Culture Review 2025

Introduction

Each year in June, we ask PDTers about our culture: what’s working, what needs evolving, and what lights PDTers up.

This report aims to:

Shine a light on the traits that make PD unmistakably PD.
Explore how we can protect and evolve what’s working, so our culture stays healthy as we scale.

Process

Questions

Below are the questions we asked PDTers this year.

Culture Pulse

What are 5 words that describe PD culture?
Turn your brain off and write the first 5 that come to mind.
What are the 3 greatest threats to our culture?
Please list threats in order of most impactful.
What do you love about our culture and why?
If you could change one thing about our culture, what would it be?
In one short sentence, what makes PD different from other organizations?

Health & Wellness

Over the last six months, how committed were you to your health & wellness goals?
1 = Not at all. 10 = All-in
Over the last six months, how much has PD supported you in your health and wellness goals?
1 = Not at all. 10 = Fully supported
Tell us more about your health and wellness support scores.
How can PD better support you in your health and wellness?

Personal & Professional Development

Over the last six months, how committed have you been to your personal and professional development goals?
1 = Not at all. 10 = All-in
Over the last six months, how much has PD supported you in your personal and professional development?
1 = Not at all. 10 = Fully supported
Tell us more about your personal and professional development support scores.
How can PD better support you in your personal and professional development?

Analysis

Questions
We gather the answers and analyze them in detail. Our reporting team looks for patterns, themes, and anomalies, taking into account the respondents’ tenure, role, and even personality insights. For example, what is the experience of new PDTers, and how do PMs see our work compared to our Designers?

Word Clouds
We take all submitted words, clean duplicates, group by theme, and programmatically create word clouds, with word sizes determined based on the number of times referenced. In addition to themed word clouds, we also create one large word cloud, as our year’s all-encompassing word cloud.

2025 Report

While our team’s description of PD Culture is remarkably consistent year over year, the scale of the conversation has expanded: we’re discussing systems, rituals, scalability, and sustainability.

Our Culture

Sentiment

How do we describe PD culture?

In this year’s culture pulse, we found five emerging themes.

01. Growth

It’s a place where truth is spoken, beauty is built, and growth is sacred.
Vivid

Being growth-minded is a permission-to-play at PD. Teammates describe PD as an environment that pushes learning and reflection. Our culture encourages and gives time for practice, while holding teammates accountable to their goals. Stretch assignments, feedback loops, and space to try–fail–improve are common threads.

This year, our responses point to a subtle evolution from “learning for learning’s sake” to learning that shows up in the work: more ownership, more shipping, more visible progress.

02. Grit

We are unlike anywhere else.
We are ambitious and audacious.
We are in it, to win it.
Ideas

Rolling up our sleeves and getting the work done is a normal attitude at Pixel Dreams. PDTers emphasize a constructive sense of urgency, a willingness to wear multiple hats, and a “high-performing team” mindset where everyone does what it takes, sometimes literally, from polishing decks to cleaning toilets. This no-ego and gritty approach encourages us to do the right things, and doing things right, enabling clients and teammates to trust and count on PDTers when it matters.

03. Excellence

High standards, zero ego, and a whole lot of heart.
Heart

At PD, excellence means high standards without ego. Themes like “accountable” (the most-cited descriptor), “professional,” and “creative” show up again and again. Teammates point to shared standards (e.g., Heartbeat rhythms, professional workflow) and a culture that welcomes constructive feedback and acts on suggestions. The result is a having a master craftman mindset: details matter, outcomes matter, and we keep raising the bar, together.

04. Authenticity

… PD is intentionally unconventional, which makes us different from conventional organizations.
Star

PDTers experience PD culture as real and candid. Radical transparency, characterized by a no-nonsense approach, goes hand in hand with a genuine openness to diverse personalities and working styles. Words like “fun”, “authentic”, “unique”, and “creative” reoccur, describing an environment where teammates can show up as their full selves, in service of the work and each other.

05. Warmth

It feels like working with super ambitious friends who are growing with you and cheering you on, always!
Evolve

PDTers highlight trust, camaraderie, and support, from everyday collaboration to structures that make healthy habits easier. Pixel Dreamers share that our culture is a team-first environment that balances professionalism with humanity, making it easier to do our best work and enjoy the people we do it with.

Potential Threats

How might we protect—and keep evolving—PD culture?

