My husband and I grew up very differently. Generally speaking, my parents’ approach to parenting was “Life is hard and our job is to prepare our kids to face whatever life throws at them”, whereas my husband’s parents were more like “We’ll work as hard as we can to make our kids’ life easier”.

Very different indeed.

My husband’s parents live about an hour away from where we live, so we have a lot of quality time to talk to each other during these two hours of back-and-forth drive. Before we had kids (that changed the entire experience of those two hours) we used to have deep conversations during these trips. Some of these conversations went back to the past, and we got to know each other better. Some of these conversations discussed the present, where each of us got to know ourselves better. And naturally, many of these conversations were about the future ahead of us, and how we want to build our life together.

A major topic was where we were going to live. My husband grew up in the suburbs and loved that life. I grew up in Tel-Aviv and couldn’t think of anything else. You can imagine it was a heated discussion. Luckily for me my husband works in Tel-Aviv and hates traffic, so on the practical side of things, it made more sense to stay close to Tel-Aviv and keep an urban lifestyle.

Another topic was family. 

We knew we wanted a large family (originally thought of having 4 kids, but since the 3rd took so long to get here we ended up with 3 eventually). We discussed kids at a much deeper level though. We talked about how we were raised, and what we got from our parents, and debated what we wanted for our kids. There were aspects that we wanted to take from my side of the family and others where we thought my husband’s side was better. We had these long conversations about how we wanted to raise our own children long before we had them. I think it was even before we got married.

You can say that it’s futile – you only understand parenting once you’re a parent. While that’s true, it’s still much easier to deal with a screaming baby when you think in advance about what you will do in such a situation. The alignment that we created as parents was crucial to our ability to support each other in the path that we chose: There were times when I wanted to back off and my husband would remind me that there was a reason we said we were going to do it in a certain way, and there were times where the opposite happened.

The bottom line is that defining your principles before you need to deal with real-life situations can be very useful. 

I found myself sharing this story a few weeks ago with a product leader I am coaching. She was facing a challenging situation with company management, and I advised her to agree on the principles of their approach to it before they got to make the decision in real time.

Here are a few more situations where principles can help you, and a caveat to be aware of.

Planning Under Uncertainty

Here is a situation that I see with a number of companies I’m working with: The year has begun, and our plans are not set yet. In Israel, you could blame the war, but honestly, that’s not the root cause for the lack of clarity in the cases that I currently see.

A lot of it is due to leadership changes, or a major shift that companies realized they needed to make as part of their 2024 planning. If these changes are significant, it can take a while to land everything in the right place and stabilize the strategic direction.

But the year, as you all know, has already begun. Q1 is almost over, and everyone is waiting to hear where we are headed. Engineering is often literally waiting for your guidance in order to know what to do, not just out of general curiosity. 

In such cases, it makes sense to split the discussion as well as the planning: we will start in Q1 with what we already know and as soon as the longer-term plans are ready we will shift to the right direction. But wait, does it make sense to start things when you can’t be sure that you’ll have the resources to complete them? And how can you communicate the path forward without creating more confusion?

That’s when I recommend having a discussion with leadership on the principles you want to follow. It’s a great opportunity to mention a number of core guidelines that you can agree on and will help everyone align.

For example, you can discuss the areas or goals that everyone feels confident moving forward with. Another example would be to discuss and agree on general guidelines for new initiatives that would come further down the road. We are currently researching a certain area that could become a major pivot for the company. Let’s say that we found a direction that we think is a good one to pursue. How are we going to approach it? 

Usually, when I work with CEOs in these situations the tendency is to want to eliminate any work on the “old” product and invest all of the effort in the new direction. While definitely understandable, it usually isn’t the right thing to do and exemplifies less than great risk management.

A better idea would be to split the resources, and the discussion on how to split them (generally, not personally) can be done ahead of time before you know what the new initiative would look like.

By doing so you force everyone to address the hard decisions that are coming at you not when the baby is already screaming. It allows you to instill confidence in everyone that while there will be changes for sure, you are ready for them and you are a responsible leader who aims to create stability in objectively unstable situations.

Product Principles

Another area where principles are important is your product and even feature definition. The reason that principles are important here is because otherwise all you can do is agree on the details, and we all know that there are far too many details to deal with.

When people rush into talking about the implementation, or what needs to be done, or create a list of features – all of which are supposed to help us understand what this is all about, I always tell them that what they are doing is similar to showing me a list of pixels and the color of each and asking me to understand that we are looking at an image of a cat.

Instead of talking about the pixels, let’s talk about the cat.

First, let’s agree that we want to draw a cat. Now, let’s talk about its characteristics: you can talk about its appearance (fur color, length of tail, etc.) but you can also talk about other characteristics: it’s an angry cat, a spoiled cat, a baby cat, or any combination of these.

Now enough with the metaphor and back to practice: when you define your product or feature, you want to first outline the important things that we need to know about it. These could be related to focus (e.g. we are aiming for SMBs and not larger companies or vice versa, we will solve the visibility problem first and only then the full governance one), to solution principles (e.g. would require minimum manual work, does not need to reach feature parity with a previous solution, etc.), to goals and processes (e.g. we want to deliver something to the market ASAP and it should only be demo-able, not a working product).

Defining the principles helps you think, communicate, decide, and align on how you see things.

While it is important to see wireframes and understand what things are going to look like, starting with that will mean endless and context-less discussion on details. It’s the less productive way to approach them.

The Caveat

In some cases, principles can do more harm than good. It happens when there is a conflict of principles or values and one side tries to convince the other that they are right.

You should give it a chance, because if you get to agree on the principles you’ll enjoy all the benefits listed above. But look carefully at when the discussion becomes futile. 

Generally speaking, if someone believes your principles are wrong it’s usually very difficult to convince them otherwise. But the good news is that you don’t always have to.

If you find yourself in an endless principle discussion, you can be in one of the following situations:

You could be running a theoretical debate. After you have tried for a while, ask yourself why it’s important to convince the other side that you are right. If it has no specific implications on actions or evident outcomes, perhaps you can just let go of it and it would impact nothing.

It could be that there is a specific decision that you need to make now, and you wanted to agree on the principle to prevent the need to have that discussion over and over again in future decisions. If you are unable to do so but still need to make a decision now, move from talking about the principles to talking about the specific decision. You might be surprised to see that while you disagree on the general case, in this specific case you are aligned on a clear next step. It could be that one of you thinks you should do X because that’s how you think you should generally act, and the other things you should do X in this specific case despite the fact that they don’t think it’s a generally good guideline. 

In the few cases that it is truly important to agree on the principle and not on a specific decision and that you were unable to convince the other side, my recommendation is to leave it aside for a while. It’s not true in all cases, but in most such cases, since we know there is no specific decision that needs to be made, you probably have that time.

Who else do you think can benefit from thinking in principles? Share this article with them, it might help you 😉