theScore Product Principles
These are the product principles I authored and used to run product at theScore. I'm including them not because every team should adopt these four (they're specific to a sports-media product with a passionate fan base) but because they're a worked example of what good principles look like: short, spiky, and decision-shaping. The how-to of writing your own lives in Writing Good Product Principles. This note is the artifact itself.
A principle's job is to make the right call obvious when I'm not in the room. Good ones resolve arguments. Here are mine.
Be bold. Don't be afraid to fail. The best products come from teams willing to take the shot, to ship the ambitious thing rather than the safe one. We'd rather miss on a bold bet than win small on a timid one. This is the principle that gives a junior PM permission to propose the audacious idea, and it's why I tolerate intelligent failures.
Use qualitative, quantitative, and intuition together, and beware analysis paralysis. Data informs the next iteration; it doesn't get a veto over judgment, and judgment doesn't get to ignore the numbers. Two corollaries I lean on: data should inform the next iteration (not just grade the last one), and don't beat a dead horse. When the signal is clear, stop measuring and move.
The fan sits at the core of every decision. Build painkillers, not vitamins: solve real, felt problems over nice-to-haves. Unify roadmaps around the fan rather than around internal org charts. And remember that fans drive the bottom line: love precedes revenue, in that order.
Communicate relentlessly. Ship and share: every launch comes with a story. Teach, don't tell: bring people along, don't just inform them. Breadcrumbs, not loaves: share progress in small, frequent pieces rather than one giant reveal. And the first-15-seconds rule: if you can't make someone care in fifteen seconds, you haven't found the point yet.
#Why these four, and how they're built
Each follows the anatomy I insist on in Writing Good Product Principles: specific and actionable (you can decide with them), short (they fit in your head), spiky (a real point of view someone could reasonably disagree with), and motivational (they sound like a team you'd want to join). "We win with fans" is spiky because it explicitly subordinates internal politics to the fan. "Painkillers over vitamins" makes a prioritization call before you've seen the feature.
The single most important thing about these: they are not KPIs. "We win with fans" is not "grow MAU 10%." A principle shapes how you decide; a metric tells you whether it worked. Teams that turn principles into measurable targets have built OKRs and lost the point. Keep them separate, so the principle picks the direction and the metric checks the result.
The other failure mode is the poster on the wall nobody uses. A principle earns its keep only when it changes a decision, when someone says "we're not doing that, it's a vitamin." If nobody ever cites them in an argument, they're decoration, and I'd rather have four real ones than twelve that sound nice.
#Continue Reading
- Writing Good Product Principles for the how-to: the anatomy these four were built on.
- Sound Product Decision-Making for "balance game sense with data" as a decision discipline.
- Crafting a Product Vision for where principles sit relative to vision and strategy.
- Voice of the Customer for "we win with fans" operationalized as listening.
- The Frameworks Toolkit for the full index of tools and when each earns its place.