Transformed

CHAPTER 19Product Culture

We've been discussing the product core concepts of product teams, product strategy, product discovery, and product delivery, but if you consider all the core principles behind each of those concepts, you can get a good sense of what is meant by a strong product culture at a strong product company:

Product teams empowered to figure out good solutions to hard problems, staffed with the cross-functional set of skills necessary and provided unencumbered access to customers, data, and stakeholders.

Product strategy powered by insights that help the organization decide the most valuable opportunities to pursue and the most serious threats to counter.

Product teams skilled at product discovery by assessing risks up front, embracing experimentation, prototyping, and rapid testing with users and customers to quickly determine which solutions actually are worth building.

And once product teams decide to build, they have the product delivery skills to build, test, and deploy via small, frequent, reliable releases that are instrumented and monitored.

There are, however, a few other critically important product model principles can be thought of as meta-principles, as they apply to product development more generally yet play a very important role in defining a strong product culture.

Principle: Principles over Process

Many companies that want to transform were, in their earlier years, quite good at innovation, but then somehow, they lost this ability.

Unfortunately, ...