Why your organization needs product principles

Ethan EismannContributorShare on TwitterEthan Eismann is the Vice President of Design at Slack, leading design and engineering teams to deliver exceptional product experiences.

At Slack, every one of our processes and features has been designed with the primary goal of making Slack a workplace tool that feels human. We see ourselves as our users' hosts, and we want them to feel comfortable and happy every time they're in Slack. Our product isn't just built for work - it's built for people doing work, and everything we create is meant to forward our mission of making work life simpler, more pleasant and more productive.

Our job is to understand what people want, and then translate that value through thoughtfully designed, well-functioning products and features.

Against the backdrop of an unprecedented shift to remote work, we've seen an influx of people turning to Slack to make the transition to a digital-first workplace. Building thoughtful, intuitive products that add value, delight and human-centric experiences into peoples' working lives has never been more important.

Product principles are essential guidelines that help teams evaluate work across functions.

To ensure we're meeting our customers where they're at, we created a set of guiding product principles" that inform everything we build, and which serve as the foundation for our entire product decision-making process.

There's business value in improving an organization's processes, and we've been able to provide better experiences for our customers by enacting ever-evolving product principles and using them to evaluate our products and features. Any company can benefit from having product principles - it's all about how you develop and deploy them across your organization.

First, what are product principles?

Product principles are essential guidelines that help teams evaluate work across functions, as well as up and down the decision-making chain, by ensuring all work ladders up to the organization's ultimate goals. Better alignment, in turn, leads to better and faster product decisions.

Product principles should always evolve to keep up with the changing ways you work and what your customers need. At Slack, we currently have five principles that guide us:

1. Don't make me think.
2. Be a great host.
3. Prototype the path.
4. Don't reinvent the wheel.
5. Make bigger, bolder bets.

By implementing these principles into all we build across teams - design, legal, marketing and more - they provide a shared framework for decision-making that keeps us aligned and therefore able to make better decisions, faster.

The idea of having principles themselves isn't a new concept, but the creation process behind building and promoting these principles is often overlooked or underdeveloped.

Start with your product philosophy

Before building the principles themselves, it's important to first establish your product philosophy, which will inform how your organization will ultimately view and abide by its principles.

At Slack, we embrace an approach we call getting to the next hill." While there is a long-term product strategy, we don't spend a lot of time debating exactly where we'll be in one or two years from now. Instead, we focus on more immediate, incremental moves to improve our customers' working lives.

We've found that because Slack is used in so many different ways by so many different companies, it's better to learn from how our customers use our features than from endlessly debating aspirational future ideas.