Define Your Leadership Principles

Leadership principles define what great performance looks like in your organization. They are the behaviors, values, and practices that set your top performers apart and guide how your teams work together.

Unlike generic performance metrics, Aude helps you track and measure specific principles that matter to your organization. You can add your company's existing principles, adopt proven principles from leading engineering organizations, or create software engineering-specific principles. In all cases, we'll help you transform these principles into observable, measurable behaviors.

We recommend gathering input from your leadership team during this process to ensure alignment. The principles you define here will guide performance feedback, development conversations, and team growth.

Ready-to-Use Leadership Frameworks

Amazon Leadership Principles

Built on Amazon's proven model of customer obsession, ownership, and high standards, this framework emphasizes long-term thinking, a bias for action, and deep operational excellence. It is ideal for organizations focused on scaling deliberately while maintaining high standards and a strong ownership culture.

Microsoft Growth Mindset Framework

This framework, centered on Microsoft's modern approach to inclusive leadership, continuous learning, and customer success, balances innovation with responsibility, emphasizing collaboration and diverse perspectives. It is well-suited for organizations prioritizing technological innovation and inclusive team cultures.

Google Engineering Framework

Based on Google's data-driven approach to engineering leadership, this framework emphasizes technical excellence, user focus, and innovation at scale. It is perfect for organizations that value technical depth, rapid iteration, and evidence-based decision-making.

Engineering Excellence Framework

This framework combines industry-standard delivery metrics (DORA) with modern engineering performance dimensions (SPACE). It provides comprehensive coverage of technical execution and team collaboration. It is ideal for organizations wanting to measure and improve all aspects of engineering performance, from delivery speed to knowledge sharing.

Bring Your Own Framework

Design Custom Leadership Principles That Drive Performance

When designing your leadership framework, success lies in creating inspirational and measurable principles. Our experience shows that effective frameworks typically follow these guidelines:

Framework Structure

• 5-7 core principles (max 10)

• 3-5 evaluation criteria per principle

• Each principle should have a clear, memorable name and a brief description

Writing Effective Evaluation Criteria

The key to actionable evaluation criteria is following this formula:

[WHO] demonstrates [WHAT] by [HOW], measured through [SIGNALS]

For example:

Engineers demonstrate technical excellence by consistently writing well-tested code, measured through code review feedback and test coverage metrics

This structure ensures your criteria are:

• Observable in daily work

• Tied to specific behaviors

• Connected to measurable signals

• Clear about expectations

Each criterion should map to data signals that Aude can track through your connected tools. This creates objective, evidence-based performance evaluations