Culture in high-performing product organizations

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Establishing and implementing a true product culture is hard, yet vital to succeed in today’s world. Organizations must design a product development culture that gives them the advantages they need, creates an environment they are proud of, and can ultimately be implemented. Indeed,

“culture isn’t a magical set of rules that makes everyone behave the way you’d like. It’s a system of behaviors that you hope most people will follow, most of the time.”

Although the real culture will unfold in the trivial day-to-day decisions and activities, the following principles will help you define a healthy collective personality in a modern Product organization.

Culture of experimentation

One of Clayton Christensen’s takeaways from his extensive research on innovation is that your processes — how you are supposed to do things — shape your culture. Most organizations today are designed to eliminate risk. So, their product culture will inevitably be risk-averse — by design. In these cases, risk elimination is associated with extensive and rigorous planning — resulting in long Discovery and Delivery cycles. Documentation is perceived as more important than Time-to-Market…