Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘principles’. Almost all organisations have some set of ‘core principles’ or company values prominently displayed on posters around the office but (probably) infrequently referred to.

The point of these kinds of principles is to guide how you as member of the organisation should behave and make decisions in a way that is consistent with your colleagues. When you arrive at a decision point with multiple reasonable options, you need a framework to help decide which of these is the most appropriate. It is at this point that you can apply the principles.

This is all well and good (ahem) in principle, but in reality a company’s core principles are often treated cynically by its employees. The problem is that most of the time these principles are not helpful. They are too prosaic and catchall, leaving no edge on which you can make a decision. How many companies have a core value that relates to ‘serving the customer’? Almost all, surely - but that is not a valuable principle because it is a truism. No one could possibly disagree with ‘serving the customer’ and so it provides no value.

Want to make your principles actually useful? Make sure that the opposite of your chosen principle is itself also a good principle.

Remember: the point of these principles is to help us make decisions, and therefore they have to pick edges that will guide us down the most appropriate path even if (especially if) all routes look reasonable.

Some examples of product principles and their equally reasonable alternatives:

Our product should be easy to use the first time you try

Our product is tailored to the power user

We value attention to detail and getting things right first time

We move fast and accept the costs

We back our instincts on what is good

We rely on scrappy experiments to learn

The value of having principles with equally good opposites is that it gives you and your team a way of talking through the various options to identify the right approach.

Imagine for example that the Product Manager and the Designer on your team are working on a new feature, but disagreeing over the scope. Perhaps the PM wants to keep the first version of the feature more minimal and is willing to cut corners in the experience to get something delivered quickly, whereas the Designer wants to include additional animations that provide a more delightful and memorable experience that they believe will be more successful long term.

In the absence of guiding principles this disagreement comes down to which of the PM or Designer can better exert their opinion, and whatever the result it is likely that both of them will leave dissatisfied.

Rewind and imagine that their organisation had as a guiding principle: “we strive to give customer’s value sooner” (rather than its opposite: “we take our time to craft delightful experiences”). In this case it would have been easy to settle the disagreement, because the principle clearly dictates that the faster option is to be preferred.

Even better: if the guiding principle is widely communicated and well understood, the disagreement is unlikely to arise in the first place. The culture of the team and their approach to work will be in line with that principle from the start, and everyone will be working with the same state of mind.