Product Principles That Create Great Products: A Guide for Balanced Teams and Beyond
Product managers on empowered teams deliver value in complex situations by prioritizing the things that matter, emphasizing collaboration over consensus, and making decisions with incomplete info.
The Evolving Role of Product Management
The discipline of Product Management is growing faster than ever, but somehow what it actually is seems less definable. Expectations of a PM can look completely different depending on where you practice - some companies use PMs as rebranded project managers while others frame PMs as the CEO OF THE PRODUCT. Product job descriptions are full of overstuffed buzzwords like “product thinking” and “product-led growth.”
In the most successful product organizations, PMs operate in cross-functional, balanced teams. Sometimes these teams are called squads, triads, or something else entirely, but the idea is the same: great products come from high-touch collaboration across diverse roles. And if you are an advocate for empowered teams within your product operating model, think about the PM’s job as a complement the to the specialties of designers, engineers, and other disciplines on product teams. Their individual skills need to be in balance so the result is a product of quality, that is desired by customers, and is worth continued investment from the business.
The term I like to use for these types of teams is a balanced team, o that’s what I’m going to use in the rest of this post. What I’m writing directly applies to you if you are supposed to be on an empowered balanced team in an operating model that encourages autonomy, customer-centricity, and outcomes over outputs.
Your Mission: Navigate to Value in a World of Complexity
Navigate: This is how we bring clarity, context, and perspective to the work our team is doing. This encompasses all the practices that many would use to define our discipline.
Value: You define the direction. The ultimate question when navigating is “Where are we going?” If you can’t clearly articulate the destination—whether it’s revenue, user adoption, or something else—you risk wandering aimlessly.
Complexity: The path we navigate will be uncertain and unpredictable. You’ll often move forward with incomplete information. Your success relies on being flexible, learning continuously, and adjusting your course as new information emerges.
Operating Principles
🎯 Our business is the business.
Product managers are stewards for making sure the business achieves strategic outcomes, everything else we do is in service of this.
We are obsessed with exploring opportunities, and we fail when the team does not understand or drive towards the outcomes we are trying to achieve.
👂 Collaboration over consensus.
We believe the best decisions are made when you consider perspectives from a broad range of people and disciplines. We include as many viewpoints as possible before making important decisions and nothing should happen in a vacuum.
We are neither gatekeepers nor bridge builders and aim to break down walls entirely and get everyone working together with a focus on the problem and the business model as a whole.
That being said, the buck stops with us because making decisions with incomplete information is our commitment to the team. As such we defer decision making to the last responsible moment to accommodate gathering opinions and up to date market data.
🤷♂️ We keep our identities small, opinions loose, and decisions quick.
While we strive to include diversity of thought in our decision-making, we also see the value in making quick decisions with small groups when we believe it will help us learn and achieve a better outcome.
As PMs we should favor quick decisions over deep research. This means we need to have strong opinions based on instinct and existing knowledge and then use our process as a way to collect evidence that strengthens or changes said opinions (while creating valuable things of course).
It is important to remember that our decisions are not tied to our identities and we should be quick to change our minds as we learn.
🎗 We empower others by being detail un-obsessed.
We need to ensure our team collectively produces a sustainable long-term increase in value. Every person on the team needs to be capable of taking on more and more responsibility and details.
On agile teams, this is the purpose of the team ceremonies. Therefore it is important that we preserve the integrity and quality of rituals that empower everyone through shared understanding.
We use team rituals (like stand-ups and retros) exist to build shared understanding and we avoid micromanaging decisions. Instead, we encourage teammates to evolve and improve continuously.
Your Unique Contribution as a PM
By working in a way that reinforces shared mission and values, the things you do become less important than the way you approach work, and you ensure you act in service of the business and team needs, so that when your product is built it is high quality, it’s desired by customers, and it’s worth continued investment from the business
You are paid to take calculated bets. Everyone else ensures feasibility, viability, or desirability from their own viewpoint. You decide what is valuable enough to build and when. Data and experimentation are your tools for making better judgment calls.
You are paid to be on top of the business. Nobody else on the team has the same mandate to internalize customer needs, interpret metrics, or keep the bigger picture in mind as consistently. You create the conditions that let products resonate in the market.
You must be an influential communicator. You have no formal authority over your colleagues, so you must motivate, persuade, and unify. That’s not optional—it’s essential to shipping products customers actually want.1
