How to Implement Product Principles so You Stop Struggling with Decisions
A life beyond frameworks
The speed at which teams make decisions defines their progress. Yet speed isn’t everything. Consistency is vital to success.
When decision-making lacks a minimum structure, you may observe undesired behavior like:
Lengthy discussions before calling the shots
Resistance to make decisions
Inconsistent decision-making across teams
Uncertainty about what a good decision looks like
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My view on decision-making is simple. A poor decision is often better than no decision because it creates learning, while no decision gets teams stuck.
Decision-making doesn’t need to be complex. Teams need to align on what matters most, and that’s when product principles come in handy.
Product principles are the foundations of collaboration. They help teams understand what’s most important and what’s less relevant. Teams understand what to pursue and what to drop.
Let’s take this piece to clarify the following:
The importance of product principles
How to set product principles
Using product principles in daily work
Challenges of maintaining product principles
Principles that helped companies I worked with
The importance of product principles
Product principles help you simplify decision-making. They enable teams to set alignment on good decisions without the need for lengthy discussions.
Let me borrow the definition of Martin Eriksson, Co-Founder of Mind the Product.
Your principles are a framework for your decisions. They’re specific and actionable rules which are a manifestation of your vision. A useful starting point might be to use “even over” statements, as these explicitly indicate what your organisation values in trade-off situations.
Product principles are the foundation of a team’s collaboration. When that’s ignored, reaching your vision and following your strategy will be hard because decision-making will be more complex than it should be.
Martin Eriksson created the decision stack framework, which helps us understand the critical role product principles play in product development. Without sound principles, teams have no chance but to discuss every decision they face.
How to set product principles
Crafting your product principles can take time and vary according to your organization’s size and challenges. Yet, a few standard aspects will help you develop relevant principles. Here’s what you need to clarify before crafting your principles:
Ideal Customer Profile: Define who your primary audience is so you can set a principle enabling prioritizing. For example, Guests even over hosts. This principle clarifies that guests should rank higher than hosts when the product team has to make a hard choice.
User Experience: What’s the experience level you want to provide? Define it so you can craft principles that smooth decision-making. For example, Intuitive usability over guided experience.
Boundaries: Which lines you cannot cross? They represent your boundaries, and you should respect them. For example, Select the best product option instead of aiming for consensus. This principle defines consensus as not being a choice while finding the best product option as the objective.
Quality Standards: Define how you perceive quality. In some industries, mistakes are unacceptable, while others are steps towards success. Clarify your situation.
As you define the above, it becomes easier to craft your product principles. The process of coming up with statements can be different. Let me give you a few options.
Top-down: The company’s leadership defines the principle and informs the product teams. This approach can work if the product teams relate to the principle, but it will be ignored if they cannot connect. A hybrid approach will work better when the leadership presents a draft and sharpens the principles with the team, leading to a better sense of ownership.
Bottom-up: When teams develop principles, they have a strong feeling of ownership. Yet, they must win support from leadership. Otherwise, such principles will become obsolete if the leadership doesn’t follow them. A collaborative approach can work. Yet a formal greenlight is necessary to make it fly.
Setting principles is so critical for the company’s future that leaders must be an essential part of it. You may wonder if each team should have its own set of principles. The answer is no. It’s one set of principles that everyone follows. Otherwise, teams will struggle to collaborate as they follow different principles.
I recommend starting simple, using the principles to reflect how they help you, and adapting accordingly. Do not strive for perfection. Strive for good enough to use the principles and learn from reality.
Using product principles in daily work
You may wonder how you can apply your principles to your daily life. The answer is simple: Use them whenever you need to make a decision. Product teams often face choices during their days, and they will ponder what’s best. Use the principles to accelerate decision-making.
I find two approaches helpful to using the principles you crafted:
Make it interactive: In a few places I worked, we had cards representing our principles. Everyone on the team had the same cards, which we’d bring to our meetings. Someone raised the card whenever a decision went against a principle, enabling the team to step back and follow the principle. It was simple and on point, which helped us integrate the principles into our daily lives.
Rule-based: You can define a rule of using the principles for decision-making. For example, defining your next goal, running product experiments, or something related. For that, you set the principles as the part and give a team member the mandate to ensure the rules are followed. Such a role can be rotative, so different people “police” the others. This approach can work when teams are more process-oriented.
First, use your principles and feel how they help you progress. Yet, I must tell you that your first principles are unlikely to remain relevant forever. Reviewing them is vital to adapt and evolve.
Challenges of maintaining product principles
Change is the only certainty in our dynamic world. Product principles are no different. However, they evolve slowly.
Review how often you use your principles and how well they help you simplify decision-making. I recommend doing an assessment every three months. Here’s what to look for:
Usage: How often do you use each of your principles? When all principles are ignored, the implementation fails, but when only a few are ignored, it is a sign of less relevance. The first requires action on collaboration, while the second hints you may need to drop ignored principles.
Benefit: When you use your principles, are the results satisfying, or do you face troubles? The first is what you want, while the second shows a need for change.
Struggle: What are the current challenges with decision-making? Look where choices get complicated. Then, reflect if you have a principle that covers it. Otherwise, it’s time to craft it.
Stories: Look for real stories where principles helped you and why so you can leverage that. Stories move people.
After the review, commit to three actions so your principles continuously evolve. Doing that frequently enough will help you maintain the principles relevant to your situation.
Principles that helped companies I worked with
Throughout my career, I’ve seen many teams working with principles. What helped was having principles for different levels. Let me share such principles with you, which you can use for your benefit or adapt to your scenario. They worked well for start-ups and scale-ups.
Strategy Principles
Focus on the goal and say no to distractions: Prioritization is key. Define one goal at a time and give your entire focus.
Stop starting, start finishing: Serialize work so teams reduce context switching as much as possible.
Dare to take risks: Don’t play it safe. Give a chance to audacious ideas.
Discovery Principles
Start with what you know to step into the unknown: Confronting reality is critical to uncover hidden opportunities.
First build to learn, then to scale: Strive to build just enough, then scale once you know what works.
Evidence talks louder than opinions: Don’t let unchecked opinions distract you.
Delivery Principles
Continuously measure the impact of your work: Assess the impact your team drives so you understand when to adapt the course.
Good enough is better than perfect: The sooner customers interact with your product, the quicker you learn what drives value.
Simplify whenever you can: Creating products can get complicated, but you will benefit by mindfully acting to reduce complexity.
Collaboration Principles
Meet your audience where they are, not where you want them to be: Strive to create solutions that are natural for your audience, not for you.
Establish alignment instead of pleasing everyone: You don’t need to please everyone, but you do need to get everyone on the same page.
Focus on solving current problems over future problems: Working on problems staring at your face is way more important than getting bugged with issues you don’t have and may never have.
Conclusion and key takeaways
Crafting digital products is challenging. Decision-making is one of the main reasons for daily hurdles. Product teams make thousands of decisions. The more you simplify decision-making, the faster you can progress. Use product principles to smooth the team’s collaboration.
Here are the key takeaways from this post:
Product principles relate to your context and situation. While you may use other companies’ principles as inspiration, you should adapt them to your situation to make them stronger.
Collaboration with teams and leadership is essential to craft relevant principles and bring them to your daily activities.
Review your product principles every three months and take action to make them more relevant and impactful.
Categorize your principles in different layers, such as strategy, discovery, delivery, and collaboration, to make using them more natural.