Six principles. They are the reason our work looks the way it does.
We design for someone who cannot hold configuration in their head, cannot tolerate an interface that moves between sessions, and would rather speak than type. Build for that person and everyone else is covered. Build for the confident power user first and you will never get back to anyone else.
Every setting is a decision pushed onto the user. Most of those decisions have a right answer the system could work out on its own. We would rather spend a week making a default correct than an hour writing a page of documentation explaining a switch.
Speech is the fastest input most people have and the only one some people have. Designing for voice from the start forces clarity: if a feature cannot be described out loud in one sentence, it is usually the wrong feature.
The model layer changes every few months. The relationship a user has with a system should not. We put a stable persona in front of a routing layer so the engine can be replaced without the user losing the thing they got used to.
Working software every week, in front of a real user. Long silent build phases are where projects go to die, because nobody finds out the specification was wrong until the money has gone.
Autonomy is a spending decision, not a badge. We put review gates wherever being wrong is expensive or irreversible, and we let the system run unattended everywhere else. Every action is logged either way.