The more you work on building product, the more you realise that prioritising is the most important part of the job.
Choosing between features, bugs, fixes, polish, and invention is tricky. It has major impacts on the customer experience, your team’s energy, and the future of the business.
This is nothing new to majority of founders. In fact, this advice can get a little repetitive. Investors, team members, advisors, random strangers….everyone seems to be playing the same broken record.
- “What are your top two priorities for this year?”
- “Make sure you prioritise!”
- “Ruthless prioritisation…”
- “Ignore the rest, just focus on what is mission-critical…”
There’s no doubt about it - what they say is sincere! But being sincere and being useful are two very different things. We cannot mistake sincerity for usefulness. Why? It’s possible to be sincerely useless.
I find that although there’s a lot of emphasis in startup-land on prioritising, there’s very little on how to prioritise. The fatigue of decision making is real. I wanted one decision to rule them all. One decision that made all my other decisions easier. I was looking for a set of values, a set of principles that would help me make everyday product decisions. Even better if it could provide some transparency for my team on how I made each decision. This is where Product Principles came into play.
Product Principles vs Design Principles
Product Principles are different from Design Principles.
- Definition of Product Principles (PP) = an ordered list of product values that help to decide what to focus on.
- Definition of Design Principles (DP) = a list of principles that provide guidance on how to create good design.
Use PP to decide what to work on, and DP to decide how to make it a great experience.
NextWork’s Product Principles
- Less but better
- Choose less features but make them exceptional.
- Exceed expectations
Go beyond the minimum and deliver more than is expected. - Axe, axe, axe!
- If you're not adding things back in, you haven't deleted enough.
- Ripple effect
- The small interactions add up to create the entire product experience. A great poem by Julia Carney summarises this well; “Little drops of water, Little drops of sand, Make the mighty ocean, And the pleasant land.” Make sure the ripple effect of the micro is a positive addition to the macro.
- Nothing goes out until we're happy with it
You are in control. You are responsible. Everything is a choice, and nothing has to go out until you are happy with it.
We use the acronym LEARN to remember these easily.
Write your own PP's
These are not company values or design principles. Product Principles are what I quote when deciding whether to improve a pricing page or build a new feature.
They’re what I reference when we’re trying to decide whether to push something out quickly or wait another two days to perfect it. There’s no universal right or wrong. You need to decide these for yourself.
“Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.”
- Clementine Paddleford
How to get started
To get started, I found it useful to compare the Zuck method vs the Apple method for product. Zuck’s method is more around shipping fast, ship early, keep it scrappy and just get it out. Apple’s Product Principles prioritise quality first and will value perfecting the tiny details of a product over getting it out quickly. Where did we sit between the two?
What it really comes down to is a toss up of quality, quantity, and speed. Where you sit between these three levers is not always clear. Contrary to popular belief, every startup is different. Spend some time reflecting on how you make decisions. What matters to you as a founder? As a company? What do your customers care about the most? What sets you apart?
From this reflection start to brainstorm some product values that matter to you. Then refine them, test them, talk with your team about them. These will become your Product Principles.
Product Principles are great for aligning anyone working on product (in startups this is your whole team) on why certain decisions are made. Ultimately my hope is that as our team grows, these Product Principles will result in a consistently high quality product experience as members of NextWork start to make such decisions on their own.
