Principles Over Process

The Work & Co Approach to Superior Digital Products

Foreword

Work & Co has designed, built, and launched category-defining digital products for the world’s top brands. When meeting people new to working with us, we’re often asked to describe our methodology. But, the truth of the matter is, breakthrough work doesn’t come from rigidly following the same steps for every challenge and product.

Instead, we focus on the principles that guide our teams—not just the next step in a predefined methodology. These principles drive us towards the outcomes we aspire to and the ideal path to achieve them.

For the first time, we’re sharing our top 7 principles with you. Our latest report captures Work & Co’s unique product management approach, inspiring product leaders and teams to transcend best practices and reach their brand’s full product potential. 

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Understanding that products serve a purpose is more than just a strategic insight—it’s a gateway to innovation. Assessing how your product fulfills a job for your customer is a foundational aspect of product innovation. When you truly grasp what job your product is accomplishing for the customer, enhancement and evolution become intuitive.

Aligning every contributor around this primary job can be challenging, yet is pivotal for simplifying the entire product journey. This alignment sharpens focus, enhances decision-making, accelerates time to market, and ultimately enriches the customer experience.

One method to crystalize this alignment is the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework. JTBD helps teams understand the underlying needs customers are looking to satisfy, offering a clear perspective on how products can serve those needs effectively. Despite awareness of JTBD across many modern teams, the real test lies in maintaining a relentless focus on it from the project’s inception through to launch, and beyond—or until insights from customers or market dynamics suggest a job evolution.

Here’s why this focus is critical: A product’s job is often charted during the strategic phase, but as projects unfold, teams can lose the plot. Whether through handoffs or the introduction of new features by other parts of the company, a product can gradually deviate from its core purpose.

This drift can occur gradually or through more dramatic shifts. Remaining fully aligned across organizational silos is difficult yet crucial work. It’s a challenge we often observe with internal teams—one that can dramatically influence both cost and launch capability.

To mitigate this, Work & Co approaches every project by setting and obsessively focusing on a clear job from the start. This strategy lays the groundwork for successful outcomes and establishes the bedrock of an unparalleled customer experience. 

For example: for one of our very first clients, Virgin America, we created an ownable digital brand that aligned with Virgin’s reputation for making flying fun, but the single most important thing the website needed to do was sell an airplane ticket. If a user couldn’t book a flight, the product didn’t have a reason to exist. This meant our focus was on developing the best possible responsive booking flow and expanding from there. 

In practice, this isn’t easy—but it is necessary. We all want the product to do all of the things for all of the people using it (and for all of the people with a vested interest in the org). But if it doesn’t do the ONE thing users need and do it with absolute excellence, the entire product falls apart.

By preparing for these challenges from the beginning, you set your product—and your team—up for success, crafting a coherent customer journey devoid of internal friction.

1. Set the JTBD, align your team.
2. Engage cross-discipline teams right from the start. 
3. Always take the customer’s POV. They expect seamless experiences, not internal conflicts. Do the hard work necessary to dismantle silos for their benefit.

Most companies rely on presentations as a means to communicate information, share ideas, and create consensus. Slide decks are an embedded part of work culture. In some ways, this makes sense. As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

These traditional approaches to product strategy, design, and development have their merits, but they also introduce significant challenges. Enthusiasm for ideation often leads to endless iteration, leaving many ideas unrealized without tangible product launches. User validation, typically delayed in traditional processes, misses the opportunity to gather early feedback across different directions. Moreover, neglecting technical feasibility from the start can result in captivating concepts that are impractical to implement. Talking about what you’re “going to do” is a form of inaction. The only way to “do it” is to roll up your sleeves and get to work.

We have found that breaking this norm and moving toward strategy you can touch and feel is far more powerful. Moving away from presentations in favor of prototypes empowers product and experience teams to accelerate development, learn rapidly through immediate user feedback, explore innovative routes, and preemptively address design, technical, or customer issues—paving a smooth path to launch. Prototypes help turn ideas into something real. They provide teams with an early and effective means to navigate the intricacies of feasibility, desirability, and viability—which saves time lost in chasing ideas that won’t work or can’t be executed. In more exact terms, they bring intangible ideas to life.

