Finding harmony among product chaos

9 principles that help me build better products

Product is an evolving discipline. Platforms get bigger, experiences get more tailored, expectations increase. At the same time, product managers tend to be restless and constantly look for new, different, better ways of doing things.

This leads to a problem: it’s hard to stick to any format to build product. Every day someone writes on Medium about new ways of roadmapping, new tools, new processes, new frameworks. Meanwhile your company has new KPIs, new targets, new businesses. It seems it changes every quarter, every month, every day.

This doesn’t scale well, especially when teams get bigger or when less experienced people join the organisation. So there is a need to create some harmony among all this chaos.

Principles are supposed to be timeless (at any moment in time they can be applied as their inherent reasoning doesn’t wear off) and boundless (there is no form as pre-requisite or barrier to apply them). This means they can be applied in your process and have impact right away. Principles should also be open to interpretation (especially important as each PM is different and builds product their own way), but specific enough to still allow consistency across the team, a source of truth.

Quick caveat: it’s important to be self-aware and not sacrifice efficiency and pragmatism. Probably that urgent bug doesn’t need a philosophical assessment to be prioritised.

Many attribute the success of Amazon, Jeff Bezos and it’s world-class execution to an obsessed following of this principle. By deeply understanding your users, business and market, you can build products and features around them. If you discover the “unchangeable fundamentals” (e.g.: customers wanting cheaper prices, faster service and more convenient access) you can more easily prioritise what drives real value.

Marshall Goldsmith popularised this mindset as one of the key parts for people to be successful, but it also works when applied to features and products. Not questioning legacy decisions, past designs, unchanged flows, even v.1 features is a clear path to being outpaced by competition. Start by defining what “here” and “there” is (you can use metrics, KPI, feedback…) and ask what got you to where you are and what you should challenge, from a product perspective, to get to the next level.

Marc Andreessen, Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos often talk about how important it is to be strict on your vision but flexible on the details. This is not just while building companies or being a CEO; it also applies when building a product vision. Developing a mental model of the world, as well as its evolution for the next 5–10 years, makes your product decisions coherent, aligned and sensible. It’s your best weapon against making too many small effort/small impact features, cluttered roadmaps, shifting priorities etc. Meanwhile it grants you flexibilityon getting to this vision. You will find new ways to get there, learn new things every roadmap and your detailed plan should open to change. Be pragmatic above everything and focus on the end of the tunnel.

I designed my process to deal with the hardest parts of building products: dealing with stakeholders (#1), prioritising features and products (#2), evaluating success(#3), leading product teams(#4), managing tech debt and reassessing roadmaps and teams (#5), scoping and roadmapping (#6), doing user research and continuously learning (#7), developing a product vision and strategy (#8) and debating, making a case and defending the vision, team and roadmap (#9). But every PM is different, has their own mental models of how products should be built, and should design their own principles to help along the process.

As long as the end goal is met — building something that solves problems and people actually want- little else matters. Principles just help create harmony among chaos.

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