Guiding Principles to Establish a High Performing (Product) Culture

Below is a working set of guiding principles to achieve a high functioning product culture (a culture that allows the continuous discovery and delivery of value to customers and the business in an efficient and effective way). These are principles I have come to appreciate from being on, coaching, and advising 50+ product/discovery teams over the last 8 years (some of these teams were high-functioning, some not so much, and some existed in cultures and systems that fundamentally prevented them from ever becoming high-functioning). Additionally, I’m currently leading a team that’s testing how to design systems (process and support infrastructure) that allow these principles to scale within a regulated, financial services company. Lastly, it’s important to give thanks to key product leaders who have inspired, influenced, and challenged my “product thinking” lens — Melissa Perri , Josh Seiden , Barry O’Reilly , David J Bland , Cindy Alvarez , Jeff Gothelf , Aaron Eden and Marty Cagan.👏👏👏👏👏

These principles have helped me codify and improve my Product Management practice and coaching. My hope is this article provides inspiration and a future state target for your product teams and organizations. My ask: take one or two principles back and make them your own to meet your specific needs (warning — don’t blindly follow), and as always, find ways to continuously improve.

Focus on (and fund) outcomes, not outputs

• We pride ourselves on being value discoverers and deliverers, not taskmasters or code shippers.
• Leaders give a team a problem to solve and provide funding runway to drive meaningful progress towards measurable outcomes. Progress and success is measured by delivering outcomes not the number of features shipped.

Customer Value = Business Value

• We prioritize time to discover customer problems and needs, while not losing sight of our business outcome goals. We know internal stakeholder requirements gathering is important, but we intentionally spend more time directly talking to our real “paying” customers (not proxy customers) face to face and determine what value we can deliver by providing solutions for their problems and needs.

Great products are made by teams that trust each other and that are emotionally connected and accountable to their customers

• We understand that the best ideas can come from many different sources, including customers, designers, and developers. We solicit ideas from others and work collaboratively with designers and developers to determine product strategy.
• We interact with customers early and often to deeply understand their needs (how to solve their problems in a meaningful way) but also to emotionally connect with them.
• Leaders establish strategic guardrails and outcomes to solve for and empower the team to solve the problem.
• Leaders keep a strong team that trusts each other together and give them a new problem to focus on solving versus breaking down and creating a new team.

Leverage data-driven experiments to search for and validate how to deliver customer value and business value

• We make evidence-based decisions.
• We test customer do vs say (aka measure behaviors).
• We maintain humility and curiosity to learn vs fortifying preconceived solutions or not identifying riskiest assumptions.

Use customer value roadmaps and hypothesis-driven development instead of feature roadmaps

• We don’t see features to build but a hypothesis to test.
• We rigorously prioritize our backlog based on evidence and strategic alignment.
• We have a repeatable process for discovering problems, running experiments, and building validated solutions (not just building features).
• We create problem/customer value roadmaps and experiment on features that are aligned with the company’s strategy and OKRs.

Be fully transparent

• We have well-intentioned, honest, professional communication.
• We leverage visual management to communicate and track work, performance, and “embrace the red”.
• We have strong communication rituals (daily stand-ups, sprint planning, holistically focused retros: process, team, leader).

Tackle risk upfront

• We create a high value/high integrity product backlog by creatively tackling risk (desirability, usability, feasibility, viability) upfront BEFORE any production code is written.

Reduce hand-offs

• We have the people building the solution as close to the customer as possible (ideally interacting with the customer directly).
• We strive for continuous discovery (leveraging rapid customer empathy and experimentation tactics) and continuous delivery.

Exhibit entrepreneurial spirit

• We act boldly, quickly cultivate insights, experiment with intentionality, take managed risks in order to de-risk ideas and fail forward with the goal of creating meaningful value as quickly as possible.
• We see constraints as a reality and a way to drive focus and creativity.