If you know me, you know I’m not a fan of corporate manifestos that sound good in presentations but mean nothing in practice.

We just published one at SeQura. But this one’s different. It’s the operating system we actually run on.

Why a Manifesto? Why Now?

Because as we grow, complexity becomes the enemy. It creates noise, slows us down, and can make us forget why we’re doing the work.

This manifesto is what happens when you boil down all the processes, methodologies, and buzzwords into the few principles that actually matter.

When you’re 7 people in a room, you don’t need a manifesto. Everyone knows what matters. But when you’re 100+ people across multiple teams, countries, and products, alignment becomes harder. Not impossible, just harder.

We wrote this so everyone has the same foundation. To make decisions the same way. To know what we optimize for and what we don’t.

What It Means in Practice

Here’s the thing about manifestos: they’re worthless if they stay on the wall. The real test is whether people use them to make decisions.

That means:

• When you’re debating whether to build feature A or B, this helps you decide
• When you’re stuck in a meeting that could be an async update, this reminds you why
• When you’re tempted to ship something “good enough” without observability, this stops you
• When you see a problem but think it’s not your job, this tells you it is

We’ll know this is working when new people join and say “this is exactly how you work.” When decisions feel obvious because we all optimize for the same things. When we spend less time coordinating and more time building.

That’s what a good operating system does. It makes the right choices feel natural.

I’m sharing this publicly because I think more teams should do this work. Not copy our manifesto (yours should be different), but do the hard work of articulating what actually matters. Without shared principles, you’ll drown in process, politics, and misalignment.

Keep it simple. Make it real. Use it every day.

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The SeQura Product Manifesto

At SeQura, we’re building more than features. We’re building a product platform that works across verticals, regions, and brands.

This is for everyone involved: designers, engineers, data scientists, product managers, and everyone who supports them.

It’s how we turn real problems into solutions that work.

Our Guiding Beliefs

Everything we do is built on three beliefs.

1. We Solve Real Problems

We focus on real user struggles, not feature checklists. We aim to understand the friction in our users’ journeys, whether they’re shoppers, merchants, partners, or teammates.

A product is only successful if it solves a real problem and delivers value. That’s the only metric that matters.

2. We Take Responsibility

We care about what we build. Not just that it ships, but that it works, helps users, and creates real value.

We’re trusted to make decisions, and we take full responsibility for the outcome. That means acting with high agency: when we see a roadblock or an opportunity, we don’t wait for permission. We move.

Our work doesn’t stop at delivery. We maintain what we build, fix what breaks, deprecate what no longer serves, and keep improving.

We own everything: code quality, user experience, performance, observability, and documentation.

If we build it, we run it, we measure it, and we make it better.

3. We Are One Team

Success is shared. We don’t work in silos or throw things over the wall. We work together from the first sketch to the last line of code.

We share context, goals, and accountability. Every perspective matters. We win or learn together.

How We Operate

These are the principles we apply every day.

Execution & Delivery

Start with the Problem, Not the Solution: Before building, we define the problem clearly through research, data, and collaboration. We avoid jumping to solutions and make sure we understand the “why” behind the work.

Drive for Impact Over Activity: We measure success by the value we create, not the features we ship. Value means impact on user outcomes and business metrics: conversion, retention, margin, cost, or experience quality. We favor simple solutions over complex systems, and we use automation and AI to amplify what we can do. We prioritize ruthlessly, challenge work that doesn’t lead to a clear outcome, and look for ways to deliver value faster.

Ship to Learn, Improve Continuously: We slice work into small increments to learn quickly. Each release and every mistake is an opportunity to make our products, services, and processes better.

Data Informs, Insight Decides: We ground decisions in quantitative data (the what) and qualitative insight (the why). When in doubt, we run an experiment instead of debating opinions.

Quality is a Collective Responsibility: Stability, performance, and craft are owned by everyone. We build quality in from the start through disciplined, professional practices like test-driven development, pairing, and continuous refactoring. We design for resilience, review each other’s work, and monitor our products together. Security and privacy are part of quality, not a separate checklist.

Build an Adaptable Platform: We design with clean interfaces and modular architecture. When we solve a problem for one, we consider how it might serve many, but we build the simplest solution that works. This allows us to scale, innovate, and adapt without being constrained by our own complexity. Regulatory constraints are part of the design, not something we add later.

Collaboration & Culture

Communicate with Candor and Clarity: We value straightforward, honest communication. We default to async to protect focus, sharing work early and often through writing, designs, and recorded demos to keep meetings to a minimum.

Seek and Share Feedback to Grow: Feedback is a gift and the engine for growth. We seek it out to improve our work and ourselves. We share it in a way that is timely, constructive, and kind, to help each other succeed.

Hold Opinions Loosely: We encourage passionate, evidence-based debate. We challenge ideas respectfully but commit fully once a decision is made. The best outcome is always more important than being right.

Make Learning a Daily Practice: It starts with curiosity and a commitment to growth, especially in areas that change how we work, like AI and how it’s changing software engineering. We teach and learn from each other through pairing, post-mortems, and shared documentation. We grow by elevating those around us.

Act with Integrity, Foster Belonging: We act with fairness and integrity in every decision, from hiring to algorithms. We build a diverse team and a culture where every voice is valued and everyone feels safe to speak up.

Pursue Sustainable Excellence: We are ambitious and disciplined, but we’re not heroes. We focus on long-term impact through autonomy, healthy workloads, and clear priorities. We do our best work when we’re rested, supported, and having fun along the way.

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How to Use This Manifesto

Use this to guide decisions, challenge assumptions, and onboard new colleagues. Refer to it when we drift. It holds us accountable to our users and to each other.

This is a living document, last updated in December 2025. We revisit it to make sure it reflects who we are and who we want to be.