Following our previous post on vision, mission, and values, in this post we’ll focus on: building strategic guiding principles. These principles provide the strategic framework for the engineering organization, creating a clear path to achieve the company’s goals.

‍

What Are Guiding Principles?

Guiding principles provide a structured framework that helps an organization stay focused, grow, and adapt to technological and market changes. The principles ensure everyone in the organization works in alignment, moving in a unified direction.

Here’s how we’ve built guiding principles at PointFive:

1. Accelerated Growth

We operate in a "Red Ocean" market—where many existing solutions already exist. PointFive was founded to disrupt this space by building a solution that is at least 10x better. But achieving that impact isn’t just about technology—it’s about having the right people in the roles that matter most.

To support accelerated growth, we prioritize:

• Scalable Architecture: Choosing the right platforms, databases, and workflow engines is essential. Having the right people for the job here is really key. That's why we’re happy to highlight the work of our Lead Architect, Ron Eliahu. He's been instrumental in driving this effort, harnessing tools like Temporal, Snowflake, GraphQL to ensure scalability.
• Automated Testing: A strong automation infrastructure means we release faster without compromising quality. Avraham Rosenchein, who leads our end-to-end test automation platform, ensures we can deploy confidently—and sleep at night.
• Buy Before Build: Rather than reinventing the wheel, we prefer purchasing existing solutions to save valuable development time. Gabriel Yahav, our DevOps lead, ensures we focus on building only what truly adds value.

2. Focus on Enterprise Customers

Our second guiding principle is focusing on large enterprise customers because they face the biggest challenges when it comes to cloud efficiency. Enterprise clients demand advanced capabilities and customizations, and this principle means we make sure our solutions meet these needs.

Key principles in this area include:

• Customization: Allowing clients to define custom alerting logic and prioritize actions based on their unique needs.
• Integrations: Seamlessly integrating with existing tools like Slack, Jira, or others already in use.
• Security and Compliance: Ensuring full compliance with enterprise security standards and delivering detailed SLA reports.
• Agentless integrations: Eliminate the need to install agents, streamlining implementation and accelerating time-to-value.

3. Field-Ready Solutions

To ensure our products are easy to use and deploy for sales and support teams working directly with customers, we adhere to the following principles:

• Independence: Building solutions so teams operate autonomously without relying heavily on engineering.
• Feature Flags: Gradual, controlled rollouts of new features to ensure smooth adoption.
• Configurable Accounts: Enabling personalized configurations to meet diverse customer needs.

4. Distributed Teams and Talent

We embrace distributed teams as they enable faster growth and access to a diverse talent pool. However, managing a distributed organization requires thoughtful principles to ensure teams scale:

• Structured Knowledge Sharing: Clear processes for documentation and onboarding ensure consistency across teams.
• Outsourcing Where Possible: Outsourcing non-core tasks means core teams focus on mission-critical areas.

Why Strategic Guiding Principles Matter

Defining strategic guiding principles provides clarity and focus, ensuring that the team is prepared to grow and adapt while staying aligned with its long-term goals. They also support long-term scalability by acting as a decision-making framework across the organization.