Why do the best product companies lay down their product culture in writing?
For a long time, I have been meaning to crystallise my thoughts around this topic. I have had long conversations on this topic with several guests on my podcast channel. I also talked about this a bit in my talk at MTP Engage Conference two years ago. I will attempt to summarise everything I gathered from my experience on this subject in the last year or so.
What does having a product culture mean?
When people work together, culture kinda happens. That is why they say, when three's a crowd, four is culture. In most companies, culture just happens and it brews of its own. And if that is true and culture forms of its own anyways, does it not makes sense to be deliberate about how it should form and shape it the way you aspire it to be?
The same applies to product teams. Even though each individual team member has its own style and beliefs, defining a product culture for the entire team aligns them to embrace a vision and strives to live upto those beliefs.
How does it help to define your product culture?
It is crucial to understand what core beliefs, and values do you hold dear that defines you as a product leader? Writing it down for your team serves as their constitution that you can always go back to when caught up in the whirlwind and disillusionment of organisational chaos. It becomes the criterion by which you measure everything else at work. The product culture in a written form becomes a solid expression of your vision and values. It acts as your north star.
The best cultures are aspirational. It provides a reference point to stretch the teams to these drafted ideals. There will be failures, but there will be cases where people overdeliver, and when that happens the bar gets set even higher. That is a power of a great culture: it makes each member of the product team better.
It also makes for a great hiring case to attract passionate product people. You can easily see and filter if the person you are interviewing resonates with your product culture.
Some of the best product companies have documented their own culture
Google:
Google clearly lays out its product culture in its book, How Google Works, which was co-authored by Eric Schmidt. Please read the book if you haven't yet but let me lay out its culture briefly as described in the book.
When Google went public in 2004, Sergey and Larry recognised the IPO as the perfect opportunity to codify the culture of the company. This piece of document has guided how the company had run since then. It was inspired by the annual letter Warren Buffet writes to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders.
Here are some of highlighters from the culture memo:
Don't listen to the Hippos
The rule of seven: Managers are allowed a maximum of seven direct reports.
Two pizzas rule: Teams should be small enough to be fed by two pizzas
Establish a culture of yes
Don't be evil.
Amazon
Amazon does not have its product culture documented at one place. However, there are a bunch of its practices that have become not just popular within Amazon but have become industry standards in tech. Some of the important Amazon product principles are:
Amazon’s Leadership Principles
Jeff Bezos’ letters to shareholders: They are a goldmine of management knowledge. My favourite ones are the ideas of Always Day 1 and Disagree and Commit.
Backcasting: Deeply immerse into the future to see how the world would be 5-10 years from now and work backwards to see what we should be doing now to be relevant in that future.
6 pagers for clarity in communication:
Here is another set of favourite Jeff Bezos’ principles: Listen, Invent, Personalize -
Netflix
Netflix’s culture deck is one of the most popular, since the time it was made public. I would like to highlight one key principle of the deck that is my favourite, titled, “Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled”
Here is what it says:
"As companies grow, they often become highly centralized and inflexible. Symptoms include:
Senior management is involved in many small decisions
There are numerous cross-departmental buy-in meetings to socialize tactics
Pleasing other internal groups takes precedence over pleasing customers
The organization is highly coordinated and less prone to error, but slow and frustrating
We avoid this by being highly aligned and loosely coupled. We spend lots of time debating strategy together, and then trust each other to execute on tactics without prior approvals. Often, two groups working on the same goals won’t know of, or have approval over, their peer activities. If, later, the activities don’t seem right, we have a candid discussion. We may find that the strategy was too vague or the tactics were not aligned with the agreed strategy. And we discuss generally how we can do better in the future.
The success of a “Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled” work environment is dependent upon the collaborative efforts of high performance individuals and effective context. Ultimately, the end goal is to grow the business for bigger impact while increasing flexibility and agility. We seek to be big, fast and nimble."
Autodesk
In my previous organization, Autodesk, the VP of Products then, Amar Hanspal, shared this culture deck with the entire organisation. His talk was titled, "Building A World-Class Product Organization"
A few weeks later, I got Amar to speak to me on my podcast:
My interaction with Mark Abraham, Head Product, World First
Mark and I had an insightful conversation around the topic of product culture. Do check it out here:
According to Mark, product culture starts from asking the “why?”.
