Live is streaming live. Watch now.

Our Foundational Principles

VMware Tanzu Labs

Within Tanzu Labs, we work with an unpredictable assortment of companies, industries, governments, countries, cities, cultures, and people. We help nearly every industry in the world refactor, reimagine, and build every kind of software product using any technology stack. We work with countless unique embedded company cultures – some welcoming, some hostile, some ambivalent, yet nearly all have given us a mandate to help them rethink not only how they build products but how they build and manage teams. Sometimes they ask us to help them rethink their entire company culture. Sometimes they ask us to help them design their offices – really, their physical offices!

Wow. That’s a lot of anything and everything.

In a world where we work with anyone, anywhere, anytime, upon anything, what is our “north star” that guides how we approach so many diverse situations?

The answer is our foundational principles. Within Tanzu Labs, we’ve developed six principles which complement our VMware EPIC2 values with an eye towards how we work with clients and each other:

⚡️ Empower Teams

Diverse teams with shared context, psychological safety, and decision-making authority move faster.

🌱 Start Simple

Learn just enough to begin and let the work inform the direction.

🦋 Embrace Change

Expect change and turn it into opportunity.

🚀 Deliver Early and Often

Ship value to users and measure impact to lower risk.

🔬 Improve Continuously

We are always learning and humbled by what we don’t know.

❤️ Give Back

Share our time, tools, code, and approach with internal and open source communities to maximize impact.


With our foundational principles and VMware EPIC2 values established, we’ve set the stage for learning how we approach modern app development, and why we approach it this way, and why you should consider adopting this ideas, too.