Creating Values and Principles: A Guide for Product Design Teams

Every great Product Design team needs a set of both Values and Principles to guide their designs, storytelling and decision-making. In a nutshell, your Values are about who you are as a team and how you work. Your Principles are about the quality of the things you create.

In this guide, I’ll talk you through what “Values” and “Principles” mean for a product design team, how to create them, and how to embed them in the DNA of your team.

In February 2024, the Product Design Team here at Pion sat down to create our own set of Values and Design Principles. I’ll walk you through how we used exercises from the incredible book Uplifting Design by Dan Makoski, tweaking them a little to create our own magic recipe.

What are the “Values” of a Product Design team?

Most companies have their own set of ‘Values’, but great design teams are like their own little world within that company. They need their own set of values to create a common identity and start making better decisions.

Pion’s company Values

Forget your users for a second. Your design team values are about you. They are your ‘why’. Your Values should speak to:

• The things that bind you together as a team of designers and researchers
• The reasons you come to work in the morning
• The core beliefs that guide your behaviour and decision-making

How do you create your set of Values?

Step 1.
2 mins, individually

Take a look at your company’s Values. We’ll use these as a creative prompt. If you don’t have any, Step 2 can be easily adapted to stand alone.

Step 2.
Brainstorming
5 mins, individually

Under each value, brainstorm related verbs, adjectives and nouns that reflect:

• What does this value mean to you?
• Which aspects of this motivate you as a human being?
• What elements of this do you bring to the table?

If your company doesn’t have a set of Values, ask yourself these similar questions and brainstorm your verbs, adjectives and nouns:

• Why do I come to work in the morning?
• Which parts of my job mean the most to me?
• What unique things do I bring to our mission?

Step 3.
Summarise
5 mins, individually

1. For each of your company’s Values, highlight the one word you’ve written that speaks to you the most.
   If you’re making these Values from scratch, use the top 5 key words you got from step 2.
2. Flesh that out into a sentence that starts with “We are..”.

Step 4.
Show and Tell
10 mins, in a group

Let’s take it one value at a time. Go around the room and each read out your highlighted word and your sentence.

Write out the themes and key concepts for each value on the board as you go.

Step 5.
Bring it together
20 mins, in a group

• Take it one value at a time. Look at the themes and ideas you have for each value and work that up into a cohesive idea.
• See what format makes sense for you now you have these brilliant ideas. Do you represent these as single nouns, adjectives or a sentence for each?
• (Optional) Sketch out an image to represent each of these values.

Pion’s Product Design Guild Values

It felt a bit generic at first, and took a few rounds of ideation, but we stuck with it. Eventually, we created a set of Values that really resonated with our team. Keep going until it feels right.

How do you create your Design Principles?

With your Values in hand, it’s time to create your Design Principles.

Don’t forget, your Values are your ‘Why’, they’re about you and the things you think are important.

Your Principles, however, are how you apply those Values to your work. They’re the fundamental rules that shape your design decisions and outcomes. They’re the standards you strive for to create cohesive and effective design work.

Step 1.
Check in with your Values
10 mins, in a group

We split this exercise over 2 days, sleept on our Values and came back fresh in the morning. You can tweak any that don’t feel right in the cold light of day, and crack on with using them to form your Principles.

Is everything clear? Ask any clarifying questions so that you have a common understanding of what these values mean.

At this stage, it might also be helpful to get a flavour of how others have defined their Principles.

For example, the excellent 10 Principles of Good Design, from Dieter Rams at Braun

Step 2.
Brainstorming
10 mins, individually

1. Go around the room and look at each value in turn.
2. Jot down 3 ideas for each value on how you’d transform that that belief into a specific, actionable guideline that dictates how design decisions are made.

You can do that by asking yourself:
How can we apply these values to our work as designers/researchers?
What does this value mean in terms of a piece of design/research work?

Hint. Principles often follow these conventions:

Imperative form (Design for X, Do/don’t do X)
Descriptive statements (Design is, our work..)
Questions

Feeling stuck? At first we did too. I prepared the examples below to give the team a jump-start when they were floundering. You might want to consider doing the same, but let them try and figure it out on their own before you bring them out!

Prep some examples in case your team gets stuck

Step 3.
Show and tell
15 mins, in a group

1. Take it one value at a time. Go around the room and each read out the bulletpoints you got from Step 2.
2. Write out the themes and key concepts for each Principle on a whiteboard board as you go.
3. Common themes may (or may not!) start to emerge here. Highlight, circle, star or etch-a-sketch the themes that feel most “right” to the team. Don’t worry about getting it perfect right now — all you’re looking for are the key themes.

Step 4.
Bring it all together
20 mins, in a group

1. Look at the top 5–7 themes you got from Step 3 and start to work them up into distinct, coherent ideas. Again, this might still feel a bit vague, and you might need to ideate for a while until it starts to make sense. Stick with it. The atmosphere in the room will eventually start to buzz when you know you’re on to something.
2. Once you have 5 or so Principles that feel more or less “right”, stop. You don’t need to get the final wording right in the room, just the distinct directions you want to cover.
3. We handled the final wording asynch — I drafted up our Principles and sent them out in a Google Form to vote on and tweak.
4. (Optional) Sketch out an image to represent each of these Principles.

We framed our principles as questions

We framed our Principles as questions to promote critical thinking, engagement, and flexibility. This approach worked for us, but feel free to adapt it to fit your team — there’s no right or wrong way.

What next?

Now that you have your shiny new Values and Principles, so what? These are only useful tools if your team is actually using them to make decisions.

We’re early on our journey towards embedding our Values and our Principles within our DNA as a design team, but here’s how we’ve used them so far.

Use them to shape your design culture

Use your product design team Values and Principles to cultivate a cohesive design culture and shape the rhythm and format ofkey ceremonies such as team-level meetings and feedback sessions.

If you already have these set up, audit your processes and team habits to make sure they support your core values. Do your team’s processes work to support your design team’s values? Do you need to add or remove any key touchpoints or processes?

Use them for storytelling

We made both our Values and Principles into Figma components encouraged the team to start using them. We’ve started splashing these all over our art boards and presentations, to visualise how they shape our work. One of our Principles relates to storytelling, so we took this prompt to level up how we communicate.

We’ll monitor adoption by looking at the number of instances of these detached and used.

Use them to shape how you give feedback

We asked the team to commit to using these Values and Principles when giving feedback to other designers. Phrasing our Principles as questions has made this particularly effective. It’s been brilliant to see the conversations we’ve sparked!

As we go forwards, we’ll keep an eye on how we’re using our Values and our Principles to collaborate and make design decisions. If we need to change things up that’s okay — our Values help us understand that as long as “We fail forwards”, we’re going in the right direction!