Product Management Team Values

Backstory: I asked my senior PM at Homepolish, Meg Vaccaro, how she thought I could best help support and mentor some of the more junior PMs on the team. She recommended I share with them a description of the values I want us, as a Product team, to embody and employ as a framework for success. As someone who is now teaching my sixth instance of General Assembly's Product Management course, I thought it might be valuable to share that document with my students and all of you.

We discover and deliver high-impact solutions to meaningful customer problems in ways that are aligned to strategic business goals.

1. For new, green-field initiatives, we start from the customer and work backwards to identify the highest ROI customer problems we can solve. We do not start from business goals and work backwards to a customer problem.
2. When optimizing a post-product/market fit product, we identify the highest ROI customer problems we can solve within the priorities set by strategic business goals.
3. We always consider multiple solutions to a problem and don’t fall in love with one particular idea or feature too quickly.
4. With limited resources, we often can’t implement the perfect solution. We work hard to balance customer needs and stakeholder goals with other priority initiatives to identify the right sized solution for right now.

We are proactive, not reactive, in every way.

1. We think and act like owners, doing what’s best for the long term success of the company as a whole, as well as what’s necessary in the short term (whether it’s “our job” or not).
2. We use our strategic goals to drive how we spend our team’s time and resources. We don’t react to the fire of the moment unless it deserves prioritization.
3. We know our stakeholders' goals, anxieties, and values so well that we proactively recognize what we need to do to communicate and manage effectively. We don’t wait for people to come to us.
4. If we sense ambiguity, we shine light on it, to make sure everyone is on the same page at all times.
5. Few decisions are irreversible. We don’t mind being wrong if it’s easy to make it right. Better to act, fail fast, and learn than not act at all.

We lead without authority by creating trust and having empathy.

1. We have complete mastery over the facts: project status, requirements, stakeholder goals, metrics, and dependencies.
2. We work hard so that we are right, a lot. We have the data to prove it. If we’re wrong, we own it immediately and do what it takes to make things right.
3. We take the time to listen intently to our customers, our teammates (i.e. dev, design, QA, marketing), and our stakeholders to capture their goals, anxieties, and values. We consider and speak to those goals, anxieties, and values often so that people trust that we have them in mind when we move forward.
4. We own our failures and pass on praise to our teams.

We are mindful of all significant risks, assumptions, and hypotheses and look for the cheapest, fastest ways to turn those into facts.

1. We try to do better than “build it and see what happens”, though sometimes that is the right answer. Typically, we use MVPs like user interviews, surveys, landing page tests, and paper / code prototypes to give ourselves permission to invest further.
2. Stakeholder buy-in is critical to our success, and we are proactive in getting relevant stakeholders’ input and addressing their concerns throughout a project.
3. Based on our team’s recommendation and our best judgement, we determine the appropriate level of testing and QA that should be invested prior to a release. The greater the cost of failure — as measured in dollars, brand equity, stakeholder confidence, cost to fix — the more we invest in testing and QA.
4. We deliver customer and business value quickly by breaking down single giant projects into multiple smaller releases. Doing so helps us manage risk, maintain velocity, and stay agile in a fast-changing environment.

We’re all in this, together.

1. We always lend a helping hand, pitching in when needed to help with QA, design, analysis, and advice.
2. We work hard to maximize the productivity of our teams at all times, but we also know when to ease up and play the long game.
3. When we say “no” — and we are forced to say “no” often — we do so with empathy and transparency. We draw upon our stated strategic goals, data, experience, and prioritized roadmap to make our points. We empathize with our stakeholder’s own goals, pressures, and context. We set realistic expectations as to what happens next.
4. When we disagree, we say so and argue our point of view until a decision is made. Once made, we commit and see it through.

Thanks to Tim Lombardo, Kate Zasada, and Austin Lin for the helpful feedback on earlier drafts. Those close to the industry will likely also notice influences from Good PM / Bad PM and Amazon Leadership Principles, so I wanted to give credit where it is due.