Why do we build what we build?
Why do we come to work everyday?
It all begins by answering these whys.
Mark identifies the following components in a product culture:
Shared vision, mission and values
Product mindset
Customer centric
Clear goals
Great people
Continuous learning
Mark and his team brainstormed and drafted their product values and principles. Here is how it looks:
My interaction with Nishant Pandey, Head products, Naukri, Jeevansaathi, Shiksha
In my conversation with Nishant, he mentioned that he sent out a memo to his product team that eventually contributed to forming the product culture. Here is what his memo read:
"So here are 10 practices that I have learned and seen that bring out the best in individuals and teams (you may notice that there is nothing here that you and I haven’t already put into practice, even if quietly, and benefited from):
1. Create what people find useful, not merely impressive. A product must solve a real problem.
2. Always search for, and apply, the best ideas regardless of who they come from. You can’t think of everything, so involve every brain in the game.
3. Wrong often, never in doubt. Be Decisive.
4. Maintain transparency in product development and management – all stakeholders should be privy to the same information.
5. Share and mentor relentlessly. Work towards making your role redundant.
6. Acting on a simple solution is more productive than articulating problems at length. So don’t over-brain things to the point of inaction.
7. Textual and visual communication is as important and integral to a Product as are its algorithms and functionalities.
8. Be rigorous with numbers. It’s the only language a product and a business talks to you in, so interpret it correctly and precisely. Data is not Information. Computers can output data, but people, using manual-work and imagination, output Information.
9. Set deadlines, even if you don’t always meet them. You will always get more done that way.
10. Take ownership. Take Accountability. Take Pride.
None of these words and phrases are more important than the other. They are all equally significant. When we put them all into practice in synergy we move towards making our product, and ourselves, world class. "
What does Marty Cagan say about establishing a strong product culture?
The last chapter of his new book, Inspired 2 is titled, "Establishing a Strong Product Culture". He defines product culture in two dimensions:
The first dimension is whether a company can consistently innovate to come up with valuable solutions for their customers.
The second dimension is about execution.
The things to have for a strong innovation culture is:
Culture of experimentation
Culture of open minds
Culture of empowerment
Culture of discovery tenchniques
The things to have for a strong execution culture is:
Culture of urgency
Culture of high-integrity commitments
Culture of empowerment
Culture of accountability
Culture of collaboration
Culture of results
Culture of recognition
How should you go about defining a product culture if you have never had one before in your organization?
The complexity of the effort varies according to the size of your product organization. Startups and smaller organizations can find it easy because of the reduced number of layers in communication. It is much easier to put your point across and persuade the team to act.
In a larger organization, it is tricky but it is still easier if you are the VP or Director of Products in your organization. You could begin by sending out a memo and use passive aggression to push the idea through in your product organization. Once the message has percolated at various levels, you could drive workshops at team levels led by team managers and leads. The best ideas from all the teams bubble up to the management and they get together to crystallise it putting more ideas of their own. This is a classic template for building culture collaboratively in a large organization. I mentioned above about the talk by my VP Products at Autodesk, titled “ Building a World-class Product Organization”. It was a talk meant to define the product culture.
However, if you are a product manager in a large organization, it is going to be a test of your resourcefulness, persuasive skills, and organizational savvy. You ought to drive the message at various levels and may be for a very long time, first through your peers, then through you bosses. But if its an organization with an inspired leadership, and if you have earned your influence through your work, your voice will be heard.
Differentiating between organization culture and product culture?
Most organizations have defined their organization culture that lays out its beliefs and values. It’s important not to mix up product culture with organization culture. What I am stressing at here is defining a culture for how you build products. There could be some overlaps with the two but drafting a belief system focussing on how you build products is the key.
Product Culture Should Evolve Continuously
As Netflix clearly states on its Culture page:
"We do not seek to preserve our culture — we seek to improve it. Every person who joins us helps to shape and evolve the culture further. We find new ways to accomplish more together. Every few years we can feel a real difference in how much more effectively we are operating than in the past. We are learning faster than ever because we have more dedicated people with diverse perspectives trying to find better ways for our talented team to work together more cohesively, nimbly and effectively."
As we usher in a new year, I urge all product leaders world over to be proactive and turn evangelists towards crafting a product culture for your organization. You will thank yourself for the legacy left long after you are gone.