Product playbooks - managing your culture as your product

Playbooks for culture

American football is a fascinating sport. On the surface, it looks very much like a modern gladiator fight. But the essence of the game is a lot more strategic and abstract. There are great lessons to learn for product teams looking to improve, establish cross-functionality and aim for high performance. Football teams, be they university or national league teams, have mastered the ways of creating alignment, effective communication and adapting to an ever-changing environment. They do this to achieve their bigger vision, becoming champions.

If you already follow the NFL, the concept of playbooks will be something you’ve already seen in action. They are the most important, most protected asset to the coaches and teams. They contain the pure essence of all team member's knowledge and experience. They form strategies and tactics, and help the team stay aligned, no matter how circumstances change. [You can read an introduction about football playbooks here.]

These tactics, in the form of positions, routes and plays, get tested each game they play, and improved as the season goes. Playbooks exist for an important reason: they allow the team to execute on their strategy by creating a shared understanding of the what and the how, in any imaginable context. They set clear expectations, and describe the culture to follow. Playbooks are a single source of truth for “how we do things here”.

“The structure of a playbook tells the story of how a team builds a scheme from the ground up.”

- Richard Johnson, There’s tons of other stuff in your football team’s playbook

Both in the NFL and in product, playbooks describe what strategies a team is looking to execute, and how they’re planning to run their operation. They are the collection of the team’s tactics to make progress in any given situation. Sounds familiar?

Playbooks are not a solution to all problems. But they help create alignment and clarity for the team, and for anyone else in the company. They reduce the risk of misunderstanding and misalignment. However, none of these problems require yet another document, so it’s important to discuss what a product playbook is, and what it isn’t.

How do you play your product game?

A product playbook is a collection of the team members’ shared context, roles and processes, alongside the constraints and risks they're gearing up to deal with. Product playbooks and specific tactics often don’t exist in the known-known dimension of our understanding. They hover between the unknown knowns and known unknowns. It takes time and effort to understand, align, and work with them. To improve culture, the team needs to increase their influence outside of their immediate circle. You need to build empathy and a shared understanding within your wider context. Great cultures emerge from the shared context and shared goals, and it’s the product teams job to create this level of alignment in this area. In cultures like this, strategy and execution flourishes and teams become high performing, psychologically safe environments. It’s a real win for everyone.

Developers and engineers have already mastered how to optimise for short feedback loops, quality and efficiency through agile frameworks. These are the same principles any cross-functional team needs to look for - but you have to go beyond the delivery phase, to incorporate the complete context of working in product management. If you’re looking to establish a playbook, the best place to start is to map out what your team does today, and why. The magic will happen once the team starts seeing patterns and connections between these tactics, along the product development lifecycle. You’ll have to expand this to how and why the team does discovery and research, and who needs to get involved when we want to launch a new product line to the market, how and why you interact with your customers, and so on.

Whenever there’s an agreed way of doing something - think about how your team runs stand-ups and retrospectives -, those are the tactics, and plays that belong to your playbook. The rules of how we play our product game are a mix of processes and our human behaviours. They're influenced by the assumptions and biases we have, by the relationships within the team and the wider context. When you're looking to improve your culture, you first need to understand the rules of the current game. Once you capture your culture, you can influence your organization. Without this clarity, your team is constantly at the risk of misalignment and bias.

Culture risks: all those cognitive biases

Assembling a playbook can mitigate a lot of risk around being and working with humans. We all have a unique perspective based on our experiences, and through that a unique understanding of the rules that drive our realities. We also have our biases [here’s my favourite example of the list of cognitive biases], and we are mostly not aware of when they influence us. Unfortunately, ignoring or not being aware of these factors won’t make them go away. They still influence every decision and judgement we make as individuals, and as a team. A playbook is a great way to tackle this risk. It forces meaningful conversations and serves as a good frame of reference for decision-making and alignment. When you make your assumptions and hypothesis visible and understandable to others, they can help you validate or invalidate them. When you treat your culture as a product with a product playbook, you invite others to join you in the problem-solution discovery and find new opportunities to improve.

