Product Principles 101
Ever wonder … what are Product Principles? Why would I use them? How do I create them?
Well, you have come to the right place!
Introduction to Product Principles
Product Principles are statements of your core values that allow cross-functional teams to evaluate work, and make better, more autonomous decisions.
Principles are effective for alignment across functional groups (Product, Engineering, Design, Marketing, etc.) and also up and down the hierarchy within an organization. Once adopted, these principles become the foundation for the way teams work. They can influence everything from talent acquisition and retention, to design decisions, to product road maps.
A well written product principle will model behaviours that align to the values of the business and will help teams understand which behaviours to avoid. They should be simple enough to stand on their own (without too much training and interpretation) and should be woven into daily activities and process like design reviews, backlog grooming, and strategic planning.
Here is an example of one of our Principles at Cisco:
Authoring product principles
If your team would like to craft some principles, here are some tips on how to author them:
Start by understanding the core values of your organization — these should be well understood, but if they are not, you might want to spend time defining Mission and Vision — why are you different from your competition, etc. As you explore your values, take some time to understand how these values might affect or impact your users, how will your users benefit from them, and what are the outcomes they will see.
Look for places of conflict — conflicting values are often the source of disagreement within teams. For example, as mentioned above, if a team is struggling with the question of whether something needs to be perfect to release it, or whether to release it and iterate, this is a place where a principle can be established to resolve that once and for all. A side benefit here is if you make your principles externally visible, you will likely attract talent that aligns to the way you operate, which further helps resolve these conflicts and build culture.
Get inspired — there are plenty of great examples of companies who have developed Product Principles, so don’t be shy about looking to these for inspiration. In fact it’s often a great exercise to get your team to identify examples and talk about why they like them or do not like them, leading to conversations about how your own principles could be similar or different.
Take a stand: Each principle should be clear on what value it advocates and why. As seen in the above example, it can be helpful if a value is explicitly called out over another regularly conflicting value to make the desired choice more obvious. There are no right or wrong values, companies will often have very different values that lead to success. It’s all about what is right for your teams, and your products.
Finally, write them down: talk about them, show them to more teams and employees and see how people react. While I do not think this should be a completely democratic process, you should make sure that teams are engaged in the creation process and that dissenting view points are heard and considered. This is what leads to broader cultural adoption and a higher likelihood of success.
Cisco’s Product Principles
Cisco’s Security and Collaboration group — a group of upwards of 12,000 people — has recently adopted a single set of principles for the whole group.
Here are the values that we hold dear:
Keep things insanely simple
vs. infinitely flexible and comprehensive
Optimizing for configurability makes it difficult for us to evolve and change as the market demands it. This is why companies like ours get disrupted. So we simplify relentlessly. We focus not on how much functionality we can pack into a solution, but instead, how little functionality we can design and still deliver elegant end-to-end experiences.
Move fast, because speed matters.
vs. perfecting before shipping
In markets as dynamic as ours, time to market matters. We can’t let perfect become the enemy of great.
So we deliver solutions that can provide value to our customers quickly. Then we learn and iterate with speed. To be clear, it’s not about being first. It’s about being the best, and getting there fast.
Constantly improve.
vs. ship and move on.
Differentiated experiences come from continuous refinement, not a one-off big bang.
So we learn from successes and failures to create the best user experience. Each step you take should be in pursuit of an improvement that can be seen, felt, and measured.
Go deep on the use case
vs. feature density spread thin
Delivering a solution that elegantly addresses specific, well-defined use cases is more valuable than one that provides a density of features that are not widely used.
So we go deep on the use case, focusing intently on the problems that matter to a broad set of customers. The result is widespread adoption and outsized impact to the user experience.
Design products people [really] love.
vs. good enough, but forgettable
Designing functional products is table stakes.
So we bring out the emotion to surprise and delight our customers with engaging experiences they can’t live without.
Designers shooting for usable is like a chef shooting for edible — Aaron Walter, Designing for Emotion
Obsess over the customer, not the competitor
vs. chasing competitors
Building your competitor’s roadmap will always be a race to the bottom.
So our goal is to empathize with our customers, understand their problems, and reimagine their experience. By focusing obsessively on opportunities for our customers, we will naturally create asymmetric experiences they can’t get anywhere else.
Build an open, extensible platform.
vs. an all or nothing position
Owning the “whole stack” is ideal, but we cannot always be the center of the universe.
So in the spirit of inclusivity we design experiences that co-exist seamlessly with other solutions. This makes adoption easy for customers and gives us the opportunity to expand our footprint over time.
Celebrate adoption.
vs. calling it a ‘win’ prematurely
Our jobs don’t stop at a sale or release. Afterall, shipping means nothing if customers don’t discover it and use it.
So we keep our eye on the ball and celebrate the real win — the successful discovery, adoption, and love of our products.
Make it secure by design, private by default.
vs. a feature bolted on at the end
We cannot win our customers’ trust unless security is inherent in every solution we design.
So when it comes to a customer’s data, we put their privacy ahead of our own interests. Any use of data will be transparent, honest, and always opt-in. It is our fundamental belief that privacy is a basic human right.
Think 10x better.
vs. a little better than the status quo
Something that’s marginally better won’t outweigh the switching cost and hassle that customers would face to make a change.
10x better is the bar to displace an existing solution that works well.
So we aim extraordinarily high to give customers a solution that’s 10x better than what they have today.
In conclusion…
In my experience, these types of principles allow teams to move faster, make better decisions, and establish a stronger culture.
As always, if you are keen to learn from our experiences please do not hesitate to reach out, I am always happy to engage and talk about what has worked well (or not) because I really do want others to adopt these valuable tools.
Also, if you are a designer, writer, or researcher, and you feel like these principles resonate with how you want to work, drop me a line; I would love to meet you.
You can find me on LinkedIn
Be sure to check out these great resources on Product/Design Principles:
