Why Even Bad Principles Are Better Than No Principles
Matt Thompson is a healthtech product manager with a background in venture capital and corporate development, exploring the philosophical foundations of business and technology to build impactful products. You can find him on LinkedIn.
What do Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs have in common?
They both changed nearly every person's life, built trillion-dollar companies, and shaped the future of our technology. But each was guided by completely different—and often flawed—principles. And both sets of principles still worked…why?
Zuckerberg championed a philosophy to "move fast and break things," building Facebook by shipping code quickly and fixing it later. When that approach led to privacy disasters, he modified it to "move fast with stable infrastructure"—acknowledging that speed still mattered, but that breaking things had become too costly.
Jobs took the opposite approach. Apple didn't launch first—they launched best. The company moved slowly and refined things, prioritizing perfection over speed.
These approaches don't just seem different—they're fundamentally contradictory. Move fast vs. move slow. Be reckless vs. be careful. But the different approaches worked because clear principles—even flawed ones—create alignment and momentum within your organization. The worst principle is the unwritten one.
My "No Principles" Crisis
Two months into the year, I was the stereotypical product manager you read about on Lenny’s Newsletter forums. I started in this role for a recently acquired company six months ago. The CTO, Customer Success Lead and the Chief Revenue Officer all wanted the annual roadmap and was frustrated that they didn’t have it nearly a quarter into the year. I had a vision, a plan, and great things in development, but I struggled to communicate the rationale behind our decisions to different parts of the organizations when each one cared about different things.
This wasn’t a small problem. My credibility in the new organization was at stake. If we made the wrong choices about priorities we’d be off-track by six months with little room for correction.
I turned to the company all-hands deck outlining the year’s priorities, mission, and vision. First, I felt comforted by the clarity. There was strong ground for a foundation. But then the ground gave way. I saw mission, vision, and 2025 strategic priorities, but no explicit strategy. Further, I couldn’t tell how we were different from our competitors and why our approach would be better?
Was the strategy that I interpreted from the deck aligned with what my product colleagues and the sales team interpreted? Did anyone think the same thing?
Without a clear strategy and product principles enabling hard choices, I had no reliable way to prioritize work and mesh with other parts of the organization. When I talked to other departments, there was no common language or shared framework to guide our conversations toward solutions.
What made this frustrating was the extra work it created. As a product manager, I was used to having alignment conversations. But the absence of shared principles meant every discussion started from scratch. Each stakeholder meeting required re-establishing context, re-explaining priorities, and re-justifying decisions.
I realized that even imperfect principles would have been better than no principles.
The following topics—first principles to product principles, crafting effective principles, their evolution, and implementation—deserve thorough exploration. We'll provide high-level overviews, highlighting key concepts. For a deeper dive, we've created detailed guides for each topic:
First Principles Deep Dive: Exploring the foundational truths that shape product principles across contexts
Elements of Effective Principles Guide: Templates and frameworks for crafting principles
Evolution Framework Handbook: How to systematically evolve principles as your organization grows
Implementation Playbook: Step-by-step guidance for rolling out principles, from startups to scale.
Click here to access our complete Product Principles resource library
Let's explore the essential concepts you need to know and see them in real-world examples:
From First Principles to Product Principles
First principles, dating back to Aristotle and popularized in the tech landscape by Elon Musk are descriptions of the essential way things work – like “objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force”. Product Principles are concise statements that help you make everyday decisions in your work.
Why do even flawed product principles help? Because there are first principles that are universally true and product principles help us shape our work to that reality. The following are some of the most relevant first principles that demonstrate the value of product principles:
We're constrained by scarce resources. This isn't just about money—it's about time, attention, and human capacity. You cannot do everything, so you must choose something. This is why even imperfect product principles like "move fast and break things" work: they provide a framework for making hard choices about where to focus limited resources.
Team output is correlated to team alignment. Products are built by teams, not individuals. The challenge isn't just deciding what to do—it's getting dozens or hundreds of people to make consistent decisions without constant coordination. Product principles help even when they're flawed by creating a shared decision-making system. Apple’s ethos of better to be perfect than fast isn’t magic but it does align thousands of employees around a common standard.
There’s always competition. You’re competing for investor dollars, customer attention, top talent. You must be better than an alternative. Product principles help you articulate and reinforce why you’re better in the thousands of daily decisions at your organization.
The Reality of Uncertainty. You never truly know if your actions will achieve their intended effects or if your chosen goals are right. Product principles provide a framework to test reality and continuously improve.
These first principles manifest differently as companies grow and product principles will reflect that reality. A startup's principles might emphasize speed and experimentation, while an enterprise may focus on reliability and coordination. Regardless of context, product principles serve as a powerful adaptation mechanism—helping companies navigate change without losing their core identity.
