Guiding Principles
Three Guiding Principles steer our work here at Desmos Studio. They help us navigate through tough decisions, and they hold us accountable for the outcomes of those decisions. They also help other people and organizations understand our values and decide whether we’d be good partners in their work.
We believe that everyone can be a math person.
Our mission is to help everyone learn math, love math, and grow with math. We acknowledge the negative experiences many people have had with math, often influenced by gender, race, ethnicity, ability/disability, and other characteristics. We strive to counteract these experiences and help everyone feel powerful, confident, and joyful while using math to learn, work, and play.
As we make decisions, we ask ourselves:
- How can we make our tools and company more inviting to people who aren’t yet confident in their math skills?
- How can we showcase the brilliance of underrepresented people and communities?
- How can we help connect the math taught in classrooms to the math used in the world?
- Where can we advance accessibility in math, such as for people who are visually impaired or blind?
We believe that quality takes time.
Our top priority is to provide our community with polished, carefully crafted products that improve year after year. We favor long-term, sustainable growth over short-term wins, and we bet on ideas that might take years to pay off. We front-load hard work and rapid iteration, knowing that our community, team, and company will benefit from today’s efforts for a long time to come.
As we make decisions, we ask ourselves:
- Where can we carve out time and space for experimentation and feedback?
- How will our decisions impact our community’s long-term trust in us and our products?
- What can we do or learn today that will allow us to move even faster and more confidently in the future?
- How can we cultivate an environment where people on our team can grow for many years?
We believe that we make better decisions together.
We find that our best work happens when leaders are accountable to the people they lead, ideas are welcomed from everywhere inside (and outside) the company, and the people impacted by our choices are involved in making them. We encourage deep relationships with each other and with our community so that the entire team can make decisions as part of a system built on trust.
As we make decisions, we ask ourselves:
- How do we ensure everyone feels like their voice matters and their ideas are valued regardless of position and title?
- How do we ensure everyone can raise concerns safely and that those concerns are genuinely heard?
- How can each of us stay connected to our community of users and partners?
- Whose voices and perspectives are missing from our conversations?