7 Principles for Cross-Functional Product Development Excellence at Teachable, Part 2: Rollout
Making Our Principles Real
We’re now done with the easy bit: getting the first version of our principles out to the team. We’ve brushed our shoulders off, patted each other on the back and gotten universal nods of acceptance that these are 7 principles that people can get behind.
But they are abstract. Easy to nod along to, not that simple to follow on a daily basis.
This is where the hard part of the journey begins: Making this set of principles a part of how we work together. There’s no easy button to achieve this, but here are some tactics we’re looking to employ.
🤝 Pod Working Agreements
Our principles are primarily a tool for pods to find a way to gel as a team. The first step is for all pods to get together to discuss how they understand them as a group, reflect on how they relate to how they already work together as a team and build an agreement of what they collectively agree to being that pod’s working method.
This can range from discussions like “how do we do Scrum?”,“do we prefer to swarm on work or multitask?” all the way to “how might we ensure everybody’s voice is heard when we choose what to commit to?”
These are then committed to a shared working agreement that the pod lives out and evolves through retrospectives.
👩🏫 Training and Processes
We left a lot of tactical decisions out of the principles, but there are a lot of obvious best practices and tweaks we’re employing to help our organization.
Principle #2 (trust) especially requires us to level up on our core human skills of reading, writing, talking, and listening. To help facilitate this, we’re bringing in a feedback coaching expert to help our teammates be direct with each other without poking at each others’ amygdalas.
We’re also revising our bug triage and issue mitigation processes to help live out principle #3 (quality).
We’re also running an organization-wide Scrum training. Scrum as a process supports most of the principles we’ve chosen. We’re not doing this to dogmatically mandate a specific process, but to help our organization have a shared understanding of the basics so they can choose to customize it — or even reject it altogether — from a place of understanding.
📥 Hiring
Cheat code time for future candidates!
If you hit ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A on your keyboard on the first video screening call, you get a 1up.
But more importantly, we will include screening for whether candidates in the hiring pipeline seem like a good fit for our principles.
This does two things: More obviously, it allows us to hire people that actually want to work in an environment like this. But secondarily, it helps keep the principles top-of-mind internally. Every time you interview someone, you consider the principles.
📈 Onboarding
An obvious move here is that our principles and the pod working agreement are ingested as a major part of a new Product Engineering team member’s onboarding journey.
🎛 Performance Reviews, Career Frameworks and Feedback
The most actionable and impactful way for us to live our principles is to evolve our manager — direct report relationships to consider them.
A clear take away from principle #1 (pod over function) is that individuals shouldn’t be “working for their manager.” Their “boss” is the rest of the pod. This makes the manager more like a coach or a facilitator that tries to find ways to help an individual play their part in the pod.
We’re going to weave this into all aspects of performance management from how we evolve our career ladders to how managers give feedback on individual performance.
🧭 Retrospectives and Iteration
We consider our principles a product. We’ve just shipped v1 and are now trying to see how our “customers” use them. We’ve done a lot of speculation on what’s useful, what’s not, and where real world conflicts might arise.
We will start hosting periodical full team retrospectives bi-annually to reflect on how we’re seeing our principles impact our lives and will use that information to evolve them in perpetuity. Just like we do with our actual product.
Great products are never done. They just keep getting better when the way people use them reveals new things about them.
💡 Team Tattoos
Nope, just kidding.
Summary and Further Reading
We’ve created our principles to remove ambiguity and friction stemming from lack of clarity of who we are as an organization. If we’re successful with them the outcome should be an organization that spends way less time confused about what decisions are rooted on.
They will forever be a work-in-progress (see principle #4!) and we expect to learn more about ourselves as time goes on. Our company is also going through very rapid growth, so we don’t expect the same principles that work for us at this stage to work as-is when we’re 2x or 10x bigger.
We obviously didn’t create our principles from scratch or consider them to be particularly iconoclastic or innovative. As most great things in the world, we’re standing on the shoulders of giants.
We owe a huge debt to a lot of thinkers that have done most of the work for us. Here are a few great books that go much deeper into the foundations of our principles.
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
A deeply impactful work on how teams build the characteristics needed for high impact teamwork. - Culture Code
Explorations into the commonalities between some of the most efficient and resilient teams in history, from sports to military to business and even professional thieves. - Power of Habit
The science behind how habits influence our lives both as individuals and more importantly for us, as groups. - Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
You may have seen this animated talk by the author Dan Pink on the surprising ways human behavior and performance is impacted when the task at hand requires high cognitive functions. Which is basically 100% of product development.
That’s it! Thank you for reading.
Oh, and in case you were wondering—we’re hiring!