When a senior, hands-on, multidisciplinary team is in place, prototype creation can happen as fast as the first week. This method brings form and function together in a way you can touch and see—helping you to experience what users might experience. It helps the tech folks in your company immediately think about “how they’d build the thing,” and your marketing folks get inspired about how they can promote it. It is a tangible idea and a source of inspiration—a tangible symbol people can point to that helps feed continuous project momentum.

1. Low Fidelity Flow Prototypes: 
   • Basic digital layouts to illustrate structure, hierarchy and flow that show how users move through an experience step by step. This can even be executed by stringing together static comps within the Keynote or PPT file, and slipping through old school “animator” style.
2. High Fidelity Prototypes:
   • Fully-designed and prototyped UI resembling the final product, vital for helping customers/stakeholders understand how the finished product might come to life
3. Code Prototypes or Proofs of Concept:
   • Functional prototypes using code to test technical feasibility and backend integration.

Prototypes don’t just serve immediate design and functionality goals; they are instrumental in shaping the product roadmap. At different “altitudes” of planning, prototypes can inform broader ecosystem integration, mid-level product positioning, and the sequencing of specific features, ensuring a balanced alignment with organizational goals and market demands.

Delivering prototypes consistently shifts focus from conceptual discussions to real-world development, propelling products toward market readiness rather than binding ideas to presentation slides.

1. Prioritize Prototypes Over Strategy Presentations: Focus on producing numerous prototypes to foster alignment among leaders and extract meaningful customer feedback early in the process.
2. Set a 6-Week Prototype Deadline: Aim to create and test prototypes swiftly, addressing impediments to achieve this feasible timeframe and accelerate workflow.
3. Pilot the Prototype-First Approach: Apply this methodology to one of your multiple products or experiences. Evaluate against cost, quality, and velocity to discover potential improvements in team health and product excellence derived from an interactive strategy.

By emphasizing prototypes over presentations, you’re not just designing products—you’re shaping immersive digital experiences that resonate meaningfully with users and stakeholders.

Defining timelines, complete with a detailed schedule and firm launch date, are pivotal drivers of innovation. With a portfolio boasting over 500 digital products launched, our experience reveals that products without a target everyone is working toward are at the highest risk for never launching. Nine months is usually the magic number to bring something from concept to launch. One-off feature releases should happen even more quickly—within one quarter, or less.

Time constraints enforce decisiveness within teams, heightening accountability and expediting prioritization. This results in significant speed-to-market advantages, enhancing competitive positioning.

Adopting constraints is challenging, particularly for teams accustomed to Agile’s iterative ease. While Agile embraces continuous improvement, we find that full adherence can foster a comfortable pace that diminishes accountability, introduces scope creep, and breeds uncertainty in product scope and timeline delivery.

We very often see teams expending more energy into “how” the work will get done rather than getting to work. That’s why we prioritize project management methodologies that propel the work forward, vs. weighing it down by unnecessary meetings, ceremonies, paperwork, or the latest “process” trend. Breakthrough products require laser focus on our goals—for the user, for the brand, and by launching on time. Though learning and iterating are important, prioritizing outcomes that deliver customer value swiftly is crucial.

• Establish a Fixed Timeline for Launch: Set deadlines to drive rapid development and discovery. With a defined launch date, paths often illuminate the way to innovative solutions that surpass your initial vision. Comparable to manifesting practices, actively visualizing and pursuing your product objectives makes them tangible.
• Be Strict Where it Matters: Clarity in product requirements determines the necessary rigidity of timelines. While initial phases may benefit from exploratory freedom, advancing development stages necessitate regimented processes through documentation and delivery structures.
• Sync Product and Business Timelines: Viewing product and experience timelines in alignment with business quarters ensures synchronization with operational rhythms. This coherence enhances the product’s impact and integrates seamlessly into existing processes, whether driving sales, fostering loyalty, or modernizing systems.
• Adopt Lightweight But Effective Project Management: While structure supports teamwork, especially amid communication or experience challenges, excessive rigidity can inhibit accomplished talent. Though Agile often displaces hard deadlines, setting these milestones and establishing efficient workflows can invigorate teams and expedite market entry before opportunities fade.

