Principles Eat Process for Breakfast
One of the big things I’ve learned over the last decade or so as a product manager and leader is that principles eat process for breakfast. You can write all the standard operating procedures you want, but if you don’t have a strong ethos about how you work then you’ll struggle to build innovative products that have lasting impact.
Processes and procedures have the potential to make our organisations more efficient, but we often conflate efficiency and effectiveness. Just because you've made it easy for someone to follow the steps to get a job done, it doesn't mean they'll do it well.
This is especially true when it comes to developing digital products.
Every product and market is different, and individual successes are often hugely contextual (and based a lot more on luck and being in the right place at the right time than any sort of repeatable process).
Even when you're working on a single product as a PM, you'll often find that the approach you take to get one idea from inception to launch needs to be totally different for the next—what worked in one situation isn't guaranteed to work in another (for all sorts of chaos theory-style reasons you could spend a lifetime trying to figure out).
This is magnified almost infinitely if you're an agency product manager working across multiple products at different lifecycle stages in different domains.
Trying to create a single product management process for your organisation is a wasted effort. What you need to do instead is create the conditions for success—a set of principles for how you do product that can be applied to any initiative and give your organisation the best possible chance of winning.
Like legendary basketball coach Phil Jackson says:
This links closely to the way Marty Cagan talks about leading by context rather than control.
You could argue that principles are context, and processes are control.
By giving your teams a set of guiding principles to work from you're giving them the freedom to figure out the best way to achieve their goals.
By handing them a Standard Operating Procedure, on the other hand, you're removing the opportunity for creativity and adaptation.
And building great products is all about creativity.
Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, argued that simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behaviour whereas complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behaviour.
It's this adherence to a set of principles which a great number of people can use that was one of the core tenets of his management philosophy, and one of the key things that drove Visa to become one of the most successful financial organisations in the world.
This links closely to military strategist John Boyd's qualities of victorious organisations, one of which is “Auftragstaktik” (leadership by contract).
This idea of contractual, decentralised leadership is a huge part of what made the German Army so successful in the early stages of the Second World War. Once Hitler made himself supreme commander of the Wehrmacht and began to lead by complete control, things fell apart very quickly (and very badly).
There's a lesson for product leaders to learn there, which is about giving your teams the freedom to figure out the best way to solve the problems that are in front of them instead of dictating approaches and solutions.
Top-down processes don't empower your teams, they disempower them.
Instead of trying to figure out the process for how you want to work, take it up a level and define the principles you want to work by.