We just published our Product Manifesto at SeQura. It’s the result of distilling everything we’ve learned about building products at scale into a single, clear document.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know I’m not a fan of corporate manifestos that sound good in presentations but mean nothing in practice. This isn’t that. This is the operating system we actually run on.

Why a Manifesto? Why Now?

So why do we need this? Because as we grow, complexity becomes our biggest enemy. It creates noise, slows us down, and can make us forget why we’re doing the work.

This manifesto is our act of distillation. We’ve boiled down all the processes, methodologies, and buzzwords into the essential principles of how we build great products.

It’s our shared compass for navigating that complexity, ensuring we all have a clear path forward and pull in the same direction.

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 because we want everyone (designers, engineers, data scientists, product managers, and everyone who supports them) to have the same foundation. To make decisions the same way. To know what we optimize for and what we don’t.

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The SeQura Product Manifesto

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

This Product Manifesto is for everyone involved in making that happen: designers, engineers, data scientists, product managers, and all who support them.

It sets the shared standard for how we turn real user problems into valuable, well-crafted solutions.

Our Guiding Beliefs

Everything we do is built on three foundational beliefs. They are the heart of our culture.

1. We Solve Real Problems

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

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

2. We Take Responsibility

We care deeply 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 in return, 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 the full lifecycle: 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 pass things over the wall. We work together from the first sketch to the last line of code and beyond.

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

How We Operate

These are the principles we apply every day to bring our beliefs to life.

Execution & Delivery

Start with the Problem, Not the Solution: Before building, we define the problem clearly, through research, data, and close collaboration with stakeholders. 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 is tracked through meaningful impact on user outcomes and business metrics: conversion, retention, margin, cost, or experience quality. This means we favor simple, evolvable, and elegant solutions over complex systems, and we use automation and AI to amplify our capabilities. We prioritize ruthlessly, challenge work that doesn’t lead to a clear outcome, and creatively look for ways to deliver value faster.

Ship to Learn, Improve Continuously: We slice work into small, valuable increments to learn quickly. We embrace a culture of constant improvement, using each release and every mistake as an opportunity to make our products, services, and processes better.

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

Quality is a Collective Responsibility: Stability, performance, and craftsmanship 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.

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 crippled by our own complexity.

Collaboration & Culture

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

Seek and Share Feedback to Grow: We believe feedback is a gift and the primary engine for growth. We actively seek it out to improve our work and ourselves. We share feedback with our colleagues in a way that is timely, constructive, and kind, with the sole purpose of helping 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: Continuous improvement is core to our mission. This begins with our own curiosity and a personal commitment to continuous growth, especially in transformative areas like AI and how it’s changing software engineering. We actively 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: Our foundation is ethical conduct. We act with fairness and integrity in every decision, from our hiring practices to our algorithms. We are committed to building a diverse team and an inclusive culture where every voice is valued and everyone feels psychologically safe.

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 well-rested, supported, and having fun along the way.

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How to Use This Manifesto

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

This manifesto is a living document, last updated in June 2025. We revisit it periodically to ensure it continues to reflect who we are and who we aspire to be.

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 will be different), but do the hard work of articulating what actually matters.

If you’re building products at scale, you need shared principles. Not because you want to sound like a “real company,” but because without them, you’ll drown in process, politics, and misalignment.

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