This document outlines the Core Product Beliefs of the Unified Design team @ Autodesk and is created to build alignment around the principles we believe are important to succeed with Product development. Together with our Tech Core Beliefs and Design Principles, the Product Core Beliefs summarize our take on product development!
Why do we need this?
While there is a lot of great material on product, and product management out there, there are also a lot of principles and practices that we don’t believe are a good fit for a modern product organization.
Why is that?
- Products and industries are moving faster and faster, upping the challenge for product organizations to stay nimble and aligned
- Agile product development is very different to waterfall product development
- SaaS has blurred the lines between product and go-to-market, making it more important for product teams to be fit to work in this intersection
Below are the 10 Core Beliefs that we believe are the most important for Product at Unified Design. Note that these Core Beliefs are not static and will be iterated on over time as we learn more.
We believe that the best products are made when Product, Design, and Engineering operate as a jointly accountable trio. This ensures that we get the perspectives needed for high-quality decision-making and that the entire product team feels ownership for what they do. We value overlap between functional areas instead of creating silos/separation. This means that others can and should have an opinion about your functional area and you should have the same.
We expect product teams to take full ownership of their strategic direction. This means that product teams are expected to drive towards their objectives, react fast to new information around them and stay aligned with other teams. Instead of focusing on alignment around a set roadmap, product teams should contribute to building transparency around what the team is doing, thinking, and learning, while ensuring that you are responsive to new information from data, product teams and leadership.
Contribute to ensuring that decisions are backed by qualitative data, quantitative data, and first principles. You are not the user and data is a powerful tool to protect you and your team against biases in decision-making. Being data-driven is not about aggregating as much data as possible before you do something, but to structure the work in a way where experiments create data that gradually improve the precision of decision-making over time.
Be obsessed with creating value and understanding the problems we can solve for our users. Contribute to creating a short and direct feedback loop between user and product team.
Take ownership of the company goals and what these goals mean for your team. In particular, a successful product is a result of both product and distribution. Ensure that your team is contributing to that in the best way possible!
Contribute to building a culture of rapid iteration and experimentation where we optimize for time to value. Fast iterations and an experimentation-over-planning mindset are the most powerful way to protect you and the team against your own biases. Contribute to helping the team to break down large initiatives into smaller purposeful experiments that can be validated fast and iteratively and aim to minimize dependencies between teams that slow us down. Fast iterations is not about mindlessly pushing out features but doing small and purposeful experiments.
In a fast-moving organization, you need to be able to embrace change and uncertainty. We don’t introduce processes before we need them and that means you must tolerate some chaos. Always innovate, there is no stable best practice and the best we can do is always improve them.
In product development, initiatives always carry a certain amount of risk. We want our product teams to do risky bets that are aligned with user value and company strategy. Contribute to finding smart ways to approach bets with high uncertainty, e.g. by testing a new feature on part of the user base and de-risk the most uncertain aspects of a bet first.
In product development, you can have as much experience as you want, but there will always be things that you don’t know and some of them will surprise you. Therefore, be humble to others’ opinions and be curious, but don’t be afraid of being decisive and have opinions when needed for helping the product team forward.
Moving fast means that there will be open gaps, “someone should think or do something about this”. Contribute to both searching for these gaps and filling them. Don’t be afraid to speak up if you believe there is room for improvement in products or processes outside your area of ownership!