What is Product Culture?
How it helps you to get more done
As a Product Manager, Executive, or Product Leader do you want to get more done while still satisfying the highest standards of quality? Implementing and fostering a product-oriented culture within your team can help you reach this goal. Not only is it an efficient way to tackle tasks but also helps to increase time-to-market while staying in budget. However, having a product-oriented mindset isn’t as easy as it sounds — but you can get a head start by establishing common processes, heuristic decision rules, and a clear ranking about what is important for the product. In this blog post I will explain how focusing on these three things will enable teams to deliver more successful products in less time!
What is culture and why does it help cooperation
Culture refers to the way of life and social behavior of a particular group or society. It encompasses beliefs, values, customs, and practices that are unique to that group. Culture plays a crucial role in promoting cooperation among individuals in any given society. For instance, when people share common beliefs and values, it becomes easier for them to work towards common goals. This promotes efficiency and reduces waste of resources. Having a shared culture also helps individuals to understand and appreciate the perspectives of others, which fosters mutual respect. Therefore, having a strong and shared culture promotes cooperation and can ultimately lead to the success of any group or organization, including building great products. Now let's see how you can quickly establish a culture in a few simple steps.
Step 1 - Start with a common language and process to help you to make better decisions
Making decisions can be a daunting task, but starting with a common language and process can make a significant difference. Standardizing the activities and vocabulary used when making decisions can help ensure that everyone is on the same page. Defining key terms and concepts, along with standard workflow and activities, can provide clarity and consistency. When information is distributed and communicated in a standardized way, and the team has a clear and shared understanding of inputs and outputs along with who owns which activity, it reduces confusion and minimizes the risk of misunderstandings. By having a common language and process, we can immediately improve the team's efficiency and reduce wasted effort and time, as well as ensure we have the best information to make better decisions and achieve our goals.
Step 2 - Using common heuristic decision rules to focus on what is important
Even with the best information, we can still get stuck in analysis paralysis and take too long to make even simple decisions. One way to simplify the process is by using heuristics, or mental shortcuts that allow us to delegate decisions with confidence and help the team to quickly assess a situation. You can standardize these shortcuts by documenting them as a set of rules or axioms that all team members should follow. You can then codify the most frequent decisions by setting up simple-to-follow decision trees. This will allow the team to deal with routine and common decisions while letting you focus on the most important decisions and get things done faster. But be careful not to try to automate ALL decisions; there will always be situations that require deeper analysis, and you want an 'escape clause' in your decision tree to allow more discussion and weigh all the factors and consider the unique nuances of each situation. I recommend using the 80/20 rules to help you find the right balance. You want to automate 80% of the decisions and reserve 20% for deeper analysis for 80% of the impact. Finally, if everyone knows about how to use these decision trees and 'team axioms", you can be confident that the team will work on what's important.
Step 3 - Using shared importance ranking so you always work on what's most important right now
As the saying goes, "When everything is important, then nothing is important." It can be overwhelming to navigate what’s important and what can wait and share that across the team. Using a structure that assigns a uniquely numbered ranking within each of your objectives, you can easily identify what’s most important and prioritize accordingly. Then leveraging the common language, process, and decision rules, you can quickly share your priority across the team and organization. This approach ensures you are always working on the most important thing right now. Using this as input to your process, and decisions, you can be confident that the whole team will be working on those giving you the best ROI, and stop feeling like you're constantly playing catch-up. Start implementing a shared importance ranking today and start feeling more productive and in control. A simple example is you may want to rank SMB auto parts makers as the most important, SMB machine makers as second, and Big auto parts makers as third, and share that information across the organization; you can be confident that the team will build what is most important to SMB auto parts makers, rather than other customer segments.
Step 4 - Align your culture with the product vision
If you have already established common practices (language and process), common beliefs (decision rules and heuristics), and common values (importance ranking), you can orient your culture to what is important to your product. Simply ranking your target customer segment, their greatest needs, and what makes your product unique and differentiated from the competitor as number one in importance will ensure your team is aligned with the product vision and create a product-oriented culture. Without this clarity, teams will struggle to develop products that resonate with those customers in ways that drive increased adoption and ROI.
To summarize, creating a product-oriented culture that puts common language, process, and heuristic decision rules in place helps teams move faster and make better decisions. Using shared importance rankings keeps everyone focused on what’s most important right now. As you can see, these simple steps can help lead to major improvements! With the right guidance, setting up a product-oriented culture can be easier than you thought. Do you want to find out how to set up a culture that is centered around the product? Do you have a product-oriented culture that could use a boost? Let me know - I’d love to help. Thanks for reading!