What are tenets?

Tenets are the principles that guide decision making for the teams. They are the key values that the teams abide by and represent their work. Tenets explain how the team approaches the problem and how they deal with conflicting priorities. They are the tie-breakers and enable teams to make hard trade-off decisions. They are the ones that the teams can easily fallback on when in doubt or making a difficult call. Hence they play a very important role in daily work as well as decision making. 

At Amazon, every team/project/program has tenets. These tenets are always mentioned in every document the team writes so that the reader has the knowledge about them and the backdrop of why some decisions are made the way they have been made. Usually, the tenets are created at the beginning of the project or during formation of a new team.  

Process of creating tenets

When creating tenets for a new team or project, there are a few things that need to be followed for them to be useful and effective. 

1. At least one tenet should capture the customer value delivered by the team. It should reflect how team’s work impacts on delivering value to the customer
2. The tenets should be able to tell what the team works on. It should be clear and precise
3. The tenet should be team-specific. They should not be generic in any way. They should reflect the work done by the team and be easily distinguishable. 
4. The tenets should be easy to remember. They should not be longer than one line or two sentences. As these tenets will be used for daily decision making, it is important that the tenets are not complex in understanding and hence should be as simple as possible
5. The tenets should take a stand. As their use is to guide decision making, they should clearly reflect the team’s stance. It has to sound black and white; no gray areas permissible. Taking a stand shows priorities of the teams and thus helps when faced with conflicting or competing priorities. 
6. The tenets should be durable and strategic. They should not change frequently even if the team changes direction often. As tenets are principles, they should lay a strong foundation that is grounded on first principles and not changed frequently.
7. The tenets, when created, should be applicable right away. They should not be something that is dependent on something else or waiting for something to happen in the future. They should be ready to use.

Best practices

• The tenets should have inherent tension in them. They should create controversy and healthy debate between the team members. The other side or the flip side of the tenet should equally be true and important. They should be such that the flip side could be a tenet for other teams as well. The reason why you select the other side reflects the hard decision that team will make and the identity of the team. Thus, tenets can then be used as tie-breakers in conflicting scenarios. 
• The tenets should be crisp and catchy. It will make them easy to remember. Use a minimum number of words to clarify maximum information. 
• The tenets should be eye-friendly i.e. they should not be more than 7 per team. If there is a need to add one then the team should let go of any other to have the place for new tenet. This should reflect in the priorities and principles of the team. The number 7 is suggested as it is the maximum number of things that the working memory can remember. 
• Every tenet should be distinct and should clarify a different message or topic. No two tenets should talk about the same topic. This helps create clarity on what is the most important thing for each topic for the team.
• The order of the tenets is very important. The one’s at the top are considered as most important in comparison to tenets below them. 
• The tenets should give enough room for innovation for the teams. They should not prescribe teams on what to do and be durable enough to take a long term approach.

Pitfalls 

Following are the most common pitfalls observed when using the tenets by teams:

• Avoid stating the obvious. When writing the tenet ask yourself “Who does not do that?” If the answer is obvious then it is not the right tenet to opt for
• Avoid multiple ideas per tenet. Each tenet should reflect only one idea or topic. This enables it to keep it simple and easy. 
• Avoid being verbose. The choice of words is very important and it reflects the priorities. In addition, concise tenet helps it to make it memorable
• Avoid acronyms and jargons. Although tenets are primarily for the team, they are also useful by other teams to understand your decision making process or priorities. Help others by avoiding the use of acronyms or jargons specific to your team and make it easy to read for everybody.

Example tenets of a team/charter

The below is a example tenets for EU Accessibility team that I was part of:

1. Accessibility is inclusivity. Customers with disabilities must have equal access to all experiences. We hold teams accountable to meet the accessibility bar through our mechanisms.
2. Customer delight is our north star. We focus on those metrics that delight our customers with disabilities (e.g. CSAT, NPS) rather than traditional financial metrics. We do not make decisions solely on financial metrics.  
3. Customer value over business impact. All customers have equal rights to a seamless shopping experience. We do not debate over incremental business impact when dealing with CX blockers for customers with disabilities. 
4. Always ask, Never assume. Direct feedback from customers with disabilities is our main input. We always seek out perspectives from customers with disabilities before interpreting what they need from our experiences.
5. Innovate, to elevate. We solve accessibility problems that elevate customer experiences. We strive for impact by focusing on new customer innovations or by removing systemic problems but always leapfrog from our current state.   
6. Serve the severely impacted. We focus on customers with all disability types. We prioritize disability needs that benefit severely impacted customers and not just the number of impacted customers.