Jason’s perspective on effective product development culture (circa 2023)

You can see this as either my summary of what I consider effective product development culture OR a summary of the kind of product development culture I prefer working in.

I will link to expanded versions of each point over time.

Feel free to ask, suggest, comment while I work through this.

Core beliefs

• We’re in it together;
• People are trustworthy;
• Performance comes from playfulness

Guiding principles

• Consent over consensus;
• The basic unit of product development is the team, not the individual;
• Enable autonomy with clear intent and technical excellence;
• Cross-pollination over imposed standards;
• Develop products by developing people;
• Think big, work small;
• Use quality to generate speed;
• Limit the “blast radius”

Key practices

• Aligned, autonomous cross-disciplinary teams;
• Test Driven Development;
• Evolutionary design;
• Pairing / whole-team programming;
• Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery;
• Heartbeat retrospectives and blameless postmortems;
• T-shaped people;
• Decoupled architecture and gradual rollout [Is this covered by continuous delivery?];
• Continuous Research, Continuous Design, Continuous Delivery