Manifesto.

This page is the closest thing we have to a constitution: who we want to be for our partners, what we believe makes good work possible, and how we treat each other and our environment day to day. Some of it was written for ourselves first. We're publishing it because we'd rather you read it before you decide to work with us than after.

Mission

A short, deliberately memorable line — the first answer when someone asks what we get out of bed for.

To form striking and inspiring work-together moments from first to last, and to lead the people-centric implementation of real digital enterprise solutions for partners who deserve the best.

Vision

We want to be the partner of choice in the area we focus on, by shipping reliable, profitable solutions and by managing the work professionally — because that, more than anything else, is what delivers enhanced value to clients and to the people who do the work.

Values

Four principles we revisit before we ship and after we miss.

1. Movement with focus and urgency

   Our clients hand us their ideas, their budgets, and a piece of their digital future. When we mess up, miss a deadline, or slow down, it matters — and we take that responsibility seriously.

2. Think precisely

   We care about being right. That means reasoning from first principles, taking the actual shape of the market seriously, and reviewing carefully before we commit. Confidence without precision is a liability.

3. The Mashed software quality

   Through the software we build, we want to push the world toward better products and better services. Quality is never accidental.

4. Optimism

   We are micro pessimists and macro optimists. A little worried about the next deploy; quietly confident about the next decade.

How we work

The next sections started life as an internal company manual. We've tidied them up rather than locked them away — we'd rather a future teammate, a current client, or a friend at another studio could read them and decide for themselves whether what we describe matches the day they want.

Why this is written down

Norms left unwritten get reinvented every time someone joins, and reinvention is rarely an upgrade. Codifying what we believe lets new and existing Mashed people find their feet faster, and lets the people we work with see the rules of the room before they walk in.

Code of conduct

We hire great people from a range of backgrounds — not because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our work better. We expect everyone here to foster a well-organised, respectful, collaborative environment, and to avoid offence, heated altercation, and the kind of behaviour that wears a workplace down. We do not tolerate intimidation, harassment, humiliation, retaliation, or sabotage. We do not tolerate willful discrimination on the basis of age, sexual orientation, gender, ethnicity, race, religion, or disability. The list isn't exhaustive; the principle behind it is. Use your judgment, and assume the same of everyone around you.

Meaningful days, real evenings

Spend your days doing meaningful, exceptional work that makes a difference. Spend your evenings with the people you love and the things you care about. We don't think those two should compete.

How we feel about full-time office mandates

Direct and friendly: we don't believe in them. Coding and most office work happens just as well — often better — from wherever you concentrate best. Remote work is a tool that buys us a higher quality of life, and we don't intend to give it back by accident. We organise around the work, not around the room.

Workplace

The office is a semi-flex workspace. Some people sit at the same desk for months at a time and then switch when they join a new team or simply want a different view. The rule is short: do whatever helps you focus, collaborate, and think.

Overlap times

Meetings are good when something genuinely needs to be exchanged or coordinated. They are bad when they are the default. So we replaced meetings-as-default with overlap times — fixed weekly windows where we are all available together (remote or in person) for the things that benefit from it: questions on running projects, roadmaps, decisions, architecture sketches, pair coding, exploring something interesting we've found.

If you can't make an overlap, give the people who'd expect you there a heads-up beforehand. That's the whole rule.

Headphones

We're not big on rules, but a baseline of focus is what gets work finished. You decide your own attention budget; headphones on is the universal "please only interrupt if it actually matters" signal. Simple, and it works.

Stewardship — workplace and planet

The same impulse covers two things. Inside: rinse your dishes and load the dishwasher; clean the coffee machine if you're the last to use it in the morning; leave a meeting room the way you'd want to find it. Outside: turn the lights off when you lock up; don't waste paper; recycle; compost food rather than bin it. We do these things because we live here, and because we'd like the next person and the next decade to live a little more comfortably than they would otherwise.

Questions or pushback?

We'd rather hear them than not. Drop us a line at [email protected] — a single sentence with a question is always welcome. If something here reads to you like a contradiction or an empty promise, that's exactly the feedback we want.