We’re choosing to grow, and the messy middle of scaling carries a real risk of cultural dilution. Below are the early warning signs PDTers flagged as potential threats to our culture. Along with these signals, we’ll look at the team’s ideas to keep PD Culture strong as we scale.

01. Culture Dilution

As we grow, there is a risk that our culture may become diluted. Cohesion could slip if we unintentionally hire cultural misfits. And if we fail to reinforce our values day-to-day, we could lose the strengths that make PD culture unique and healthy.

To safeguard against the risk of cultural dilution, our team is calling for an ongoing collective effort to elevate our standards of behaviour beyond individual efforts. How do we foster clarity, consistency, accountability, and courage among our team to uphold those standards? These are important questions to ask and answer as we aspire to elevate as a united front.

02. Slippery Slope of “It’s Fine”

What we tolerate sets the tone, for better or worse. If we fail to embody our values, including failing to hold each other accountable when we miss the mark, teammates may assume mediocrity and lack of accountability are acceptable at PD.

In the short run, things may look fine on the surface, but without holding each other accountable to higher standards, standards will inevitably drop, robbing each other of our opportunities to level up, grow into our better selves, and do our best work.

Our operating system (OS), Heartbeat meetings, frameworks, learning modules, and more, help us uphold our shared standards at scale. In practice, accountability is built in: expectations are clear, signals of how we’re doing are visible, and misses surface early so we can address them. As we grow, we’ll keep tuning these rhythms, not to add bureaucracy, but to enable us to do things right consistently.

03. Overstretching

Stretching is crucial for growth, but overstretching can cause injuries. When a team member feels overextended, the things that tend to slip are often the rituals and practices that strengthen and celebrate the individual and the team. Our team called for protecting the time and space essential for our cultural practice so that our culture has room to grow.

Creativity is an essential ingredient of our work. To be our best selves and do our best work, our creative engines benefit from time and space to recharge. We’ll carve out a dedicated space for deep thinking and exploration—time to stretch and grow our capabilities without tipping into burnout.

You + PD

Health + Wellness

Health & Wellness: how are we doing?

Having reviewed the collective perspective, we turn to personal growth: how teammates assess their progress and how PD is supporting them.

The overall sentiment from our team is positive. We’ve seen a meaningful lift in our team’s personal commitment to health, and PD’s support scores even higher. Many appreciate the support systems and structures at PD designed to improve our team’s health and wellness, such as accountability groups.

How committed have you been to your goals

7.9/10
Your Commitment

How has PD supported you in your goals?

8.4/10
PD Support

Personal + Professional Development

How are we growing on a personal level?

Our teammates rated their individual commitment to personal and professional development at an impressive average of 8.23/10, reflecting our collective commitment to improving ourselves day by day.

PD’s support lands in the 8–10 range for most PDTers, with many giving PD a full mark. The sentiment is clear: support is strong and appreciated.

What fuels that growth? Many PDTers named ‘opportunities’, ‘trust’, and ‘freedom’ — room to learn, stretch, fail, and win fantastically. Beyond the “learning” dojo, our team expressed a much higher level of stepping up in the “doing” arena this year.

How committed have you been to your goals

8.2/10
Your Commitment

How has PD supported you in your goals?

8.9/10
PD Support

Conclusion

Culture is not static — it’s a living, evolving force shaped by every teammate’s values, actions, and aspirations. This year’s findings reinforce our core identity: a high-performing, heart-forward team committed to growth, excellence, and authenticity. Even as we scale, our pulse remains strong, driven by shared rituals, honest reflection, and the courage to hold ourselves to a higher standard. As we continue to scale our company, we aim to uphold a culture where great people do their best work, together.

As we look ahead, the challenge is clear: protect what makes us unmistakably PD while boldly adapting to what the future demands. This means hiring intentionally, scaling systems without diluting soul, and making space for recovery, creativity, and deep work. It’s a collective responsibility, but also a shared privilege. With clarity of purpose backed by shared values, we can grow not just bigger, but better, raising intelligence and awareness in ourselves and in the world we aim to move.

BONUS: Word Clouds!

Our report would not be complete without showcasing our inspiring word clouds, programmatically created based on the words PDTers chose to describe our culture. To get the words, we asked a simple and straightforward question: What are 5 words that describe PD culture?

This year’s themes are Growth, Grit, Excellence, Authenticity, and Warmth.