What Does a "Healthy" Product Culture Look Like?
A healthy product culture isn't quiet meetings and clean alignment — those are often just theater. And when a culture is sick, reaching for " Good to Great" won't heal it; that playbook assumes trust you haven't earned back yet. Heal first. Greatness later. I've watched more than one organization run a beautifully facilitated " brutal facts " session. Sticky notes go up. Someone brings the good markers. A trained facilitator writes "psychological safety" on the whiteboard and means it sincerely, in the moment. People say true things out loud — some of them for the first time — and there's a kind of relief in the room, the particular high of collective honesty. Everyone claps. Everyone thanks everyone for their candor. Three months later, the person the sticky notes were quietly pointing to gets recognized or even promoted. Nobody mentions the contradiction. That's the part worth sitting with — not the accolades themselves, bu...