What is a great product culture? How can we build a thriving product culture that accelerates innovation and drives market success?
I believe three vectors are vital to foster a successful product culture:
- High Product Velocity
- Merge Business and Product
- Ultra-hard Prioritizing
High Product Velocity
You need velocity to ship it as quickly as possible and validate it with a customer.
When focusing on velocity it's easy to end up sacrificing on two things.
One is the tech debt in areas where we’re not certain, and two is the full-fledgedness of the feature. So the feature might have good user experience, but not solve every single problem for everyone.
The other one is user experience. But...
Never sacrifice user experience. Never, ever ship something that has a bad user experience.
Merge Business and Product
Empowered engineers do not want to be given a requirements doc - they want to be co-founders of the solution.
To achieve this, business and product teams need to be integrated to ensure alignment on goals, strategies and customer insights.
When team members collaborate closely, they can leverage their diverse perspectives and make decisions that are informed by both business objectives and user needs.
Ultra-hard Prioritizing
Prioritizing product features starts with identifying the Minimum Viable Feature (MVF) — the smallest set of functions that deliver value while still solving the core problems for users.
It’s all about launch products faster and test assumptions.
Feature triage involves assessing the importance and urgency of each feature, focusing first on those that deliver the most significant impact on customer satisfaction and business objectives.