Using Principles and Constraints to Build More Valuable Products
Principles and constraints over processes and templates
I've come to realize that the backbone of repeatable success isn't just about innovative technology, choosing a methodology, or executing your go-to-market strategies—it's also about making your skillset adaptable and as context-agnostic as possible.. that guide decision-making at every step. These principles have shaped my approach and outcomes in profound ways.
In my journey, I’ve worked on products across a range of different sized companies and product types and one learning that has helped me in every context is that there is a handful of things that work for me everywhere. So I distilled them into a set of personal operating principles and constraints I use to to start just about everything.
One core belief that has consistently guided me is the importance of moving fast. This isn't about rushing decisions or sacrificing quality, but about embracing agility and making informed choices quickly. This principle came to life in one of my early projects, where swift decision-making allowed us to pivot effectively in response to early user feedback, setting a foundation for a flexible and responsive development process.
Principles
Move fast.
Getting real world product usage is where the rubber meets the road. Until that point I acknowledge that I cannot predict the future or the best solution. All of my opinions are as good as guesses until we ship it and see the effect. So I spend as little thought and effort as possible on approving simple decisions so I can focus on bigger issues and learn as fast as possible.
Work small.
When I get my teams ramped up on moving fast, they find out decisions are actually wrong pretty often. The salve to apply is minimizing the amount of effort going into each release. When the effort is low, the risk of being wrong is also minimal, therefore it costs us less effort and we learn (i.e. get to the right solution) faster.
Talk about it.
Fast, small work needs to result in iteration. The entire team needs to be able to make our product and opinions more right than yesterday. Hoarding information and creating knowledge silos only prevents shared learning.
Reinforcing behaviors
I believe there are certain guiding mindsets that reinforce and strengthen my core principles
assume positive intent.
We should always challenge each other in a respectful way because we create the best products when it incorporates more opinions.
outcomes over solutions.
Value measurement is the lynchpin📍that connect solutions (what we do) to outcomes (what we achieve) We gauge progress via metrics, not features.
shared context.
Every member of the team has equal context about the business and user problems to solve and is encouraged to bring their perspectives to our work. Transparency is the default.
shared ownership.
While each discipline has different domain of expertise, we give consent to every member of the team can make decisions. We value collaboration over consensus.
Constraints
Finally, I believe empowerment and autonomy comes with safety to fail. So while I always encourage asking forgiveness vs asking permission, there are some guardrails to establish that the entire team should stay within. Luckily, these constraints also support the core principles.
Don’t deliver work that adds more value than cost
Understanding how value will be measured value is a pre-req to doing work
100% full delivery backlog is an anti-pattern
Do "just enough" research
realized value only exists once it can be measured
Assuming value before delivery is an anti-pattern
This exercise was effective because it encouraged everyone to share their ideas and incorporated elements of everyone's opinions into our final working agreement. Once we agreed that "talking about it" was important, a sense of openness was created that allowed us to share opinions and challenge each other without guilt or awkwardness. The constraints we established became guardrails for future decisions and made everyone feel more autonomous, as long as they respected our shared constraints.