How to Create a Product Culture that Lets People Do their Best Work

How to Create a Product Culture that Lets People Do their Best Work

“Culture” is such a common talking point in recruiting that it sometimes feels like it’s lost its meaning. Is culture the physical amenities of an office space, the personalities of the people you work with, or some larger focus on the mission and values of a company? Ask three people, and you’ll get three different answers.

But one thing is certain: In an environment where tech companies and tech talent are becoming increasingly global and decentralized, having a healthy culture has never been more important. So how can companies with footprints all over the world ensure their employees are aligning to consistent vision, whether they work at HQ or not?

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As both a product leader and someone who recently landed a new job myself outside of my company’s central location, I want to share a few personal examples and talk about three core tenets I believe are crucial to attracting and keeping the best product and engineering talent — regardless of where they work or what team they are on.

1. Give employees work that matters

Last year, I decided it was time for a new opportunity. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but I knew in order to be my best, I wanted a company with:

  1. a clear, shared, deep sense of mission
  2. a human-centered culture
  3. a clear opportunity to advance the user experience through data science

As the technology skills platform, Pluralsight has a very clear mission to democratize technology skills. Our platform does that by allowing technology orgs to achieve their goals faster by having insights into their team’s strengths and content to upskill into modern tech roles. Our social enterprise, Pluralsight One, supports our mission by providing access to groups that might not otherwise have it.

This mission matters. And because of that, it checked all my boxes.

I was hired to lead our data product (and have since transitioned to my current role as head of the learner experience) at Pluralsight’s office at our new Boston location, far away from our headquarters in Utah. Our Boston office houses a majority of our data science and machine learning team members, and we’re working on unique projects (in conjunction with people at our other locations across the world) that will have profound effects on our product.

But the overarching mission remains the same: Democratize technology skills.

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It was clear from day one on the job that I was surrounded by people that understood and were committed to this mission. That’s not always the case at other companies. Some leaders have to worry not only about organizing an efficient team, but treating a poor culture or instilling a sense of purpose in team members. That creates drag.

So as a leader, I invite you to consider: What is your mission? And what are you doing to live up to it everyday?

Having a solid company mission is the foundation, but it’s not enough on its own. On a more granular, day-to-day level, your teams need to feel like their work is accomplishing the right outcomes, which leads me to my next point.

2. Focus your team on the customer

Every job starts out with promise. You get assigned to exciting projects. You’re sharing input. You’re working in harmony. But then you might get conflicting directives. You get feedback that doesn’t match with what you observed. And you might start asking the question, “Why am I even doing this?”

Luckily, if your projects are focused 100% on your customer, you’ll never have to worry about asking that question. Our chief experience officer, Nate Walkingshaw, has done an exceptional job of guiding our product teams with his Directed Discovery process for designing and building products, and one of the core pillars of that process is listening to the customer.

When you’re focused on the customer, it becomes much more about team cohesion than checking a box. You’re constantly seeking feedback and looking for contextual clues to make your product better, rather than steamrolling toward a project outcome in a vacuum.

By focusing on the customer, you also create a culture of trust and learning. At Pluralsight, we empower our teams to identify opportunities, pursue them with autonomy, constantly push and test new code and run. You shouldn’t have to put together a 20-slide PowerPoint deck to pitch higher-ups before starting on project; you should be able to unearth a customer need and immediately start solving it.

This type of model has to have defined guidelines around quality and deployment standards to work effectively. But when you move toward measuring your product teams’ successes against the voice of the customer, you create incentives all along the way to satisfy customers in ways that actually move the needle for your business. Your customers feel heard, your employees feel fulfilled and your design process doesn’t get bottlenecked by decision paralysis.

At Pluralsight, we are upfront with potential hires about our process and the fast, agile way in which we build. We understand it’s not for everyone, and we want people who will commit to that process and the thinking behind it (in addition to our larger corporate mission and values).

That upfrontness creates clarity from day one. Since opening our Boston office as the center of our data product operations, we’ve seen almost no turnover on our engineering team and an extremely high employee NPS.

3. Embrace your office’s unique identity

I technically work at a satellite office. But it doesn’t feel like it at all. Pluralsight’s Boston office is the beating heart of our data product — including our Role IQ and Skill IQ offerings and Iris, the brains behind our platform — and a prominent part of our entire Learner experience, and that’s by design. The type of work we do, and the talent available, largely informed the creation of the office and the engineers we look to hire. Our office is uniquely positioned to take advantage of a hotbed of data science talent on the East Coast.

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But we’re still distinctly Pluralsight.

So how do you balance embracing the uniqueness of your location while still helping each office feel like part of the whole? It all comes back to the value of doing meaningful work that’s focused on the customer.

For example, many of our Boston employees take the train to work. That gives them the opportunity to use our mobile app in exactly the same environment many of our customers do: on-the-go, offline and in short- to medium-length sessions. This creates empathy for the learner experience and inspires informed design, and the product is better because of it.

This serendipitous “discovery” — a result of the way Boston workers commute — couldn’t have happened the same way at any of Pluralsight’s other locations, but our teams are motivated to engage in this activity because of Pluralsight’s belief in creating with possibility, and our product team’s belief in putting ourselves in the shoes of the user. So it was a perfect, natural intersection of geographical identity mixing with company values to enable meaningful work.

With a good company culture, your people should be able to work well in any environment, but the environment also contributes to the way we’re able to work.

Of course, understanding the importance of these three principles is much easier than putting them into practice, and values like diversity and inclusion are equally as important to creating a rich and vibrant culture as what type of work you’re doing.

But just remember: culture and values are not geographical — they are embedded in your people. Prioritize the right things and get your people focused on the customer, and you’ll have found the secret to attracting the best talent and doing fulfilling work.

(Also, if you’re interested in joining our Boston team: We’re hiring.)

Very cool James! It's been a long time-- my old team was a big Pluralsight shop, had no idea this was your product all along!

Marcelo M.

Product Design Director @ CoinZoom | Design Leadership, Startup Entrepreneur

4y

Managers, #ProductOwner, #UXResearchers MUST READ article about creating a "Company Culture."

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