Writing Good Product Principles
A product principle is a reusable decision rule, a sentence that makes the right call obvious when you're not in the room to make it. Good principles are the cheapest form of leverage a product leader has: write four of them well and you've delegated a thousand small decisions without delegating the judgment, which makes them a quiet engine of influence without authority. Write them badly and you've made a poster. This note is the how-to; theScore Product Principles is my worked example throughout.
#The anatomy of a good principle
I hold every candidate principle against four tests. It must be all four, not three.
Specific and actionable. You can decide with it. "Be customer-obsessed" decides nothing, because everyone agrees and nothing changes. "Painkillers over vitamins" makes a prioritization call before you've seen the feature. If two reasonable people couldn't use it to settle a real argument, it's a value, not a principle. Short. It has to fit in your head and survive being quoted in a hallway. If you can't recite it from memory, it won't be there when you need it. A clause, not a paragraph. A spiky point of view. It must be something a thoughtful person could disagree with, which means it has to choose a side. "We win with fans" explicitly subordinates internal politics to the fan; someone could argue for an org-chart-driven roadmap instead. A principle nobody could oppose isn't guiding anything. Motivational. It should sound like a team you'd want to join. Principles are cultural artifacts as much as decision rules; the tone teaches what the team values. "Have a shooters mentality" gives permission to be bold; it's a rallying cry, not a policy.
| Test | Passes | Fails |
|---|---|---|
| Specific/actionable | "Painkillers over vitamins" | "Be customer-obsessed" |
| Short | A memorable clause | A paragraph of nuance |
| Spiky | Picks a side you could debate | A truism nobody opposes |
| Motivational | Sounds like a team you'd join | Sounds like a compliance memo |
#The mistake that kills most principle sets
This is the single most common and most damaging error, so I'll state it flatly: a principle is not a KPI. "We win with fans" is not "grow MAU 10% this quarter." A principle shapes how you decide; a metric tells you whether the decision worked. The two belong in different documents and serve different masters. Teams that "operationalize" their principles into measurable targets have quietly rebuilt their OKRs and thrown away the thing that was guiding the choices the OKRs measure. Keep them separate: principles pick the direction, metrics check the result, and neither can do the other's job.
#How to write and keep them alive
A few rules I follow. Keep it to a handful, three to five. A list of twelve is a list of zero, because no one holds twelve rules in mind at a decision point. Earn each one against a real past argument: the test of a good principle is that it would have resolved a debate you actually had, so if you can't name the argument it settles, cut it. Write from conviction, not consensus, because principles sanded down until no one objects are by definition not spiky and therefore useless. And the survival test: a principle is only real if someone cites it to change a decision. If they live on a wiki page nobody opens, they're decoration. I'd rather have three principles people argue with than a dozen they nod at.
Ask a teammate to state your principles from memory and then describe a recent decision one of them changed. If they can do both, the principles are working. If they can recite them but can't name a decision, you've written slogans. If they can't recite them at all, you've written a document.
#Continue Reading
- theScore Product Principles for the worked example: four principles built on this anatomy.
- OKRs and Goal-Setting for the metrics layer principles must not be collapsed into.
- Crafting a Product Vision for how principles relate to vision and strategy above them.
- Sound Product Decision-Making for principles as pre-made decision rules for the team.
- The Frameworks Toolkit for the full index of tools and when each earns its place.