Product Culture
They say that culture eats strategy for breakfast, but what is culture, how does it apply to product development and how do you foster a strong product culture? Here is a handful of ideas that have proven themselves as ways to build a product culture.
Product culture is to product development what umami is to a great dish. The bacon. The parmesan. The stuff that makes you keep coming back and makes you long for more. Product culture is a culture of empathy for customers and users through a strong understanding of real-world problems and their solutions.
Anyone can foster product culture, this is by no means limited to product managers. Whether you’re an engineer, in sales, customer service, or in marketing, you can build product culture bottom up. All you need is a genuine interest in solving problems for customers, an open mind and the guts to talk to anyone about your product.
Product culture helps you deal with difficult decisions when there is not enough data, it helps deal with difficult founders and their strong opinions and it helps bring teams together and pull in the same direction.
Here are a few quick, dirty, and cheap tactics that you can deploy if you think your product culture needs a lift.
❤️🔥 Share casual customer stories
First, you need to go and meet customers or do deep research on who they are, and what they are trying to do. Preferably both. Take pictures of them and their environment if you can (remember to ask for permission). If you just do that, you’re better off than most people who don’t talk to customers regularly. But to mine the gold, you should find ways to share your findings and empathy for the customers with the whole organization. Write engaging little stories, talk about the customers at all-hands meetings, put posters on the backside of the bathroom doors, the sky is the limit. Use real customers, users, and employees as examples of the people you’re solving for (Please don’t create personas. No one can feel anything for Invoice Isabel or Sales Simon).
If you are a master of this art, you don’t just talk to your existing customers, but also to potential customers or customers you’ve lost. If just a few people in your company are inspired and start not only talking to customers but also sharing who they are and what they need, that’s the culture you’re looking for.
🍿 Watch recordings of customers using your product
Get a room, get popcorn and soda if you want, but most importantly find a way to record real customers using your product to solve real problems. Getting everyone in a room to watch the recordings with you. If you’re not an engineer, make sure to get some engineers in the room. Engineers will see all the errors, all the loading, and all the micro-moments where something is wrong or can be optimized. Be prepared to cringe when the customers get stuck and remember that feeling of your toes cramping — it’s the golden empathy that you’re after. Take a moment to write down all the observations in silence and go around the room and agree on what to go out and solve immediately, what to plan, and what to ignore. I’ve never seen engineers write so many notes and action items as in viewings like these and so much of it getting fixed afterwards.
If you’re a master at this, you don’t just do these sessions for new things that you’re working on. You’ll do them for the product as it is today, and possibly even for the competition as well.
📐 Measure before you build
Want to change something? Have a grand idea of how the world will be so much better if we do X? Start by measuring the baseline today, before designing a single screen or writing a single line of code. Just by figuring out how to measure the behavior you want to change, you’ll be so much wiser about how to go about creating the impact you want. Once you have the backlog, try to outline basic scenarios like “If we do X and see Y happen, we’ll do Z” Outlining a decision tree of what you’ll do differently or what consequences specific results will have, will help you understand if what you’re thinking about changing is meaningful or not. Sometimes you’ll learn that just measuring the baseline is more work than the potential change is worth to you, in which case you should move on to other ideas. Other times you’ll learn by looking at the baseline that the data is highly influenced by outside factors and that even with a split test, you’ll only be able to get a result in a million years. Measuring before you build will help you refine your thinking about the changes you want to make and it is a real skill, so if it is not your strong suit, then find someone who knows how to look at data and design tests. Designing a test is cheap compared to building stuff only to realize that you have no way of knowing whether it worked or not.
📆 Spend a day with customer service
Say you watched recordings of customers using your product, got great ideas of real-world problems to solve, defined success, and measured the baseline and then you finally built the thing. Do yourself a favor and go spend a day in customer service, no matter how successful your change was. Nothing teaches you about the issues your releases create as spending time in the frontline defending your work. Whether it is in the chat support, picking up the phone, or answering emails, you’ll get to help all of those customers who didn’t experience the happy path, and who aren’t using your product as you imagined. It’s very demanding, challenging, and humbling to help customers through the mess you created.
If you’re a master at this, you do a shift in customer service every quarter or twice a year to get a continuous stream of information from the customers who need help.
👟 Walk a mile in the customers’ shoes
Finally, to foster product culture you should walk a mile in the customers’ shoes. Not just look customers over their shoulder or watch recording, but become a customer yourself. So are you working on a digital publishing platform? Then create a magazing and publish it. Are you working on accounting software? Set up a company and do the books. Working on warehouse tech? Then go and pick and pack orders on the floor. Eat your own dog food and drink your own champagne. It hurts but in a good way.
I didn’t invent all of this. I just picked it up on the way from so many talented people that I was fortunate enough to meet and work with. Thank you!
