How to create product principles that make a difference
Why use them, and 20 examples to get you started
A thousand decisions go into every product.
Every day you and your team are making decisions to create products that people (hopefully) love.
But it’s very difficult to make good decisions without also thinking about the bigger picture. This bigger picture is made up of 3 things:
- The company strategy
- What the market is doing
- Your product principles
Where the product vision describes the future you want to create, and the product strategy describes you path to achieving that vision, the product principles speak to the nature of the products you want to create — Marty Cagan
What are product principles?
The idea behind having a list of principles for your product is to crystallise what the company and product team believe is important.
Product principles are the core DNA of the product. They’re the fundamental values that underly every action, decision or move the product team makes — ProductPlan
To do that, principles need to transcend individual features and be aligned with the vision throughout the life of that product.
Here’s an example. (20 more at the bottom of this article).
Say you have an email marketing product. You learn that customers love your product because of the integrations, not the actual email campaign functionality.
You could then create a product principle that speaks to that realisation like,
“In the case where the needs of an integration and new functionality conflict, we will prioritise the integration, because that’s the most important thing for our customers.”
Who needs to see them?
Don’t feel the pressure to publish them publicly. First principles (see what I did there) is that they are used to help make good decisions, and align the team and business.
If it makes sense to use this as a marketing opportunity, then go for it. Otherwise they can stay as an internal…
