Use principles with personality to drive product decisions
Much of a product manager’s job is to drive alignment across teams. Some drive alignment with a vision. Others drive alignment by having lots of meetings shaping individual decisions.
I like to drive alignment with principles that help people make aligned decisions.
Why is alignment on principles important?
Driving product teams with a vision is not enough.
Let’s use an analogy. If you tell someone your vision is to build a building, some teams might build the foundation for a single story shopping center. Other teams might build a skyscraper. And in the end, you only have a small plot of land zoned for a 2 story 4 bedroom single family home.
Driving a single decision in meetings is inefficient as it is impossible for any product manager to be there for every decision.
That leaves us with the problem of how do we drive alignment on decisions. In my opinion, the best way to do this is to first align on principles with personality.
Decision Principles with Personality
Let’s start with an agreed upon definition of principle
a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.
But what about the personality part? Why do we need that?
Let’s extend our earlier analogy. Instead of purely setting the vision as “build a building”, now we layer on the principle “build a good building”. Does that drive any alignment between different teams towards building that 2-story 4 bedroom single family house? I hope it’s obvious that the answer is no.
The personality piece is what drives the alignment
Not everyone will get along with every personality. Not everyone should agree with your principles. It’s this tension that creates alignment and drives one type of decisions over other options.
If you are working with teams that have worked together for a long time, you might not need to spell out these principles as clearly or tightly. Conversely, if you are working with a brand new group with very different background, aligning on these principles with personality is critical for operating independently but towards an aligned vision.
Let’s align by using examples of principles
Example 1
Without personality: Design products that are easy to use.
Yes, there are products out there that are not easy to use. But do you really believe those team’s intention was to make it not easy to use?
With personality: Design products starting with the simplest use case that has the most impact, ship it before it’s perfect, iterate quickly to support more cases.
The latter has personality because people could make a strong case for starting with complicated ones, wait until its perfect, and take years before launching another iteration. It’s not wrong, some industries need this — think Boeing. An aircraft manufacturer should NOT only design a plane that flies when there is perfect blue sky and no wind. BUT a food delivery start-up can do this by only support delivering of one type of food first and then build iteratively.
Example 2
Without personality: Design products that create stickiness
With personality: Design interactive tools that are fun to use.
The latter has personality because people could make a strong case for not making interactive fun tools. Think about banks. They might want an image of trustworthiness and not want to be mixed up with fun. Think about all the books that might be fun but you can’t interact with. Interactive and fun might be good for learning tools and games. But it’s not for all cases.
This type of principle drives one set of product & design decisions to shape a consistent product experience.
Closing Thoughts
Few people like to be around bland people. Don’t use bland principles.
Be bold, think big, define principles with personality to create an aligned upon “way” for your team.
