This article was written by Gabby Sirner-Cohen, David Woolston, and Dan Kuebrich.
We’ve always been pretty serious about watchwords at FullStory. And we just did something special—we added a new one.
Our watchwords are our guiding principles—the foundational values we turn to when making everyday decisions and when navigating uncharted waters.
Empathy, Clarity, Bionics are all deeply ingrained in FullStory’s DNA as a company. And—as of today—Trust is being added to the list of FullStory watchwords. We’ve come to see that Trust is inherent in the work we’ve been doing over the years—it's been an implicit expectation in nearly everything we do. It is our intent that by naming “Trust” as a watchword, we’re not just attaching trustworthiness to a particular arc of work, but—like Empathy, Clarity, and Bionics—we’re ensuring it stays at the forefront of our conversations, our decision-making, our work, and our reputation.
How we define Trust
By definition, Trust is choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person's actions. For us, we know that trust is earned by committing to doing the right thing, and then holding ourselves accountable to doing the right thing, every single time.
This means our customers trust us to provide an intuitive platform that provides the Digital Experience Intelligence data they need, accurately representing the metrics they rely on to run their businesses.
This means their users trust us to only capture intended data, protecting their privacy at all costs.
And this means FullStorians trust one another to work hard for the common goal and trust FullStory to do the right thing, be accountable, and deliver on what we say we’ll do.
Trust is making bold promises to do the right thing and reliably delivering on them, even if it isn’t easy.
Why now is the right time for Trust
So, why now?
While Trust as a watchword is new, it turns out that we aren’t actually breaking new ground when it comes to living by this value. When we looked across the company and reflected on the past few years—the evolution of FullStory’s Digital Experience Intelligence platform, our Series D announcement, and countless other milestones—we realized that every single team across FullStory has made concerted efforts towards improving trust when it comes to earning and keeping the trust of our customers, and safeguarding the trust of our customers’ end users. We have always believed it was one of our irrevocable responsibilities to help our customers gain insights while putting the privacy of their users first.
And we realized there were other dimensions of trust at work, too. Not only were we working on external trust for our customers (and their users), we were also working on trust on even more fundamental levels: Trust of our own internal operations and systems. Trust of our own data and processes. And especially, trust of one another and the community that we are all striving to build here.
FullStory went into 2022 having doubled in size. We’ve evolved into a fully-distributed environment across ~40 states and five countries. Building trust with our teammates required more intention.
In fact, it was the push to expand the definition of Trust that examined its role in our culture, our work environment, and the way we interact with one another—in a time of rapid growth and in a distributed setting. It quickly became obvious that Trust speaks to every audience we work with.
It’s more than a product strategy
To maintain a community built on Trust, we know that we must be purposeful in ensuring that FullStory is a place where employees can thrive. We expect FullStorians to keep sensitive information private, while encouraging them to be explicit about their boundaries and own up to mistakes… but we also ask FullStorians to give one another grace, withhold judgment, and do what is right over what is easy or fun.
Just as we want our customers to trust us, we want our FullStorians to trust that they can thrive in a safe community where they can be their authentic selves.
FullStory is a place where constantly striving to improve the trustworthiness of our product, our brand, and our own experiences is prioritized. So it turns out that Trust has been just as deeply ingrained in FullStory’s DNA as all our other watchwords—it is only now that we are officially naming it.
When it comes to operating, we commit to:
Do the right thing for our customers’ users and for users to trust us with their data
Do the right thing for customers, so they to trust us to deliver the Digital Experience Intelligence data they need
Do the right thing for FullStorians, so they trust us with their careers
We know trust cannot be granted immediately through a large gesture (like naming it as an official watchword and writing a blog post about it 😉) but instead, it is earned through regular, frequent exchanges accumulating over time. So consider this simply one interaction in a series of many where we can prove ourselves trustworthy time and time again.
