Principles of great product teams

First principles that separate the best product teams.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been thinking about what separates great product teams from the rest. There’s no better feeling than being on a team operating at their full potential, doing their best work together, and creating meaningful impact for customers. So I started writing these thoughts down for three reasons:

1. Clarifying my own thinking and convictions — writing and refining these principles has already been extremely helpful in refining my own thinking. I’m expecting this will lead to more conversations where I learn something.

2. Frustration with PM career ladders — I’ve always been frustrated with career ladders for PMs. Most feel over-matrixed and unhelpful in practice. I’m hoping that a set of first principles that apply across all levels of product can be more helpful to PMs regardless of where they are in their career journey.

3. Giving the same advice — in confronting a range of challenges, both inside Coda and when advising other companies, I found myself giving a similar set of advice. So it felt worthwhile to write it down in case it could be helpful to a wider audience.

That’s a bit about the why, now let’s talk about the core idea.

Turning ambiguity into clarity

To start with an observation, PMs and product teams encounter relentless ambiguity. Everyday is a barrage of questions — what should we build? What problem are we solving? Who’s deciding? How do we measure it? What’s my role? What’s the strategy? And it’s all levels, from the PM of a small team to the CPO.

In my experience, great product teams and PMs tend to be exceptional at prioritizing ambiguity and turning it into clarity. By contrast, average PMs and product teams tend to accept or get bogged down by ambiguity. The differences play out in everyday situations like, being clear about a strategy, leaving meetings with clear follow-ups, averting roadblocks before Engineers hit them, getting to the root of customer feedback, facilitating sound decision-making, and the list goes on.

So I drafted seven principles on how to do that in practice, based on my own mistakes, learnings, and observations from hundreds of other product teams.

Today, I posted the first principle on Coda’s blog and in the coming weeks I’ll add the other six. Click the button below to read it. I’d love to know what resonates, what doesn’t, and example rituals that come to mind for you.