Product Principles
A Framework for Alignment and Collaboration
When I stepped into my role at IPG, I quickly noticed something was missing. I had an extremely talented team who were willing to put in the effort, but our alignment on what mattered most in our design decisions was a gray area.
Our team was growing, but the environment wasn’t naturally collaborative. Developers and product managers weren’t very engaged in the design process. It wasn’t hostility, just a lack of shared language and investment. And that made design decisions hard. We’d go back and forth on direction, with little agreement on what “good” looked like or why one path was better than another.
That friction wasn’t just slowing us down, it was holding back the quality of the work.
The Need for a Framework
I realized we couldn’t just keep making decisions ad hoc and hoping it all aligned. We needed a framework that would help us explain why we were making the choices we were making. Something that grounded our perspective and made it easier for other teams to understand and (ideally) adopt it too.
Not fluffy values to slap on a slide. Real, working principles that could shape decisions, reduce ambiguity, and help us find clarity faster.
How We Built Them
To get there, I hosted a workshop with my team. We looked at companies we admired: Slack, Airbnb, and others known for having a strong design point of view, and talked about what made their products feel cohesive and intentional.
Then we turned the focus inward: Not fluffy values to slap on a slide. Real, working principles that could shape decisions, reduce ambiguity, and help us find clarity faster.
What do we care about as designers?
What values already show up in our best work?
Where do we consistently see friction or tradeoffs?
The workshop was a wrestling match. We brainstormed, we argued, we grouped themes, we ranked ideas, we killed darlings. It was honest and energizing.
And by the end, a set of common threads had started to emerge.
