Spending Chips: Breaking Rules Without Breaking Trust
Treat accumulated social capital as chips you deliberately spend to break the specific rules that block a new bet
- Difficulty
- Expert
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
Company rules exist to protect a business at the stage where it succeeded — but those same rules can strangle a new bet. The move is to treat the trust you've built over years as a pile of 'chips' (social capital) and consciously go all-in on one bet, spending chips to break only the rules that stand between you and the work, while never breaking the underlying trust. The goal is never to defy rules for their own sake; it's to claim the space to work with users and test prototypes.
Origin
Tanguy Crusson's own mental model from a decade at Atlassian, enabled by Point A's 'pirate flag' culture where multiple founders operated the same way.
Core principles
- 01Rules were built to protect the business at its successful stage, not for new bets
- 02Social capital is a finite, accumulated resource — spend it deliberately
- 03Break rules without breaking trust: say no to the rules that don't fit, yes to the ones that do
- 04The end goal is the work, not questioning the rules
How to run it
- 1
Inventory the rules that actually block you
Identify which specific established rules stand between your team and moving fast — often concentrated in one function (for Crusson, engineering: repo ownership, standards, reliability-time mandates).
Pro tip Most of the rules Crusson needed to break were in engineering, so he restructured around that constraint directly.
- 2
Restructure to gain the authority to break them
Change your team's shape to remove the gatekeeper. Crusson chose to have no separate engineering leader and act as both product and engineering lead, and hired principal-level engineers who could commit to any repo no-questions-asked plus contractors exempt from standard staff rules.
Pro tip Hire principal-level people with deep internal credit who want to make a splash, not their next promotion — they can self-authorize changes in areas they don't own.
Watch out This is uncomfortable and not advisable in many environments; expect tough conversations with people whose job is to protect those rules.
- 3
Go all-in and accept the personal stakes
Commit your chips fully to the bet: if it works it works, if it doesn't you may be out. That conviction is what lets you say 'we're not doing it' to rules that don't serve the mission.
Watch out Only do this where leadership is genuinely forgiving and the environment is safe for you personally.
In the wild
Atlassian didn't want an engineering footprint in Europe then, but Crusson was based in France and didn't want to relocate. With no engineering manager and a team of contractors (exempt from staff rules like mandated reliability time), his team could rebuild services and ignore standards to move at startup speed.
→ The team became the fastest-moving group; being physically far and framed as 'won't exist in six months' meant other teams didn't engage to stop them, and the approach was later institutionalized into Point A.
Common mistakes
Breaking rules as an end in itself
The intent was never to question rules for their own sake — only to claim the space to work with users and test prototypes. Breaking trust while breaking rules would have cost the leadership support the whole approach depended on.
Is it for you?
Best for
A tenured operator with real internal credibility betting their capital on a single 0-to-1 project in a forgiving org
Not ideal for
Newcomers without accumulated trust, or heavily-regulated/low-trust environments where rule-breaking ends careers
From the transcript
“I've got a bunch of chips since I join atlan I've been accumulating chips and those CHS are like Social Capital”
“your teams will need to break a lot of rules that are established but they need to be able to do that without breaking the…”
“the rules were created to support the business at the stage where it was successful”
“the end goal was not to question the rules the end goal was to get to the stuff that we needed to do”
“So I decided not to have an engineering leader in the team and to do it myself”
From the episode
Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian
Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery)