In this article we’ve collated real product principle examples from Intercom, USA.gov, Airbnb, the FT, OpenAI, Slack, Gitlab, Shopify and more.
Product management principles are behavioral statements that create a mental model and decision making framework for teams. They’re powerful cultural tools that can shape the values and efficacy of an organization.
They act as a values system that helps teams determine on a daily basis what to do when faced with multiple possible pathways.
Product Principles Table of Contents
Product principle examples can bring the concept of product principles to life, and help you shape your own.
“We have principles in place that reflect how we want to work as a product team. Having principles within the team that they sign up to is key… day to day [it] enables us to have a culture that is working towards those outcomes and challenging each other to maintain them.” - Joe Tinston, CPO of Bloom & Wild
The Hustle Badger Product Principles Miro Board
What are product management principles?
There’s a whole host of things out there referred to as ‘principles’.
At the company level they might be connected to value or mission statements, linked to them, or used instead of them, as the primary cultural tool in the organization.
Even at the principle level, the term ‘principle’ can cover many different types of things.
Things referred to as principles span:
- Product management principles: explicitly labelled product principles intended to guide product development processes and thinking
- Design principles: often UI and experience led, explicitly focused on how the user perceives and interacts with the product
- Company principles: these aren’t always applicable to product contexts, but in product-led technology companies they are often intended to guide the behaviour of every team - including product development
Despite their differences, principles of different sorts are often used interchangeably, depending on how product led a company is, how design led a company is, whether they spring from the top of the organisation, or are created within teams.
The point of this article is to help you shape your own principles through showing some examples - whether you’re a founder, a team lead or a CPO.
As a result we’ve tried to select the strongest and most effective principles we could find, and not worried too much about the principle bucket they sit in.
There’s few scenarios where a company has a set of company principles, another set for product managers and another set for design. Generally one set of principles rules.
Our criteria has been that they must be
- Have something to say: Meaningful when it comes to how the organization thinks about product ideation and development
- Embedded: truly used within the company, rather than cultural wallpaper
What makes a good product principle?
It should be
- Linked to company vision / mission or strategy: they need to ladder up to the business strategy and purpose
- Clear about required customer outcomes: they need to state what good looks like when it comes to serving users
- Actionable: you need to understand what you should do at the point of decision
- Precise: feel good, vague language doesn’t set strong guardrails or help with complex situations
- Opinionated: it’s important that they have a clear point of view - everything to everyone principles serve no one
- Intuitive: people should understand instinctively what they mean without reams of explanation
- Snappy: if they’re catchy and you can quote them, people will remember them
Let’s get into it now.
USA.gov’s product principles
This is a considered, public set of product principles, guided by values.
They’re hosted publicly in the ‘About Us’ section of USA.gov.
Each principle is clearly defined and articulated using behavioral language which in turn makes it clear how employees should act when faced with choices.
What’s good about these product management principles:
On top of being hosted publicly, it’s clear that a great deal of thought has gone into articulating and conveying these principles. In addition to the headline product principle, each comes with an explainer.
There’s 6 principles and each is supported with 3 bullets of explanation.
Let’s take an example from principle 5 - ‘USA.gov is a productivity tool, giving people fast, accurate service’.
One way this is explained is that it means ‘Taking time to understand where we can build for a general audience, and where we should offer different paths for different needs.’
Explaining the principles is as critical as outlining them in the first place.
Financial Times’ product development principles
“What does good look like? It’s one of the most common questions we ask in any piece of work. It’s a phrase that hides a lot of questions too: What are we trying to achieve? What is this product supposed to be? How can we make things better? Getting a shared picture of ‘good’ is a challenge.” - Lindsay James, CPO Financial Times
Describing their product principles as tools to help decide what to build on, and what to leave behind, these principles were developed collaboratively in a series of workshops, involving the entire product and design org.
The questions to answer were:
- How do you want people to talk about our products?
- What were the conditions under which they did their best work?
What’s good about these product management principles
There’s a lot to learn here about truly embedding product principles within an organization, and making a team live and breathe them. The collaborative approach was a key component.
The FT accomplished adoption in other ways as well. One tactic was converting each of the principles into emojis, which teams and individuals could use to respond to initiatives and statements on Slack. They also implemented a fortnightly Show and Tell, where the team who best embodies one of the principles receives an award.
Our interview with Lindsay James of the FT
Intercom's many principles
“As we’ve scaled, codifying our approach to decision-making has been critical. Think about what happens when new folks who lack all of that historical context join the company; without principles in place they can feel disempowered, lost, or even totally misaligned. Now consider what happens when those misaligned people start onboarding even newer folks, compounding misalignment. It becomes frighteningly easy to lose any sense of overall consistency and momentum across teams.” - Emmet Connolly, VP of Product Design at Intercom
What’s good about these product management principles:
There’s real clarity of thought about why principles exist, how they empower and strengthen the organization, and what makes a good principle.
Here are some great learnings from Intercom:
- Principles over process: they don’t hire great people to follow a cheat sheet, they empower them to make great decisions
- Principles shouldn’t be truisms: truisms don’t help in a decision making context. If you reverse the principle and it doesn’t make much sense, that’s a pointer
How Intercom use principles:
- Different principles for different functions: they have different principle sets where teams have different focus areas
- They iterate their principles: they’re on at least their 3rd big iteration
- They sometimes even design new principles for specific projects: again, where new requirements require new thinking.
For example, the design principles the team developing Intercom’s chatbot UI should follow is a good example of ethical AI UI - and a case where the team decided to enhance existing principles with a new set for a new use case.
It might feel like principle overkill, but it’s a great example of how organizations can really get behind principles.
Shopify’s early product principles
Source: Marc Abraham
Shopify’s product principles have disappeared from Polaris in favour of product marketing language, but they used to be:
- Put merchants first
- Empower but don’t overwhelm
- Build a cohesive experience
- Be polished but not ornamental
What’s good about these product management principles:
They’re focused on jobs to be done for the users. Functionality and ease of use is emphasised.
They’re also clearly linked to the [old] mission of “to make commerce better for everyone, no matter where they’re located or their level of experience.”
Cisco’s product management principles
Cisco’s Product Principles
Jason Cyr, VP, Head of Design for Security and AI, wrote up Cisco’s product principles in 2022. He talks through Cisco’s principles and also gives out some good advice on how to make your own.
“Principles are effective for alignment across functional groups (Product, Engineering, Design, Marketing, etc.) and also up and down the hierarchy within an organization. Once adopted, these principles become the foundation for the way teams work.” - Jason Cyr
What’s good about these product management principles:
In their write up about their product principles, Cisco has paired each principle with its opposite. Defining what the opposite of the principle is helps clarify the true meaning.
Here’s some examples (principle in bold):
- Keep things insanely simple vs. infinitely flexible and comprehensive
- Move fast, because speed matters vs. perfecting before shipping
- Constantly improve vs. ship and move on.
- Go deep on the use case vs. feature density spread thin
- Design products people [really] love vs. good enough, but forgettable
- Obsess over the customer, not the competitor
It’s a useful trick because articulating the negative brings the cultural point into sharp focus. Often people start with what they don’t want, and by flipping that round are able to articulate the positive principle.
Each principle also comes with an explainer, and they’ve invested time and effort in creating principle icons, and principle cheat sheet slides.
Box’s product principles
“Creating a set of product principles is no easy task and requires input from a wide range of stakeholders. Don’t select them lightly — they’ll inform every feature release and product decision.” - Box Product Principles, Pendo
In 2020, Jeetu Patel, then CPO of Box, now of Cisco, gave a session at Pendo’s ProductCraft Virtual Conference on product principles. The major lesson he conveyed was that product principles are binding. At Box if a feature or idea didn’t align with their principles, they did not pursue it.
That means that you really need to invest the effort to nail and if necessary iterate your principles - since they codify what your organization will pursue and become.
What’s good about these product management principles:
Similar to Cisco, what the principle does not mean is as clearly articulated as the goal. Sometimes defining what you are not in favour of is as critical as stating the goal you’d like to achieve.
It’s a great example of a company really living their principles.
We already covered Gitlab in our product vision examples article, and this is another example of a clearly articulated set of cultural principles.
Gitlab maintains a coherent and maintained set of cultural documents online. Enormous effort has been made to articulate strategy, vision, goals, principles, roles and much more.
What’s good about these product management principles:
They come with opinionated explanations of what is meant by them. They’re hard to misconstrue.
If there was any danger of anyone not understanding them, they have supported them with a long essay on concrete ways in which they live their principles, covering topics as diverse as the minimum viable change, subtractive thinking and SaaS first development.
Finally, they are completely coherent with Gitlab’s other strategy and planning documents, creating powerful cultural scaffolding.
Airbnb’s product principles
Sanchan Saxena, current SVP & GM at Atlassian, ex VP Coinbase, Airbnb and more, shared this short video about Airbnb’s product principles in 2023.
In it he covers each of the principles, what is meant by them, and an example of how they’re used within Airbnb.
What’s good about these product management principles:
They’re coherent, and all stem from a laser focus on delivering the best possible user experience. In many ways, they’re all different ways of saying the same thing.
For an interesting added insight, Sanchan shares how Brian Chesky is a fan of Amazon’s PR FAQ, or working backwards method, and how they have adapted PR FAQs within Airbnb to be punchy, product focused future leaning press releases.
He goes as far as to share a real one about AirCover, their insurance product.
Our Amazon’s Working Backwards Method | PR FAQs Template & Guide
Gusto’s product principles
“We don’t usually think of products — especially software — as having personality….[but] products are human. They mirror the perspectives and quirks of the people who built them. This type of personality-driven product development requires stepping back and determining the values and principles that truly matter to your team.” - Tomer London, Gusto CPO & Co-Founder
Tomer wrote up these product principles on Gusto’s blog in 2015, and they’ve stayed there ever since.
What’s good about these product management principles:
These principles were developed collaboratively with the team as a whole in workshops, and intended to reflect the values which mattered most to the personalities building the product and working at the company.
