Ritual — Symbol — Belief
A good team shares three things: ritual, symbol, and belief.
These elements do not happen by chance, but by the intention and commitment of product leaders and team members.
Rituals: actions or events performed by the group members that enforce their identity, support to each other, and belief.
In a product team context, ritual can be a mini-product snippet we share with each other every Friday; a monthly team building; a Friday breakfast in a ‘hotspot’ style by different members on rotation.
Each team can come up with its own ritual. To be successful, a ritual needs to have three characteristics:
- Adoption: every team members need to join it, either by rotation or play various roles in the ritual. Ritual is a mini-project/endeavor that holds everyone together.
- Unique and Engaging: Standup can be a ritual, too. However, it’s not enough to build a strong team and culture, unless you do something special in the standup meeting (like clapping hands together while standing up in a circle, dress up the same way, etc.).
- Simple: Ritual can be very simple, as long as it’s unique and consistent. Simplicity allows it to last for a long time and scale easily as the team expands.
Symbols: A visual or linguistic cue that identifies a group of people
Symbols start as a team name, logo, hoddie design, or how a group calls each of its members. For e.g., a startup called MagicPony has an orange hoddie as its symbol. Twitter calls its employees tweeps. Waymo calls themselves waymonaut or waymonewt (new employees). Google’s and Amazon’s employees are googlers and Amazonians respectively. These kinds of symbol and linguistic cues provide a strong sense of belonging and exclusivity that strengthen the support and collaboration within a group.
Belief: a shared truth, faith, or confidence in something
Not all belief needs to be documented as a vision and mission statements. In many product teams whose products are new and the market has not taken its shape, loosely held beliefs are more useful. As a product leader, you need to engage and help to form the team’s belief as a piece of common knowledge. For a product team, the most common types of belief are
- A customer’s problem that would add outsized value and that we can solve better than anyone else
- A new business model or a new way of doing things that could change everything forever
- A macro observation on political, social movement, or technological advances
To be meaningful, the belief needs to be ambitious (dare to put a stake in the sand, not obvious to everyone outside of your group) yet loosely held.
A good product leader uses rituals, symbols, and beliefs to bring everyone together and continue to iterate these elements as the team scales.
