What sits at the foundation of a company? What is each team member working towards? What standards guide feedback and decision making?
Values, and they matter. They are the fundamentals that hold a company together and determine how to operate day to day.
At Reaktiv, we talk about our values often. They are the guiding principles that determine how we approach challenges, collaborate, and communicate. At the start of each quarterly team meeting, it’s guaranteed they will be listed on the very first slide of the presentation deck. Our values are woven into how we plan projects, set up releases, test workflows, and celebrate successes.
It’s taken trial and error for us to reach a place where our values are woven into our daily workflows. Like any new habit worth keeping around, we continuously recommit to using them with intention.
In this post, we’ll walk through the typical phases of a Reaktiv project and show how our core values shape every stage of that process. It is also a reflection on how we’re striving to bring our values to each project lifecycle, both consistently and deliberately.
🫶🏼 Our Values: The Foundation for How We Work
As you read through our process, you will see how our values come to life in our team culture and client projects, from kickoff through delivery.
🤝🏼 Good Collaborator
We bring a willingness to help to all projects and conversations. We are positive rather than cynical, supportive over competitive. We approach all discussions with a “yes, and” mentality.
📣 Kind and Clear Communicator
In both written and verbal communication, we are empathetic and respectful. We understand the importance of both quantity and quality.
💭 Creative and Imaginative
Our team is made up of thoughtful and strategic thinkers with a growth mindset. Creativity goes beyond design; each member of our team is creative in their role, in their own way. When a problem arises, we aren’t looking for the easy way out, we are searching for the right answer and the best solution.
🕵🏼 Enthusiastic and Energetic
We dive deep into problem solving to come up with the best solution. We’re intentional with our strategic solutions and enjoy the process of problem solving. Each team member brings their own version of optimism to projects and discussions.
✍🏼 Intentional and Purposeful
We are a proactive and self-motivated team who pays attention to the details. We’re seeking to achieve the best solutions for both our clients and our internal projects and processes.
Meet & Greet
As the first few emails turn into an introductory meeting, we show up with authentic enthusiasm to understand your goals and offer a personalized solution. During this early phase, we ask questions about your site, your current experience, and the challenges you are navigating. We focus on listening and strategizing together to begin building a solid foundation, a partnership rooted in trust and shared purpose.
👉🏼 Values in action: Kind & Clear Communicator, Enthusiastic & Energetic
Discovery & Strategy
Once a project is marked as sold, we move into our initial phase, Discovery and Strategy. This is where we dive deeper into understanding the why behind pain points and challenges taking place on your current site.
In this phase, we bring curiosity and a deep desire to solve meaningful problems. By conducting stakeholder interviews, reviewing documentation, or listening to team pain points, our creative and adaptable team seeks to fully understand what’s not working and begins to piece together the why, along with reliable recommendations.
Good collaboration is reflected through our preparedness. We organize documentation, assumptions, goals, and risks. We take this and move into discovery sessions with open minds and a goal to co-create clarity and direction.
One recent, memorable project involved a client team who were unsure of how to align their content with their mission. Through thoughtful questioning and active listening during our stakeholder interviews, we uncovered a shared desire for storytelling and emotional connection. That insight directed the design process and resulted in a site with clear narrative flow, communal imagery, and stories that resonate with site visitors.
Our primary role during Discovery is to understand and listen, while offering guidance through questions and our recommendations. Our clients share the problem they are experiencing and we strategize to find a solution in an impactful, visually pleasing way.
👉🏼 Values in action: Good Collaborator, Creative & Imaginative, Intentional & Purposeful
Project Management
Our project managers are the bridge between our technical team and the client. They are not only keeping our internal team on track, they are sharing relevant progress and needs with the client team. Updates are clear, concise, and purposeful. They are created to minimize confusion and support decision making. We always aim to provide not just a recommendation or direction, but the why and further explanation behind it.
Transparency is kindness. When budgets or timelines shift, we don’t avoid the conversation. We bring it to our internal team and the client team with context, solutions, and clarity. We have found that by having these conversations timely, as soon as the budget or scope creep concern arises, we give us time to adjust and ideally stay on track.
Trust between our project managers and clients is built from day one. We start by introducing our tools and process, but we also create space for connection. During a recent project kickoff centered around an uplifting website, we started the call by having all attendees share a moment of joy they witnessed or experienced recently. This set a tone of optimism and collaboration that continued beyond that initial call.
One of our newer rituals is a mid-sprint check-in which has helped strengthen alignment and accountability. This is a time for us to gather as a team to review sprint goals, celebrate what’s on track, identify blockers, and remove friction. The aim is to mitigate risks and finish the sprint by completing the goals we set out to.
👉🏼 Values in action: Kind & Clear Communicator, Enthusiastic & Energetic, Intentional & Purposeful
Development & QA
Creativity in development means solving problems with understanding and thoughtful intentionality. We’ve created processes and expectations to make sure our developers are not working in silos. Instead, they collaborate closely, review each other’s work, and approach enterprise builds with a balance of innovation, accessibility, and security.
A few years ago now, we implemented the EOS framework. Following the meeting expectations outline in this framework, each department meets weekly for the L10 meeting. When our dev team gathers, they share wins, explore ideas, and tackle process improvements together. This time together allows for mentorship, experimentation, and strengthening team rapport which is essential in a remote agency such as ours.
Our QA process isn’t just about checking boxes. It’s about seeing the site through the eyes of real users and going the extra mile. We’ve used the following real world example as an analogy of how we approach QA.
When a repair company comes to your home, completing the improvement is the expectation. If your home is left messier, you take note! But, if your home is cleaner, with all the extra details taken care of, they’ve won your trust, and your business, going forward. Using this example, our goal is to leave your home (your site) cleaner and working better than you expected.
What do we do when the problems are complex or the bugs are piling on one another? We lean on each other. Whether it’s a quick Slack huddle or sharing a laugh over a giphy or emoji, we maintain a spirit of support and a can-do attitude through the most complex challenges. Some days will be more difficult than others (we’re human after all!), but after a good night’s sleep, we’re back at it and ready to start again with a fresh perspective.
👉🏼 Values in action: Good Collaborator, Creative & Imaginative, Intentional & Purposeful
At Reaktiv, our core values aren’t just a list on our website, they are the foundation. Whether we’re collaborating with a client, solving a complex dev problem, or reviewing feedback with clarity and kindness, our values guide us.
It’s not always easy, but we’re doing our best to weave our company values into our daily work. Living by these values takes consistency, intention, and reflection.
We hope that by sharing a bit of our process, we’ve sparked reflection on your own values. Whether you’re a potential partner, a fellow agency, or a team looking to reconnect with your own values, let us know.
Do our values align with yours? Let’s talk about what we can purposefully create together.
