{"id":20658,"date":"2021-10-20T17:30:22","date_gmt":"2021-10-20T16:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/?p=20658"},"modified":"2025-01-03T13:19:39","modified_gmt":"2025-01-03T13:19:39","slug":"intercom-product-principles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/intercom-product-principles\/","title":{"rendered":"Foundations to build on: Intercom&#8217;s principles for building product"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Clear guiding principles are the best way to scale a team while keeping them aligned. Without a set of principles, organizations begin to fracture.<\/p>\n<p>One team heavily believes in <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Big_Design_Up_Front\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Big Design Up Front<\/a>, another follows <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Lean_startup\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Lean start-up<\/a>, a third tries to instil <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/PRINCE2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">PRINCE-2<\/a>, and before you know it your process is a patchwork quilt of all sorts of conflicting ways to build software.<\/p>\n<p>Principles are a way of encoding successes, helping to repeat the behaviors that led to positive outcomes and avoid the previous behaviors that led to mistakes. At Intercom, we push ourselves to share and refer to our principles a lot. We also update them every 1-2 years to ensure they\u2019re still representing our best ideas and still guiding us to results we want.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"pullquote-style-one\"><p>&#8220;Everyone who works on our product inherits the four top-level principles and then also the principles appropriate to their domain&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>We have four top-level principles for how we build software, five product design principles, and five engineering principles. The idea is that everyone who works on our product inherits the four top-level principles and then also the principles appropriate to their domain.<\/p>\n<p>We hope you find them useful as you consider the sort of behaviors you want to codify and encourage in order to ensure your own future success.<\/p>\n<p>Note: no principle is a truism. The opposite of a principle should itself be a principle, so things like \u201cBuild good software,\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t ship bugs,\u201d \u201cGreat design matters,\u201d and so on are, in my opinion, bad principles, because no company would ever adopt the opposite one. As such, if you\u2019re tempted to \u2318C and \u2318V a principle here, take a moment to consider all the alternatives you\u2019re saying no to.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"rd-principles\">R&amp;D principles<\/h2>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-26525\" src=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/blogInline_RDPrinciples_949x349.png\" alt=\"R&amp;DPrinciples\" width=\"949\" height=\"349\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/blogInline_RDPrinciples_949x349.png 949w, https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/blogInline_RDPrinciples_949x349-300x110.png 300w, https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/blogInline_RDPrinciples_949x349-700x257.png 700w, https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/blogInline_RDPrinciples_949x349-768x282.png 768w, https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/blogInline_RDPrinciples_949x349-600x221.png 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 949px) 100vw, 949px\" \/><\/p>\n<h3>1. Start with the problem<\/h3>\n<p>Start by deeply <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/great-product-managers-dont-spend-time-on-solutions\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">understanding the problem we\u2019re solving<\/a>. Continually evolve this understanding, and persistently return to it to ensure you haven\u2019t veered off course.<\/p>\n<h3>2. Think big, start small, learn fast<\/h3>\n<p>Think ambitiously, but know that big things have small beginnings. Always try to find the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/start-with-a-cupcake\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">smallest coherent solution<\/a>. Starting small enables you to ship sooner. Find a way to quickly learn whether or not you&#8217;ve solved the problem.<\/p>\n<h3>3. Ship fast, ship early, ship often<\/h3>\n<p>Shipping is our heartbeat. It brings life to our team, to our product, and to our customers. Challenge yourselves on how to move faster from idea to customer.<\/p>\n<h3>4. Deliver outcomes<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/shipping-is-your-companys-heartbeat\/\">Shipping is the beginning<\/a>, not the end. Plan to iterate, fight for adoption, and keep pushing to have customer and business impact.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 id=\"product-design-principles\">Product design principles<\/h2>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/RDPrinciples_Inline2.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Product design principles are intended to help us make decisions when faced with competing options that seem valuable along different dimensions.<\/p>\n<h3>1. Connected, modular systems<\/h3>\n<p>We favor <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/the-full-stack-design-system\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">modular<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/design-futures-1-creating-systems-not-products\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">systems<\/a> over bespoke optimizations. We reuse, evolve and merge before creating something new.<\/p>\n<h3>2. Opinionated by default, flexible under the hood<\/h3>\n<p>We optimize our designs to feel simple and opinionated by default, but progressively reveal power and flexibility.<\/p>\n<h3>3. Follow fundamentals<\/h3>\n<p>We favor established best practices and avoid overly clever, non-standard <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/design-principles-choosing-the-right-patterns\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">design patterns<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h3>4. Make it feel personal<\/h3>\n<p>Our designs reflect that we\u2019re <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/emoji-and-stickers-are-just-the-beginning\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">connecting real people<\/a>, not entries in a database.<\/p>\n<h3>5. What you ship is what matters<\/h3>\n<p>Our deliverable is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/what-should-designers-ship\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">not the design file<\/a>. We take pride and ownership of what we ship.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"engineering-principles\">Engineering principles<\/h2>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/RDPrinciples_Inline3.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Engineering principles provide guidance on day-to-day technical decision making and insight into how previous decisions have been made. They describe how we behave when we excel as engineers.<\/p>\n<h3>1. Shape the solution<\/h3>\n<p>We never blindly execute on requirements defined by others. We deeply understand the value of our work, and help design solutions which efficiently deliver that value.<\/p>\n<h3>2. Be technically conservative<\/h3>\n<p>We like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/videos\/build-boring-software\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">familiar solutions<\/a> with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/run-less-software\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">boring technologies<\/a>. We reuse the same patterns in different solutions as much as possible.<\/p>\n<h3>3. Build in small steps<\/h3>\n<p>Large changes are hard to understand, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/videos\/reaching-the-right-balance-between-speed-and-safety\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">harder to debug<\/a>. We deliver complex changes in a series of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/moving-faster-with-smaller-steps\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">small, controlled, easy to understand steps.<\/a><\/p>\n<h3>4. Keep it simple<\/h3>\n<p>Complexity is the enemy of our ability to move quickly. We will trade off performance, financial cost, and perfect abstraction in order to keep a solution simple.<\/p>\n<h3>5. Work with positivity, pride and love<\/h3>\n<p>Software engineering isn\u2019t just about the cold logic of computers. It is an inherently <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/videos\/alignment-on-great-product-teams\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">collaborative discipline<\/a> where great things are only built by high-functioning groups of humans.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Principles are a way of encoding successes, helping to repeat behaviors that led to positive outcomes and avoid behaviors that led to mistakes. Here are the principles we use at Intercom to build product.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":26527,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"category":[12898,5],"tags":[335,547,153,17828,16235],"coauthors":[348],"class_list":["post-20658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-engineering","category-product-and-design","tag-engineering","tag-product","tag-product-design","tag-product-principles","tag-rd"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.3 (Yoast SEO v27.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Foundations to build on: Intercom&#039;s principles for building product<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Principles are a way of encoding successes, encouraging behaviors that lead to positive outcomes. 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