The Balsamiq Playbook

Our mission and values

At Balsamiq, our mission is to help people create great user experiences, no matter their background or training. We live by these core values:

⭐️ Strive for excellence: We take pride in our craft and push for better, for our customers and ourselves.

⌛ Be efficient: We respect each other's time, cut unnecessary complexity, and focus on what matters.

🤝 Be accountable: We own our work, follow through, and support each other in getting things done.

🔄 Be adaptable: Change is constant, and we embrace it with curiosity instead of resistance.

💙 Be professional and caring: We assume good intent, give each other grace, and collaborate with kindness.

Our values guide every decision we make and keep us grounded in what truly matters.

How we work together

We've been globally distributed and fully remote since the beginning. Here's how:

Golden hour
No matter where we're working from, we overlap for at least one hour every day. 5-6 pm in Italy, 8-9 am in California.

Async communication
We design/visualize in Balsamiq and document everything in Confluence (our wiki). But most of our conversations happen in Slack.

Social channels to keep up with "watercooler" chats
Project-specific channels to keep things organized
Learning channels so we keep growing
Standard naming conventions (like #p_ = project)

Standard workflows
High-level project management happens in a tool we built called Acetaia. Project leads update and review statuses weekly. Meanwhile, specific engineering tasks live in Jira—which we review weekly too. Most recently, our whole company adopted EOS.

How we care for our team

Building a strong team starts with a strong set of company values and continues with policies that support, protect, and nurture. Here are a few that stood the test of time:

How we create great user experiences

We're building the kind of company we'd love to do business with: customer-focused, delivering great products, and making every interaction a delight. We believe great UX comes from smart user research and clear product principles:

How we give back

We believe nonprofits, educators, students, and other do-gooders should focus their resources on making a difference, not on software costs. That’s why we’ve donated tens of thousands of licenses and subscriptions over the years, alongside a portion of our profits: