Proletariat Core Values: Week 1 – Understand Why
Many companies never share their core values publicly and for those that do, it can be hard to understand how these values came about and how they are used in daily work.
Over the next five weeks, I’m sharing the five core values we used at Proletariat Inc., not just what they were, but why we chose them, how we wrote them, and how they actually impacted our work.
This week: Understand Why.
The Core Value as Written
Understand Why
Know why your work is important to your team, your project, and the company. Be passionately curious, act with intention, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. It’s your responsibility to understand the reasons behind a decision, and it is the decision maker’s job to be transparent.
Why It Mattered
Understanding why a decision was made is fundamental to doing great work. Most teams and individuals can explain what to do. Good teams get alignment on how and when to do something. But great teams push to understand why, because that’s where autonomy, creativity, and real ownership live.
When someone knows the why behind a task, they can make smarter decisions, raise flags earlier, and often suggest better ways to reach the goal. If you know why someone else on your team is doing something it makes you a better teammate because you can more easily align with their goals and all row in the same direction.
Making the leap to understanding why decisions are made a certain way or work is done a certain way is the fastest track to growing in your role and career. If you want more responsibility you need to have a broader understanding of the business and the team. That higher level perspective is required for strong leadership.
What It Encouraged
This value was built around two core ideas:
Transparency is required
Curiosity is everyone’s responsibility
We didn’t want to just say “be transparent” because that puts the burden solely on leadership. Instead, we wanted to instill a mindset of responsibility in every team member: if you don’t understand something, ask. If a decision doesn’t make sense to you, dig in.
The inverse was also true: if you were making decisions, it was your job to explain them. That created a culture of decision transparency, which is incredibly important especially when the decisions are difficult or controversial. That transparency allows trust to flourish up and down the organization.
How We Applied It
“Understand Why” showed up in all kinds of ways:
In meetings, people would frequently ask: “why are we doing this instead of that?”
In 1-on-1s, we encouraged teammates to challenge process and strategy by starting from first principles
In hiring, we looked for people who were curious and wanted to get a view of the bigger picture
In our weekly full team meeting leadership would answer any question and invest time to ensure the team was fully informed
In design and development reviews, we prioritized intent: “What was the outcome you wanted to achieve here, and why?”
When a difficult decision needed to be made leadership would outline not just what the choice was made but the reasons why that was the right choice given the context
It also helped us avoid making the easy but not best decisions or “because I said so” direction. If a lead couldn't explain why something was being prioritized, it was clear the decision needed to be revisited.
What Made It Work
We wrote this value with purpose:
Action-oriented language ("know," "be," "act," "ask")
Balanced accountability between decision-makers and team members
Broad applicability across roles, levels, and disciplines
It wasn’t about pretending everyone could or should agree all the time, and that is highlighted more in a future value. it was about creating clarity, trust, and shared context, even when we moved fast.
Final Thought
The more time I have spent away from running Proletariat the more clear it is to me how important transparency and understanding why is to a high functioning organization. Investing the time to ensure that everyone is fully educated and aware of any aspect of the business they feel is important or relevant to them is always worth it. Encouraging high potential team members to learn more about why decisions were made trains them to become key decisions-makers in the future.
(Want more information on how to create your company’s values? Check out my post on writing core values.)