Talk by Antonio van der Weel on Product Culture at ProductTank AMS on February 16 2017

1. Antonio van der Weel
Feb 2017
How we created our product culture
at Werkspot / Instapro

2. x

5. Product-first company culture

6. Our Management Team background

7. Product at the center of the Management Team
Chief Strategy OfficerChief Product OfficerChief Marketing & Sales
CEO

8. Scaling our company culture
How do we keep our great culture and atmosphere, while
growing fast from 70 to 140 employees within 2 years?

9. Make Core values explicit
Inspired by: Netflix http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664
Kayako https://medium.com/life-at-kayako/capturing-and-scaling-startup-values-2c8a84731acc#.xzxf24oge
Risks if you don’t make values explicit while growing:
§ Hiring the wrong people
§ Teams with different cultures
§ Unclear what behavior to recognize and reward

11. Hiring the right people
§ You can’t teach values to
people
§ Serious part of recruiting
(culture interview)
§ Performance of an individual
developer is not the same as
team performance
Image: integreatleadership.com

12. Objective driven product teams

13. How we do things How we don’t do things
Agile
Agile helps teams respond to unpredictability through
incremental, iterative work and feedback.
Waterfall
We don’t upfront define and schedule into detail for a long period
(like a year) everything we want to do.
Lean
The core of Lean methodology is a build-measure-
learn feedback loop based on a minimal viable
product (MVP) approach.
Heavy research & assumptions
We don’t do very heavy research upfront and define our
requirements based on assumptions of this.
Problem and opportunity driven
We start with finding out and defining a (user)
problem to be solved.
Solution driven
We don’t start with defining features, they are a result of a specific
problem we want to solve.
Focus on user value
Start with the need of the user. Business results will
follow when doing things right.
Financial driven
We don’t start with our financial goals but we start with user needs.
We are not blind for business goals but they are a result, not the goal.
Ownership
Our product development department has ownership
and mandate to find the best solution for the given
objectives.
Top down solutions
We don’t dictate solutions on what or how to do things by
management (but steer on objectives and key results)
How we do product development

14. OKRs: Objectives & Key Results
EXAMPLE OKRs Q1 2017
Objective: Increase user base
Key Results:
1. Increase daily page views to 1,000
2. Total monthly new users to 10,000
§ Objectives are ambitious (80% reachable)
§ Key Results are measurable (SMART)
§ OKRs are public

15. 7Geese to track OKRs and recognize core values

16. How we go from company mission to stories
Company mission
Easiest & most reliable way to arrange home services
Strategic tracks
Make it easier for Service Professional to win jobs
Objectives & key results
Improved matching > Win-rate improved by 25%
Epics
Matching settings during onboarding
Releases / stories
TBD by scrum team
Inspired by: Intercom: https://blog.intercom.com/how-we-build-software/
Spotify: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1018963/Articles/HowSpotifyBuildsProducts.pdf
Yearly updated
quarterly
quarterly
Epics

17. Leading your team by objectives & vision
Epic stories focus on the objective and
results. Start quarter with vision
presentation
§ Helps to keeps team focused on doing
impactful things
§ Leaves space open for team input on
solutions
§ Guides team on scope questions
Image: illustratedagile.com

18. Challenges of working objective driven
§ Delicate balance between too specific and too broad Key
Results, enough space needed to pivot
§ Can you be truly lean if OKRs end within the quarter? Limits
ability to iterate
§ Investors/management needs to learn there is no answer to
‘what will you build this year?’. We create quarterly short-term
product roadmaps, based on long-term strategic objectives

19. Ask Me Anything

20. antonio van der weel