The 2025 HashiCorp Principle Awards

Each year, HashiCorp recognizes project teams that embody our Principles through their cross-functional teamwork, via the HashiCorp Principle Awards. Meet our 2025 winning team — and the runners-up.

HashiCorp's Principles have always been at the heart of not just what we do, but how we do it. Since 2020, our annual Principle Awards program has recognized individuals or project teams who embodied each of our nine principles.

This blog post highlights the winning team and finalists' extraordinary contributions and collaboration, demonstrating our principles at work.

»Meet the 2025 Principle Award winner

Strategic security & compliance uplift for enterprise products

Our Research & Development (R&D) and Security teams launched an initiative to enhance key security and compliance areas critical to delivering our products and services. Delivering these became a top priority to ensure we meet and exceed customer expectations.

This effort was a true cross-functional collaboration, with significant contributions from nearly every part of R&D and Security. GRC, Cloud Security, Product Security, Threat Detection & Response, Platform Engineering, Product Engineering, and R&D Operations played a key role in identifying gaps, implementing improvements, and ensuring long-term sustainability.

The team incorporated many of our nine Principles: Integrity, Pragmatism, Execution, and Communication. They showed Integrity by committing to proactively addressing security challenges and holding themselves accountable for delivering improvements. Their Pragmatic approach prioritized the most critical security needs first, balancing long-term impact with immediate risks. Focusing on transparent Communication kept stakeholders informed, reinforcing trust with internal teams and customers.

By aligning priorities and taking decisive action, the team not only improved our security posture but also built a stronger foundation for future collaborations between R&D and Security.

Congratulations to the winning team members: Jessica Capaldi, Luka Trbojevic, Bryan Sharp, James Dayhuff, Eric Weinstein, Chris Steinmeyer, Colette Alexander, Adam Gray, Michele Degges, Devon Powley, Rose Jen, Thu Anh Le, Jamie Finnigan, Randy Hodges, Jessica Overton, Antony Saba, Ryan Breed, Izaak Weiss, Andrew Allen, Gerald Dagher, and Daniel Kimsey.

»Meet the other finalists in this year's awards

HashiCorp Validated Designs and Assets That Matter

The HashiCorp Validated Designs and Assets That Matter initiative made technical resources easier for customer-facing teams to find, use, and trust. These teams needed reliable, standardized content to help customers design and operate cloud solutions effectively. This initiative delivered a structured, validated set of assets, reinforcing HashiCorp as the go-to standard for cloud operations.

The impact has been significant — customer-facing teams now have access to over 100 high-quality assets, including Solution Design Guides, onboarding guides, and a new “Demos Done Right” platform. These resources have led to higher deal win rates, larger deal sizes, and reduced friction in day-to-day operations, saving millions in productivity costs.

The team’s success was possible because of collaboration across R&D, TFO, Support, and PMM, led by the TFO Value Engineering team. The project embodied the Principles of Integrity, with its focus on technical accuracy, and Pragmatism, with its attention to real-world solutions. Most importantly, it proved that well-designed tools win deals — Beauty Works Better in action.

Kudos to the team members: Bryan Sadowski, Adam Cavaliere, Michelle Roberts, Vish Krinshnaswamy, Michael Wood, Amber Reddy, Ian Kemp, Dan Brown, Prakash Manglanathan, Troy Fluegge, Thomas Kula, Justin Clayton, Monica Miller, Chris Stella, Syed Quadri, Jenna Wong, Mauricio Afiuni, Mauricio Esteban Mitolo, Rodolfo Castelo Méndez, Eric Espinola Cañadas, Just Herreman, Adam Summer, Allison Broski, Andrew Marrone, Mark Lewis, Craig Sloggett, Emmanuel Rousselle, Lucy Davinhart, Chris Zembower, Ravi Panchal, Jenna Degaust, Matt McQuillan, Finn Dannin, David Canadillas, Srini Nagaraju, Shriram Rajaraman, Dave Randolph, Van Phan, Alex Basista, John Duke, Johnny Chen, Tristan Stoker, Adam Buxton, Jeff McCollum. Many more teammates contributed to this project in many ways, shapes, and forms.

The Launch Lifecycle Process and HashiConf

After HashiDays, the team took a moment to reflect on how we handle product announcements and major launches. With HashiConf fast approaching, the team wanted to enhance our Launch Lifecycle Process (LLC). This is a framework that brings structure, transparency, and efficiency to our announcements.

The objective was to align this launch process with our Product Lifecycle Process (PLC) to improve communication, ensure accountability, and set every team up for success. This involved:

• Providing clear visibility into what we were announcing and when.
• Implementing iterative ‘readiness checks’ to monitor progress.
• Establishing escalation paths for announcements that were off track.
• Understanding the cross-functional impacts on marketing, sales, and other launch workstreams.
• Executing a seamless launch with all planned announcements delivered on schedule

The results were fantastic! HashiConf was a successful event, showcasing impactful announcements across our infrastructure and security portfolios. Thanks to our improved launch strategy, marketing, sales, and go-to-market teams had the insights they needed well ahead of time. The team also delivered striking keynote designs, activations, briefing decks, and infographics to bring the conference to life.

Kudos to the team members: Grace Stillar, Jen Hanussak, Faranak Medrano, Melar Chen, Mitchell Ross, Yushuo Huang, Diana Smith, Aubrey Johnson, Rich DuBose, Sam Pandey, Shaziya Bandukia, Monika Doshi, Anubhav Mishra, Omar Ismail, Sarah Hernandez, Paul Thrasher, Ashish Larivee, Kanishk Sahni, Siranjeevi Dheenadhayalan, Anando Chatterjee, Prakash Linga.

To learn more about HashiCorp’s Principles, visit: https://www.hashicorp.com/our-principles. If they align with your values, consider applying to join our team. To view our open roles across multiple departments and locations, visit https://www.hashicorp.com/careers.