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