Take Microsoft's shift to cloud computing. Instead of reinventing their strategy, they evolved their product principles to emphasize "cloud-first, mobile-first" while maintaining their enterprise DNA. This allowed teams to move decisively into new territory without losing strategic coherence.
Anatomy of Product Principles: From Bad to Better
In 2014, Facebook made a seemingly small change that revealed how product principles evolve. "Move fast and break things" became "move fast with stable infrastructure." As Facebook scaled to serve billions of users, the cost of "breaking things" had become too high. It was a product principle for a startup, not a market leader.
This evolution illustrates product principles have:
Common Elements of Effective Principles: Some product principles are better than others and there are common elements for continuous improvement.
Archetype Patterns: Product principles vary but often follow similar patterns that help them connect.
Evolution Frameworks: Product principles should change as organizations grow and markets shift.
Elements of Effective Principles
Clear and Interpretable: The best product principles are concise and unambiguous while allowing room for judgment.
Actionable and Guiding: Product principles must translate into real decisions and behaviors. If a tough decision arises, would this principle help us choose?
Adaptive, Not Dogmatic: Product principles should have a consistent core but evolve as the company scales.
Balanced Between Present and Potential: Product principles should bridge who you are and who you want to become. They must be grounded enough in current reality to be achievable, yet aspirational enough to drive growth.
Finding the right balance across these elements is an art, not a science. The goal isn't perfection but creating product principles that work for your organization's context and growth stage.
Archetype Patterns
While principles often follow common patterns—from customer focus to technical excellence—their power comes from how they work together to guide an organization's decisions.
Evolution Framework
Great product principles must evolve. The key is establishing a systematic approach to recognize when change is needed, test new ideas, and implement updates effectively. While we explore this topic in our resources, here's the essential framework:
1. Listen for Change Signals
Watch for misalignment between principles and outcomes—like missed targets, competitive losses, or employee feedback.
2. Test Thoughtfully
Treat principle changes like product launches—start small and gather data. Run pilot programs with select teams, measure impact, and collect feedback before broader rollout.
3. Implement Systematically
Success requires clear communication and consistent execution. Leadership must model new behaviors while integrating changes into formal processes like hiring and reviews.
Think of evolving product principles like pruning a garden rather than clear-cutting a forest. Small, thoughtful adjustments over time maintain healthy growth better than radical overhauls.
Implementing Imperfect Principles
Uber Case Study: Principles at Scale
Uber's 2017 cultural transformation stands as a dramatic example of principle change in recent corporate history. The company had grown explosively under Founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, but that growth came at a devastating cost. Their product principles—mantras like "Always be hustlin'" and "Toe-stepping"—created a toxic culture that led to multiple crises including sexual harassment scandals and regulatory battles.
When Dara Khosrowshahi became CEO, he faced a daunting challenge: transform the culture of a global organization with 20,000-plus employees while maintaining business performance. The stakes were enormous—Uber was burning through billions in capital and preparing for an IPO.
Their transformation approach was comprehensive:
1. Deep Employee Engagement: Instead of imposing changes from the top, they involved 1,200-plus employees.
2. Product Principle Replacement: Imperfect principles were identified and evolved for the current context:
o "Always be hustlin'" → "We value long-term growth"
o "Toe-stepping" → "We do the right thing. Period."
3. Structural Changes: New product principles weren't just words—they were backed by revised performance review criteria and new hiring practices.
4. Sustained Focus: The changes persisted through their IPO process, proving they weren't just for show.
The results validated the approach. Employee satisfaction scores rose significantly, regulatory relationships improved, and public trust began to rebuild.
Uber proved that product principle changes, even at massive scale, can drive real transformation without harming business performance.
A Bottom-Up Approach: My Experience
Not every product principles rollout requires Uber-scale transformation, but small implementations benefit from a similarly systematic approach. In my case:
1. I started by deeply examining our product strategy and current challenges.
2. Then I drafted initial principles and tested them with my manager.
3. I refined them through discussions with product colleagues.
4. Gradually, I conversed with stakeholders to gather feedback.
5. Lastly, I let adoption grow naturally through demonstrated success as I told others about how the principles were connected to the work we did.
The key lesson? Whether changing a massive organization or a small team, principles need clear intention and room to evolve through use.
Conclusion: The Courage to Be Wrong
The real danger in product management isn't having bad principles—it's having none. Perfect product principles don't exist. Every principle involves trade-offs. Every framework has edge cases. Every rule will be wrong sometimes. But that's not failure—it's learning.
Facebook grew quickly under their initial product principles, had to evolve them once they were a market leader and appear to be returning back to the initial principles as they face existential threats / opportunities from TikTok and AI.
Apple became the most valuable company in the world with their product principles but it’s cost them so much with their slow delivery of Apple Intelligence that they may be changing.
Start where you are. Write down your principles, however imperfect. Share them with your team. Use them to make real decisions. Let them evolve. The worst principle is the one that never gets written.
You can only have good principles by starting with bad ones.