• Set firm deadlines and align them with business rhythms to drive rapid innovation and integration.
• Focus product development on swiftly delivering customer value while allowing leeway to refine methodologies to suit your unique environment.
• Encourage a structured yet flexible approach to balance team autonomy with accountability, enhancing both speed and efficiency.

Creating transformational digital products requires assembling world’s top talent to tackle complex strategic, design, and technology challenges. We purposefully moved away from the industry’s traditional pyramid team structure in favor of smaller, dedicated teams of senior, highly experienced practitioners to maximize velocity and quality.

Traditional teams are generally built with a few senior individuals providing overarching direction and communication at the top, supported by mid-level staff who balance day-to-day management. A larger contingent of junior contributors performs the bulk of the work, ostensibly reducing costs—but often at the expense of depth and experience.

There is a pull toward management and mentorship for many practitioners that reinforces this model—they’d rather give direction than be hands-on in the work. Organizational structures support this and align career growth and achievement with managing others. Financially, it is also easier to pencil out. But it does not lead to the best work.

Our focus is on recruiting versatile, experienced practitioners who bring decades of hands-on expertise. This approach, while seemingly costlier, yields invaluable benefits:

1. Beyond Conventional Standards: Senior teams can bypass unnecessary industry methodologies, delivering not only more but doing so creatively and efficiently.
2. Trust and Predictability: Experience fosters accurate estimations and anticipation of challenges, preventing scope creep and unforeseen expenses.
3. Seamless Integration: Our teams operate as true extensions of internal product teams, fostering collaboration and eliminating silos.

We also eschew the typical hand-off practices seen in large, specialized teams. While such transitions are often economically driven, they can fragment the production process. Our solution: maintaining multidisciplinary teams from project inception. By doing so, we ensure that strategy, design, and technology are inherently aligned from day one.

But beyond assembling top-tier talent, we intentionally create the optimal conditions for high performance. This involves clearly identifying and securing the necessary skill sets, methodically planning team allocation, and equipping teams with the requisite tools, technology, and time. Your product team’s human and technical resources are critical in navigating the path to your objectives.

In a world where efficiency is paramount and the rush to streamline processes is ever-present, it’s essential not to overlook the profound impact of assembling and nurturing the right team. Effective problem-solving comes from stripping away unnecessary management layers and bureaucracy, allowing creativity to flourish and innovative ideas to emerge.

• Prioritize small, senior, multidisciplinary teams to move faster and mitigate risk.
• Avoid conventional hand-off processes to maintain cohesion and elevate product impact.
• Cultivate an environment where talent thrives unencumbered by bureaucracy and unnecessary process.

In product development, achieving sustainable momentum requires more than just moving towards launch targets; it involves navigating a host of challenges that threaten to slow progress. While the launch is a significant milestone, it is not the endpoint but rather a springboard for continued growth and learning. The real challenge lies in the ability to make sound decisions, transition ideas into tangible outcomes, and embed accountability throughout the process. Success hinges on a holistic approach that balances visionary planning with pragmatic execution to maintain the forward momentum necessary to propel products beyond initial release.

When a team adopts a continuous learning mindset, momentum is built into the process. This approach invites real-time feedback—which shapes decisions that are responsive, rather than reactive. This mindset fosters adaptability, ensuring that products evolve as swiftly as the market demands.

Envision a scenario where every user interaction reveals insights that pivot plans in a moment. A learning-focused team thrives on this dynamic, transforming insights into immediate action. As teams fine-tune features, they not only resolve current pain points but also anticipate future needs, keeping the product vibrant and relevant. Experimentation is transformed into a habitual practice, welcoming ideas that push boundaries. 

