7 Principles of Great Product Teams

How great product teams turn ambiguity into clarity.

Lane Shackleton

Lane creates insightful product experiences and leads effective, empathetic teams, including the Product and Design team here at Coda.

7 Principles of Great Product Teams

By Lane Shackleton

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Product Teams · 1 min read

The PM role, and building product, is fraught with ambiguity. What’s my role? What does the customer want? What should we build? What impact did it have? What decision should we make? What should we do next? It doesn’t matter if you’re a PM of a small team or the CPO — these are the questions that keep you up at night. So, what do Product Managers and product teams do about all this ambiguity? The ineffective teams let it fester. They let ambiguity block their progress, sometimes in small subtle ways and sometimes big systemic ways. They leave meetings without follow-ups, they aren’t proactive about what’s next, they let open questions delay decisions, they make mistakes and don’t learn from them. By contrast, the best product teams are relentless about turning ambiguity into clarity. If you remember one thing, that’s it. Find and prioritize ambiguity, and make it clear for your team. ‘Turning ambiguity into clarity’ sounds... ambiguous. For the last 15 years, I’ve held a variety of product roles at Google, YouTube, and Coda. So while I’m always skeptical of frameworks, I wanted to write down some underlying philosophy, stories, and pragmatic approaches might be useful to others. Ultimately my not-so secret hope is that reading this will prompt you to reflect more deeply on your own experience and discover your own principles. Below, you’ll find seven principles that may help you and your team achieve the overarching concept.

Principle 1

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7 Principles of Great Product Teams

Lane Shackleton

7 Principles of Great Product Teams

Create cathedrals, not bricks.

Create systems, not goals.

Be proactive, not reactive.

Learn by making, not talking.

Principles 5 -7

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