Project Principles Should Invite Disagreement

When launching a new project at Palantir, teams were required to organize a "murder board" - a deliberate process where smart colleagues would critically examine and challenge the project plan. This approach revealed a powerful insight about effective principles.

Good principles must create meaningful constraints by being genuinely contentious. They should force explicit trade-offs that some reasonable people would disagree with.

At Palantir, when new team members would write principles like "move fast," they were immediately challenged because such principles fail the disagreement test. As Nabil explains: "Everyone likes move fast, so I guess [that's] not a good principle actually, because nobody can really disagree with this reasonably."

The key insight is that effective principles must:

• Create meaningful constraints on decision-making
• Force explicit trade-offs that some reasonable people would disagree with
• Clearly signal what you will NOT do (not just what you will do)
• Help teams make difficult choices when facing competing priorities
• Serve as a filter for determining which opportunities to pursue

This approach prevents teams from adopting vague, universally agreeable statements that provide no real guidance. Instead, it pushes them to articulate specific beliefs about what matters most in their context, even when those beliefs might be controversial.

The value comes from the clarity these contentious principles provide - they become decision-making tools that help teams stay aligned on priorities and make consistent choices, especially when facing difficult trade-offs.