By continually iterating, teams build a living, breathing product that evolves in tandem with customer expectations and market trends. In this environment, learning isn’t just routine—it’s the fuel that propels momentum, ensuring a product doesn’t just keep pace but leads the charge.

We hold ourselves accountable for getting the product out the door, and even more so on the results we expect it to reap. The artifacts that we create along the way—the product roadmaps, backlogs and measurement plans—are living breathing guides that we look to post go-live, and we continue to shape and iterate upon as we evaluate how the product is performing.

The value of being first to market cannot be overstated. Yet speed doesn’t translate to rushing underdeveloped products out the door—most companies can’t risk launching something half-baked. It involves smart estimation to find the swiftest path to delivering the core value proposition.

The Work & Co approach takes fundamental concepts validated by prototypes and transforms them into a well-defined roadmap, integrating planned execution with timely delivery. Beyond the ‘what’ and ‘when,’ roadmaps serve as narrative artifacts, weaving the product’s story into stakeholder engagement.

If tackling complex capabilities first allows for a quicker market entry, our roadmap will support that strategy. Conversely, identifying quick wins that deliver immediate value may take precedence while complex features develop in the background. This requires a comprehensive understanding of the effort needed for various features or phases, ensuring alignment on resources and timing.

Our roadmaps act as a critical truth source, managing expectations and spotlighting potential bottlenecks. Regular re-estimations maintain accountability and balance ambitions with reality.

Clients often face constraints from outdated platform architectures. While they may seem like insurmountable barriers, Work & Co believes in proactive technical planning to find clarity amidst ambiguity. This includes understanding existing systems, creating implementation blueprints, and detailing sprint plans that guide work prioritization and estimate realistic timelines.

Scalability is embedded into our DNA. With long-term relationships across diverse clients, we anticipate future scenarios, ensuring readiness for increased user loads, functional evolutions, and market expansions. Our philosophy is to develop the simplest solutions initially, expanding scope and complexity incrementally.

At Work & Co, our goal is to create products that endure independently after our involvement ends. We support clients in establishing new divisions or business units to sustain their product ecosystems effectively.

Initiating scale planning post-launch is a misstep. Success hinges on foresight from inception through development, predicting future needs and challenges. Even during formidable challenges—such as transitioning from monolithic architectures—immediate workarounds must be identified.

Balancing present demands with future visions is essential. Businesses cannot afford downtime, and user experience should not be hindered by technical constraints. Planning and estimation demand a dual-track approach: long-term strategies complemented by short-term actions, ensuring each step propels your business towards long-term objectives.

• Embrace launch as merely the first step in a product’s lifecycle, focusing equally on post-launch learning and adaptation.
• Utilize strategic roadmaps to align team efforts, balancing long-term vision with short-term actions to maintain consistency in delivery.
• Plan for the product launch long before launch.

There is power in a future-focused mindset. The mark of an exceptional product team isn’t just in their ability to bring products to market, but in their dedication to what follows the launch. Launching a product is a milestone, but it’s far from the journey’s end. It represents the beginning of a path toward continuous enhancement and growth. The difference between a good and a great product practice lies in the commitment to what happens next.

Having encountered almost every conceivable challenge in the digital landscape, we understand how seemingly minor issues can evolve into substantial obstacles. This foresight enables us to predict the trajectory of a product’s journey and prepare our clients to embrace self-sufficiency and drive a thriving product practice independently.

Achieving this level of maturity requires a shift—transitioning from collaboration with us to independently managing digital transformation. The highest praise we can receive is when a client no longer needs us because they have fully assimilated our methodologies, hired the right team, and continue to refine their approach even after our involvement ends. This is realized through our ‘one team’ model—an essential catalyst for accelerated market entry and rapid skill development through daily observation and emulation of best practices.

Our model pairs Work & Co’s talent with client experts, fostering an environment of shared responsibilities and progress. Our process demands transparency, often engaging C-suite executives directly in the work in progress. We value human connections, inviting clients into our workspace to encourage a sense of collaborative ownership.