This method is effective for creating values that the team will buy into and adopt, but means there is less opportunity for leaders to directly influence culture, or set their view of what good looks like.
“Product principles are essential guidelines that help teams evaluate work across functions, as well as up and down the decision-making chain, by ensuring all work ladders up to the organization’s ultimate goals. Better alignment, in turn, leads to better and faster product decisions.” - Ethan Eismann, SVP Product Design at Slack
Slack developed these product principles starting from their ‘product philosophy’, which they call ‘getting to the next hill’.
At its core the philosophy of getting to the next hill is a focus on immediate, incremental moves, versus big aspirational concepts. It’s supported by a longer term product strategy but the focus is on continuous improvement.
“When you climb each small hill, you gain a new perspective, which lets you make new and better decisions because you’re able to survey the land. If you attempt to summit Everest, you risk spending a great deal of time scaling it only to realize it’s not the right perspective” - Why your organization needs product principles, Techcrunch
What’s good about these product management principles
There’s emphasis on using product principles as a mental model to improve execution, rather than a logic to replace jobs to be done.
The product principles are seen as a suite of tools, working in alignment with a product strategy, jobs to be done for users, and a product philosophy.
They’re also treated as an evolving tool - while they were rolled out with a company announcement, custom emojis, and boards, they’re seen as a set which will change and adapt over time.
IKEA's design and product principles
“The development of a product goes through various phases, and one of our ways of identifying whether a product suits our range is with Democratic Design. It has five different dimensions—function, form, quality, sustainability, and low price. With each principle considered, a design should be considered democratic.” - IKEA
What’s good about these product management principles:
A mix of design and product development principles, these have stood the test of time. They’re concise, elegant and form IKEA’s mission statement, embedded into IKEA’s working process. The fact that they’re single words is also effective and memorable.
As an added bonus, they link to their top 5 ever designs from the page, and explain how each of these designs excels against these principles. Using concrete product examples brings the principles to life, elegantly showing, not telling.
It’s another effective way to articulate the principles, alongside explainers and the negative.
Basecamp | 37 Signals’ principles
‘It’s simple until you make it complicated’ - Jason Fried
37 Signals was founded by Jason Fried and David Heinemaier Hansson back in 1999. It’s had various name changes (i.e. to Basecamp), but it started as 37 signals, and it is currently 37 signals.
They’re most famous as the creators of the open source framework Ruby on Rails, Basecamp and HEY, but they’re also prolific authors on start up and company culture. Rework and Remote were both NYT bestsellers.
37 signals’ core products are software products. As a result they’ve developed 7 shipping principles that cover how and under which conditions they release software.
What’s good about these principles:
They come with an opinionated essay which makes how to interpret them very clear, and articulates dos and do nots. They’re also coherent, in that you could work through these principles and by the end understand how to behave and act within one of their engineering squads.
Their shipping principles also align closely to their beliefs about the world, or the 37 principles they list on their home page. Some of these principles include ‘Err on the side of do’ and ‘Fixed’ or setting clear scopes to stay on track, on time and on budget.
37 signals: the principles that drive them to do what they do
37 signals was initially named after 37 extraterrestrial radio signals that were identified by Paul Horowitz as possible communications. These days the site homepage features 37 principles that they say drive them to what they do.
What’s good about these principles:
It’s eclectic, and philosophical but it’s a good mix of general life advice, and what matters to their company. Articulating that the company has principles is sufficient to drive cultural focus.
As with some other principles we’ve looked at in this article, there’s overlap with Amazon. The principle Disagree and Commit turns up here, and is also part of Amazon’s leadership principles.
OpenAI's AGI product development principles
“Although we cannot predict exactly what will happen, and of course our current progress could hit a wall, we can articulate the principles we care about most” - Sam Altman, OpenAI
In 2023 Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI published an essay outlining the principles by which the company was approaching AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), and the measures they would take in the short and the long term to act according to those principles. As things have developed, footnotes have been added saying what has been learned so far, and what has changed.
What’s good about these product management principles:
They’re an interesting example of trying to set some cultural guardrails in a tough to predict grey zone, where the outcome doesn’t depend solely on people’s behaviour. Included are: guardrails for AGI, open governance, and managing risk through incremental iterations.
They’re also iterative, updated and were made collaboratively with advice from other tech leaders. Acknowledgements on the article for assistance with the project include Brian Chesky (CEO of Airbnb), Paul Christiano (Head of the AI Safety Institute), the internal OpenAI team and more.
Wrap up on product management principles
Product principles are powerful tools that shape your company’s ethos and development principles.
Product principles need to
- Shape your goals: articulate what you want to achieve as an organization
- Match your business requirements: once you have principles in place, they will drive your organization. They must align to what you want to achieve
- Drive the culture: they will shape decision making and day to day interactions. You need to be clear what you want to drive
- Be easy to understand: you can adopt methods like punchy language, explainers, show and tells and the negative approach to define positive principles
- Be adopted: used within the company daily and aligned to
They require deep thought, and investment in articulation and adoption.
Don’t be afraid to iterate or cancel principles. Technology moves fast, and you can’t always know in advance how things will land. Best of luck shaping product management principles that work for your org.
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