The process risk

The process risk most of the time exists outside the team, but becomes very real, very quickly when things start to scale. Often when the relationship between decision-making and day-to-day execution becomes abstract, humans and organisations create delicate processes to make up for the lack of context and interaction.

Organisations create guidelines, publish values and expectations for others. But they’re rarely contextual and actionable enough to align teams effectively or sustain a healthy culture. They also get more dangerous as complexity grows. The more the company and the product scales, the more need there is to invest into internal alignment and communication. When companies only use process (or the lack of it) to influence culture, they usually don’t end up in good places.

Often process becomes a way to control, not to empower. It rarely gets meaningfully challenged. Teams are struggling to influence change, and processes become administration tasks. Process exists, but doesn’t drive value, and destroys culture. Ultimately, culture is what people do on a daily basis, not what we wish we’d be able to do. Passionate, talented people get frustrated, and eventually they’ll leave.

The other common scenario is when autonomy and trust are key values, and leadership confuses autonomy with anarchy. Scaling requires new processes and culture shifts, and clear guidance from the leaders. No team can operate in an objectively autonomous way in a vacuum, we all depend on internal and external teams to create our own products and services. Assuming teams won’t often encounter serious blockers, and even if they do, they’ll be able to work it out “between themselves”, doesn’t make the risk go away. Good culture creates process that enables collaboration and autonomy. When teams know they’re not independent, but understand the rules of the game, they can make better ad-hoc decisions too. Empowered teams need frameworks and guidelines, but that doesn’t mean there are no rules. Great teams have playbooks and product cultures that allow them to be flexible on the how, while staying stubborn on the what.

How playbooks work in practice

One of the product development teams I’ve worked with spent 2 months in escalation last year.  It was a result of a complicated network issue, and it was a core technology dependency for our strategy. It was the first key piece for a platform integration - the foundation of the next 3 years for the team. They had to align third party suppliers, internal teams, stakeholders and their roadmap commitments. They did not encounter anything similar in the past. They had no idea what an escalation process would take or what part of the system was failing. But they had a strong product culture, with frameworks and tools they all understood. And they were determined to make it work. Fast forward 2 months, they managed to deliver on their original release deadline. 

They already had a strong culture of managing product development risk. The internal alignment allowed them to make good decisions in every critical moment, without having to wait for approval or expert opinions. They already had their own product development playbook. They had a high performing delivery culture, supported by strong discovery capabilities. Whenever they expected or encountered a risk, they had a rule in the playbook they could apply. They didn’t know the answers, but they knew how to ask the right questions to make meaningful progress and overcome unexpected obstacles. 

Rule 1: Managing value risk

When you work with innovative technologies, you can't ignore the risk of the unknowns. This team always starts with tackling the value risk first, to be able to respond to new information as they go. They understand that the more unknowns they need to deal with, the more space they need to get it right. They always look for the riskiest assumptions, and follow lean and agile principles in their delivery. This approach allows them to discover related risks early enough, and find ways to mitigate them.

Rule 2: Managing delivery risk

As soon as the team realised what was happening, they looked to shift their focus. They agreed - for the time being - to keep the release deadlines, and re-prioritized the backlog. They pulled forward independent elements from the roadmap, agreed on who and how will take care of the escalation and moved on. In software - especially if you’re innovating - things will never go as planned. Great product cultures focus on outcomes and empowering teams to make the best decisions. Dual-track agile is a great approach to create this type of flexibility for product teams. Because the team is clear on the what and the why, they feel empowered to find alternative ways to solve problems. They don’t feel blocked in their execution, and can apply a true agile mindset.

Rule 3: Managing technology risk

The team had objective evidence to be confident in the quality of their own code. They follow continuous integration and development principles, invest into code quality and operate a very stable codebase. They also assumed that the network problem would get resolved, as it is part of the basic infrastructure for the whole company. So the only variable they had to manage was time. They had no idea when the problems would get resolved. To ensure that the customer value gets realised, there had to be a plan for every scenario - and because the constraints and opportunities were clearly understood, that’s exactly what they’ve done.

