#6 Ways of working and culture
What you do is who you are
A message for Product leaders: if you don’t define the ways of working for discovering and delivering value in your organization - someone else will (e.g. Sales, Engineering, a rogue VP of something).
And chances are that it won’t be for the benefit of your product organization and your customers.
Why should you care?
Because your ways of working shape your culture.
What you do is who you are.
The way you’re set up to discover value will impact whether you make decisions based on evidence from customers - or commit to building stuff based on opinions. One often leads to success, the other to failure.
It will impact whether you’re staying in “discovery land” for 6 months, or if you’re making true progress at a fast pace.
It will impact whether the solutions you build have legs to become profitable businesses, or just the latest and greatest technology deployed for no one to use.
The higher you are on the product leadership spectrum in your organization (e.g. CPO), the more attentive you should be to your product teams’ habits and principles behind their decisions.
❌ Many product leaders misunderstand (or neglect) this...
Remember,
The easiest and less impactful forms of fostering a certain culture are written artifacts (e.g. product principles, values on the wall, etc.)
The hardest and most impactful are your and your teams' actions (e.g. who you promote, the worst behavior you tolerate, what you praise in public, how your teams make decisions, how they collaborate, their habits, etc.). This is what matters ✅
It's the small daily decisions, how the team actually works, and what you incentivize through actions that dictate the culture you end up having.
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Hey there 👋 I’m Afonso, Founder & Partner at Scandinavian Product Group. Thanks for reading :)