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;
- Sustainable, high performance comes from a playful growth mindset
Guiding principles
- Consent over consensus;
- The basic unit of product development is the team, not the individual;
- Autonomy is enabled by clear intent and technical excellence;
- Cross-pollination over imposed standards;
- Developing products is about developing people;
- Think big, work small;
- Speed generates quality;
- Limit the “blast radius”;
- Don’t just borrow wisdom; think for yourself
Key practices
- Aligned, autonomous cross-disciplinary teams;
- TDD, evolutionary design, pairing/mobbing;
- Continuous Delivery normally; release trains when regular synchronisation required;
- Heartbeat retrospectives and blameless postmortems;
- T-shaping;
- Decoupled architecture and gradual rollout;
- Continuous Research, Continuous Design, Continuous Delivery