The culture of progress in a product team is a subject at the crossroads of three fascinating topics: startup corporate culture, learning processes and product management.

Here are the questions I asked myself to tackle this subject:

• 🚀 Why install a culture of progress in startups?
• 🧠 How do we progress?
• 🏃‍♀️‍➡️ Why is progress difficult?
• 📚 How do you help a product team move forward?

🚀 Why install a culture of progress in startups?

I've recently had the opportunity to take a look at the culture of several tech scale-ups, and the notion of progress is a recurring theme:

• Doctolib: serve, care, learn, act
• BlaBlaCar: be the member, share more. learn more., fail. learn. succeed., dream. decide. deliver., be lean. go far., fun & serious
• Alan: members first, fearless ambition, distributed ownership, radical transparency, personal and community growth
• Pearltrees: performance, progress, transparency

The reason seems obvious to me, a startup changes quickly and you have three options to adapt your team's skills accordingly:

• Progress: your culture and your team enable you to adapt to change.
• Recruit and/or replace: new skills and new profiles.
• Do nothing: with negative medium-term consequences.

If we agree that a team's resilience and ability to progress are probably key criteria for startup success, how do we put them in place?

🧠 How do we progress?

Once you've decided to install a culture of progress, you often skip a step and go straight to the list of processes to implement, or worse, the tools to install.

But how do you make progress? Without going into a course on neuroscience, it can be summed up as follows:

• Choosing the right learning methods
• Repeat frequently

Here are a few examples with different modalities and frequencies:

• Attend a conference once a year
• In-house training, once a week
• Reading, one hour a week
• Provide feedback, every day

If you limit yourself to the annual conference, you benefit from a high level of quality in terms of knowledge, but it remains weak in terms of pedagogy, with a "top-down" approach and little knowledge reactivated afterwards.

On the contrary, if you only encourage your teams to read every week, you'll bring about a highly beneficial recurrence, but "self-directed" learning has its limits.

Finally, if you opt only for in-house training, you'll be encouraging peer learning, but you'll be depriving yourself of the richness of an outside perspective.

Should all these approaches be combined? Probably. Are there other approaches? An infinite number, that's the beauty of teaching.

🏃‍♀️‍➡️ Why is progress so difficult?

It's not enough to install lots of processes for your teams to make miraculous progress. You know what? Progress is inherently difficult.

Sport is an analogy I use regularly in this context. In a sport as simple as running, you'll realize that injury can happen quickly if your program is not adapted, with outings that are too long or too frequent. In business, you can imagine an interminable seminar poorly positioned or micro-management over time.

But if you dose your training program right, by running frequently and slowly, your body will get used to the shocks, you'll build muscle and ultimately run longer and faster.

Making effective progress means constantly adjusting a cursor that enables you to move out of your comfort zone while enjoying yourself and without hurting yourself. Learning how to position this cursor is learning how to learn, and should be the first lesson for any start-up establishing a culture of progress.

📚 How do you help a product team move forward?

Before talking about the specifics of the product team, I think we can rely on a few fairly classic processes that we'll come to personalize:

• Continuous feedback
• One-to-one and coaching
• Internal and external training
• Reading books

However, I can see a few specific points to bear in mind if you want to make progress in Product Management:

• It's still a young profession, which means we have to include external sources of reflection and discuss their translation collectively internally.
• A pivotal role that involves a variety of themes(design, technical, marketing and entrepreneurial) over and above its primary mission(discovery and delivery).
• The need to develop and maintain expertise in our customers' businesses leads us to conduct regular field experiments.
• Solving complex problems requires analytical rigor, which must be developed using robust analysis methods (Descartes, Barbara Minto, etc.).
• A systemic environment, with mass-market products that set standards and in turn require a dedicated monitoring process and regular product testing.

Have you identified any other special features? We'd love to hear from you!

Just so you know, I've launched a listing of reference books and podcast episodes in Product, as the range of content has grown considerably in recent years (especially in French). I'll be sharing this with you soon!

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