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culture-craft skill

/culture-craft

This skill helps you design high-performing team culture using Stripe and HubSpot frameworks, defining values, rituals, and excellence standards.

npx playbooks add skill menkesu/awesome-pm-skills --skill culture-craft

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---
name: culture-craft
description: Designs team culture and sets standards of excellence using David Singleton (Stripe) and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot) frameworks. Use when building teams, setting cultural values, creating rituals, or establishing excellence standards.
---

# Culture Building

## When This Skill Activates

Claude uses this skill when:
- Building or leading teams
- Defining team values
- Creating rituals and practices
- Setting standards of excellence

## Core Frameworks

### 1. Stripe's Operating Principles (Source: David Singleton)

**Key Principles:**
- Move fast, think long-term
- Bias for action
- Default to transparency
- Own problems end-to-end

### 2. Culture as Competitive Advantage

**The Approach:**
1. Define what excellence means
2. Hire for culture add (not fit)
3. Create reinforcing rituals
4. Make values visible

---

## Action Templates

### Template: Team Culture Design

```markdown
# Team Culture: [Team Name]

## Core Values (3-5)
1. **[Value]:** [what it means in practice]
2. **[Value]:** [what it means in practice]
3. **[Value]:** [what it means in practice]

## Excellence Definition
In our team, excellence means:
- [Specific behavior 1]
- [Specific behavior 2]
- [Specific behavior 3]

## Rituals That Reinforce
- **Weekly:** [ritual that reinforces value]
- **Monthly:** [ritual that reinforces value]
- **Quarterly:** [ritual that reinforces value]

## Hiring for Culture
- Look for: [specific traits]
- Interview for: [specific examples]
- Red flags: [what to avoid]
```

---

## Quick Reference

### 🏛️ Culture Checklist

**Define:**
- [ ] Core values (3-5 max)
- [ ] What excellence means
- [ ] Behaviors to encourage
- [ ] Behaviors to discourage

**Reinforce:**
- [ ] Rituals created
- [ ] Values visible
- [ ] Hiring aligned
- [ ] Feedback loops

---

## Key Quotes

**David Singleton:**
> "Culture is what happens when no one is watching."

**Dharmesh Shah:**
> "Culture is to recruiting as product is to marketing."

Overview

This skill designs team culture and sets standards of excellence using frameworks inspired by David Singleton (Stripe) and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot). It helps founders, PMs, and people leaders define values, create rituals, and hire for culture-add to make culture a competitive advantage. The output is actionable: values, rituals, hiring criteria, and measurable definitions of excellence.

How this skill works

The skill inspects team goals, current behaviors, and hiring practices to produce a compact culture blueprint. It maps core values to specific, observable behaviors, recommends rituals at weekly/monthly/quarterly cadences, and creates a checklist for hiring and feedback loops. It emphasizes transparency, ownership, bias for action, and long-term thinking while prioritizing culture-add over culture-fit.

When to use it

  • Launching a new team or reworking a team charter
  • Defining or refreshing core values and behaviors
  • Designing rituals that reinforce desired behaviors
  • Setting measurable standards of excellence for performance reviews
  • Hiring and interviewing to prioritize culture-add

Best practices

  • Limit core values to 3–5 and tie each to specific behaviors and examples
  • Define excellence as observable actions, not abstract traits
  • Build simple, recurring rituals that make values visible (weekly demos, monthly retrospectives)
  • Hire for culture-add: seek complementary traits and avoid homogenous ‘fit’
  • Create feedback loops and visible dashboards to measure adherence

Example use cases

  • Create a Team Culture brief: values, excellence definition, rituals, hiring cues
  • Audit hiring processes to replace vague ‘fit’ questions with culture-add assessments
  • Design a quarterly ritual that promotes cross-team ownership and transparency
  • Translate product-operating principles into daily engineering and PM behaviors
  • Create a checklist to onboard new hires into expected ways of working

FAQ

How many core values should we pick?

Choose 3–5 values. Fewer values are easier to internalize and maintain focus.

What does ‘hire for culture-add’ mean?

Prioritize candidates who bring complementary perspectives and strengths rather than just matching existing norms.