{"id":26892,"date":"2022-02-09T17:29:19","date_gmt":"2022-02-09T17:29:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/?p=26892"},"modified":"2025-01-03T13:20:05","modified_gmt":"2025-01-03T13:20:05","slug":"product-principles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/product-principles\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing Intercom’s product principles: A series exploring the beliefs that shape what and how we build"},"content":{"rendered":"

Intercom is built on principles.<\/p>\n

I mean that in a very practical sense: PMs, Designers, and Engineers at Intercom use our R&D principles<\/a> every single day to guide their decision-making. Having clear principles keeps everyone pointed in the same direction, and empowered to move quickly and with confidence.<\/p>\n

\u201cDefining and distilling these principles has been one of the biggest contributors to our ability to consistently build great products at scale\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is why we\u2019ve decided to share these principles with you. We’ll do that here over the coming weeks and months, exploring the thought process behind each one. Defining and distilling these principles has been one of the biggest contributors to our ability to consistently build great products at scale \u2013 we hope you find them as useful as we have.<\/p>\n

What are product principles and why do we need them?<\/h2>\n

We didn’t always have product principles. In a sense, building a product is simply a series of decisions<\/a>, and in the early days, like most companies, we made many product decisions based on shared intuition and context.<\/p>\n

But as we’ve scaled, codifying our approach to decision-making has been critical. Think about what happens when new folks who lack all of that historical context join the company; without principles in place they can feel disempowered, lost, or even totally misaligned. Now consider what happens when those misaligned people start onboarding even newer folks, compounding misalignment. It becomes frighteningly easy to lose any sense of overall consistency and momentum across teams.<\/p>\n

\u201cPrinciples: a set of fundamental truths or propositions that serve as the foundation for behaviors that give you the results you want\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hence the need for principles: a set of fundamental truths or propositions that serve as the foundation for behaviors that give you the results you want.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a bit of a mouthful \u2013 the kind of word salad you end up with when you try to compress a big idea down into a single sentence. So in even simpler terms, a principle is a shared idea that helps teams do good work together.<\/p>\n

And principles are not just for onboarding new hires. As teams grow, they need structured ways to:<\/p>\n