Our fully integrated product teams capitalize on organic knowledge transfer across the product lifecycle. Through regular standups and iterative reviews, both internal and external teams maintain laser-focus on progress, ingraining a culture of continuous learning from the outset. In practice, this includes things like shared Figma libraries, functional documentation, Jira instances with shared epic, backlogs and acceptance criteria, a unified UAT process, launch planning by mapping out a triage process, and more.

At Work & Co, this can also mean adopting our clients’ ways of working—showing that the processes they’ve implemented in-house can work in a day-to-day context, or one of greater transformation. There are lots of great “ways to product.” As long as that includes the principles we’ve mentioned in prior chapters (senior, cross-functional teams, prototyping, moving at speed), it can be successful. 

When the time comes for our clients to assume full ownership, they don’t just feel ready—they are ready, thanks to a collaborative process grounded in foresight and strategic continuity.

• Strive for product longevity by focusing on post-launch growth and improvement.
• Prepare internal teams for independence through continuous knowledge transfer.
• Embrace transparent, close collaboration for effective product lifecycle management.

We’ve distilled the art of continuous improvement into our practice, not just for the products we create, but within our own organization. We believe this approach is a powerful blueprint for any company seeking to excel and innovate over time.

Just as these principles can be applied to hone exceptional digital experiences, they can guide you in continuous growth and transformation of your company:

• Focusing on the Core Mission: Understand the essential job your organization performs for its customers. This clarity is your compass, aligning strategic decisions with your central mission.
• Prioritizing Action over Discussion: Dedicate less time to speculating about change and more time to active experimentation. Real progress stems from putting ideas to the test, iterating on what works best.
• Harnessing Time Constraints: Use deadlines as a catalyst for innovation. By applying time constraints to projects, you drive forward momentum and prevent inertia.
• Investing in Talent: Seek and cultivate top talent, but more importantly, create a thriving environment that unleashes their potential. Remove barriers so that creativity and excellence can emerge naturally.
• Cross-Departmental Collaboration: Engage teams across departments to anticipate and adapt to future trends. Collaboration breaks down silos and fosters a holistic approach to problem-solving.
• Instilling a Culture of Perseverance: Cultivate resilience by fostering a culture that sees initiatives through to completion. Encourage persistence, ensuring every effort reaches its full potential.

Leadership, though challenging, can transform when guided by these principles. With the right mindset and actions, every organization has the potential to surpass current possibilities and achieve extraordinary outcomes. By treating your company as a product, an evolving entity, you commit to a future of perpetual growth and innovation.

• Empower your organization by applying product principles: build, test, and evolve.
• Keep your core mission at the forefront, guiding strategic focus.
• Substitute speculation with actionable experimentation to drive real change.

As digital product leaders continue to navigate an ever-evolving landscape, the need for flexibility, innovation, and strategic foresight becomes even more crucial. Work & Co’s principles invite you to embrace a dynamic approach—one that prioritizes adaptability and a steadfast commitment to delivering value and impact through meaningful digital experiences.

By integrating these principles into your practice, you’re not just enhancing the way you design and develop products; you’re initiating a transformative shift within your organization. This shift will empower teams to transcend conventional limits, foster enduring growth, and craft products that not only meet but exceed expectations.

Remember, the journey of product development is continuous, with each launch representing a new beginning. By keeping the user experience at the forefront and committing to these guiding principles, your team can navigate challenges with confidence and emerge as leaders in digital innovation.

Shane Abrahamovich, Narguess Noshirvani, Steve Kuhn, Ian Lyckland, Puja Kartan, Jon Stookey, Bethany Pensworth, Christina Kalsow-Ramos, Parker Sapp, Tim Hetter, Jesse Fischer, Katelyn Loyer, Emily Giddings, Dani Horton

Design by Jamye Fontillas, Lauren Ebeling, and Manoel do Amaral

Edited by Rachel Ramaswamy, Partner, Product Management; and Brian Marr, Managing Director, Growth