A Software Development Manifesto

What's a development manifesto?

Manifestos have guided software and agile teams for decades. The Agile Manifesto remains the most influential, though newer frameworks like the Async Development Manifesto have emerged to support distributed teams. These documents serve one purpose: align your team around shared values and principles.

Existing manifestos make good starting points, but your team needs its own. Use a collaborative process to build principles that reflect your culture, not someone else's.

Why you need a development manifesto

Teams rarely agree on everything from day one. Your developers bring different backgrounds, experience levels, and working styles. What feels obvious to one person may never occur to another. Worse, practices that work during proof-of-concept often break as you scale.

A manifesto forces alignment. It surfaces disagreements early, when you can address them constructively. It also guides hiring—candidates aligned with your DNA will thrive; those who aren't will struggle from the start.

Team development stages

Psychologist Bruce Tuckman identified four stages all teams pass through: forming, storming, norming, and performing. The storming stage—where conflicts surface—is inevitable and often painful. Teams that skip it lack the diverse perspectives needed to innovate. Those stuck in it fail to ship.

Your job is to move your team through storming to performing as fast as possible. A manifesto accelerates this journey.

Scaling challenges

Fast-growing startups face a unique problem. If you double your team every six months, you're essentially onboarding a new team constantly. Each wave of hires can push everyone back to storming, tanking productivity.

A manifesto prevents this collapse. New hires see your DNA immediately. Existing team members have a reference point for every decision. The manifesto doesn't solve all growing pains, but it moves teams from conflict to cohesion faster than anything else.

Hiring and evolution

Use your manifesto during recruitment. If continuous delivery is core to your team, someone who insists on lengthy manual QA cycles won't fit. Conversely, candidates who already live your principles need less onboarding.

Stay flexible. As your business, industry, and team evolve, revisit your principles. A manifesto isn't permanent—it's a living document.

How to create a development manifesto

A manifesto reflects what most of your team believes. Not everyone will agree with every line, and that's fine. The goal is majority alignment, understanding, and willingness to defend the principles together.

Avoid top-down mandates. If management imposes a manifesto, the team will ignore it. Instead, facilitate a collaborative process:

• Find examples to show the team as starting points.
• Assign a non-manager facilitator to lead the activity.
• Run brainstorming sessions and collect ideas from everyone.
• Group ideas logically and develop high-level principles.
• Refine with the team until you have a solid working set.
• Create a one-page document for quick reference.
• Share it everywhere—Confluence, Google Docs, Slack, wherever your team lives.
• Reference it daily in conversations and decisions.
• Identify gaps and create action items to address them.
• Revisit regularly and improve as needed.

What a development manifesto looks like

We've shared the manifesto we built at Klipfolio below. Use it as inspiration, but create one that matches your team's values and culture.

This version reflects our thinking at the time of writing. We've iterated on it since and will continue to evolve it as we grow.