surface the real decision, clarify ownership, and reduce unnecessary churn for the people doing the work. Not all chaos is avoidable, but much of it is. I want to protect urgency for the moments that truly deserve it.
Decision Filter
When I am unsure what to do, I want to ask:
- Does this solve an important problem, or just a loud one?
- Am I choosing this because it is high leverage, or because it is visible?
- Does this help the pillar and company make better long-term decisions?
- Have I made the tradeoffs, risks, and success criteria explicit?
- Is this the right level of rigor for the reversibility and scale of the decision?
- Am I protecting team attention, or quietly fragmenting it?
- Am I being kind and honest at the same time?
- If this works, does it create durable leverage or only temporary activity?
- If I repeated this style of decision for a year, what kind of leader would it turn me into?
Cadence
I want to reread this document at least quarterly, and especially when:
- I am deciding whether to take on a new area of ownership.
- I feel overloaded, reactive, or unusually approval-seeking.
- I am in a major roadmap or staffing tradeoff.
- I need to re-anchor on what L8-level impact should actually look like in practice.
I also want to revisit it whenever the company north star, Growth strategy, or the rubric for my target scope changes enough that my operating assumptions should change too.
Source Anchors
This document is informed by a mix of personal framing and company context:
- The structure and tone of my life ethos in
~/schybo/src/content/ethos.ts docs/personal-career-plan.mddocs/career-growth-plan-template.mddocs/engRubric.mddocs/managerRubric.md- Internal Growth and company strategy docs covering profitable growth, Growth planning, Growth org charter, and current Growth OKRs
The goal is not to mirror any one source exactly. The goal is to keep a durable set of decision rules that still make sense as the surrounding plans evolve.