We’ve all interviewed for jobs, changed jobs, and hired team members. We’ve all received an offer letter, negotiated, tried to understand the legal jargon, and what our equity is worth. Many of us have been on the other side of the table trying to figure out what to offer a candidate and how to best get them over the finish line. This is after we’ve spent 90–120 days and tens of thousands of dollars recruiting them, only to give them an offer letter and a two sentence congratulations email expecting them to accept within five days.

Candidates are demanding more transparency about compensation, equity, and pay equality, and most don’t understand the value of their equity, or what options mean. As a result, HR teams are working hard to define their compensation brands and how they talk about compensation internally and externally. …

Note: This is an updated version of a talk I gave at Design Driven NYC, which you can watch here.

Intro

When we set out to build Trade in 2017, we didn’t want to just sell coffee online. Personalization and segmentation were critical, because we believed that deep personalization, data science, and intelligent merchandising would provide the best and most differentiated experience possible for the marketplace.

To provide that best in class experience, our design team first put in place guiding principles for our onboarding that would influence our thinking as we iterated (I’m a big fan of principled product and design thinking). …

Why They Matter

When building and launching a DTC brand, it’s easy to fall into the reactionary routine of just building product, shipping features, and iterating. While there isn’t anything wrong with building, the product and brand have to play together with a real sense of purpose. This purpose can be defined with clear and meaningful product and design principles.

Your product principles and values guide your team, decision making, and most importantly, they set expectations for the experience and execution across brand and product. They help you define the why and can set the standard for defining the important non-negotiables.

How You Should Think About Them

The principles should be derived from your overall company vision and strategy, as well as your brand strategy. They should be developed in collaboration with marketing, product, design, and engineering. That’s right, engineering. I see many teams leave engineering out of the fold when discussing and designing their principles. In order to build a truly product and design driven organization, the values and principles need to be supported and evangelized by the entire team, not just product (design, marketing, creative, brand, engineering, sales, customer experience, etc). …

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years helping build product teams, speaking to successful PMs, and interviewing potential candidates.

As I spend more time thinking about what sets amazing product teams apart, I’ve been reflecting on what I view as critical to success, and that’s a deep empathy for the customer and for the problems you are solving.

It’s a given that you have to have the core product management skills and history of execution in place. However, that only gets you so far. No amount of process can overcome the challenges that come with figuring out how to build an amazing product experience. …