Rule 4: Managing stakeholders and the organization

As soon as the issue was discovered and investigated, we agreed on a lightweight reporting out template. In this case, it was an update email to the core stakeholders who have been accountable for the release, and had authority to approve the team’s decisions. The first email was about what we’ve found and what we’re doing now to enable a go / no go decision. The second had information on the details of the issue, and the suggestion from the team to continue as planned. The third was sent the week later, with the alternative plans for approval to on how we’ll continue to execute on the release:  

  • Plan A: if everything goes well

  • Plan B: if the problem still persists, but only for the next 3-6 months 

  • Plan C: if the problem doesn’t get fixed in the next 6 months 

Similar communication was released to the rest of the organization in our weekly company update calls. The team got the required stakeholder support, had authority to find their own path through the problem and delivered the working feature set in time for the release. The network problem was fixed 2 months later and the platform is now rolled out to all customers.

Start small, aim big

Your product playbook needs to be more than a collection of processes and documents. You're looking for sustainable, repeatable ways of tackling constraints and problems. As your context shifts, you need agreed ways of adapting. Big ideas need big bets, and big bets need big investment. They take time to realise, and they come with increased risk.

When you have a working playbook, the fires become manageable and move further away. Everything is still on fire, and will be. But in an efficient culture, you have time to think and breathe. There's always going to be more work than what your team is able to focus on at any given time. But good cultures make product decisions easier and better with time. They not only create good product outcomes, they deliver high performance too.

Get started

Think about it as a discovery process you'd run for any product opportunity. Your opportunities might be achieving faster deployment times, or better conversations with your stakeholders, or more exposure to your users and their preferences. Don't aim to establish or find the perfect processes just yet - look to understand, experiment and continuously level up your product game. Use mapping workshops, survey’s, interviews and other research methods to figure out what’s working, and what could be improved. Your aim is to create a shared understanding about what you do as a team and what areas you could start improving from tomorrow.


Here are some easy questions you can explore with your team:

  • How do we react when our context changes? How often does this happen to us?

  • How do we measure success? How do we know if we've invested enough and we should move to the next opportunity? How do we measure ROI?

  • How do we keep your work in progress visible? How do we prioritise? How many different prioritisation processes do we have?

  • How do we ensure there’s enough clarity, so stakeholders engage with us in the best possible way?

  • How do we stay close to our customers and users? How do we gain more insight into our markets?

  • How do we run more experiments?

  • How do we improve our outcomes?

  • How do we manage discovery, delivery and releases?

  • Do we have a go to market process?

  • How does our vision, strategy and our current roadmap fit together?

  • What inputs do we need to listen to? Where are they coming from? How do they affect our work?

Staying on the right track with your playbook

Looking through the questions you probably see that this work requires more than a workshop. Influencing and changing culture is a long process, and there are no guarantees of easy success. Your goal should not be to change the world - at least not when you’re at the start line. Focus on the real outcomes, the main reasons why product culture is important to you and to your team. Use the concept to discuss how invisible connections or gaps create bottlenecks, to create space and alignment.

Focus on how you can keep it lean, clear and accessible. Work on problems, not solutions. There’s no need to replace a broken process with another process that will break in 3 months time. Listen to how people engage with you and your team, ask questions about what’s working and what doesn’t. The first step to influence is to understand what’s happening and why. With more clarity, you’ll be able to identify where your focus as a team needs to be.

Successful products are built by high performing teams. They are not only on the mission of building products, but also on the mission of improving how they work as a team. They find ways to adapt to the evolving context, and create space for themselves to learn.

And this should be your first question to start with your team on: What comes to your mind, if I ask ‘how do we play the game here’?

I’m curious to know if this article helped you, or if you have any follow-up questions or thoughts? Get in touch if you want to discuss in email or next to a virtual coffee.

Previous
Previous

3 steps to level up stakeholder communication and engagement

Next
Next

Previous conferences, posts and talks