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Culture is how people behave when nobody is watching. It’s not the values on the wall or the all-hands slides - it’s the actual norms, habits, and unwritten rules that govern how decisions get made, how conflict gets handled, and what gets rewarded or punished 🌱 Peter Drucker’s line “culture eats strategy for breakfast” is overquoted but true. The best strategy in the world fails if the culture won’t carry it.

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How culture forms

Culture isn’t designed - it emerges from behaviour, primarily leadership behaviour. What leaders pay attention to, what they reward, what they tolerate, and how they act under pressure all send signals that the team internalises and replicates. A leader who says “we value psychological safety” and then visibly punishes someone for delivering bad news has just communicated the real culture. Words don’t set culture. Actions do 💡

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The artefacts and the reality

Culture operates at multiple levels. The visible layer is artefacts - rituals, symbols, processes, how the office looks, what gets celebrated. The invisible layer is assumptions - the deep, often unspoken beliefs about how the world works that drive day-to-day behaviour. The mistake is focusing on the artefacts (add a culture deck, start a book club, do team offsites) without addressing the underlying assumptions. Artefacts can reflect culture but rarely change it on their own.

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Culture in product teams

A strong product culture has a few recognisable characteristics:
  • Decisions are made based on evidence, not hierarchy
  • Discovery is a continuous practice, not a pre-project phase
  • Failure is treated as information, not as career risk
  • Customers are regularly brought into the room, literally or figuratively
  • Psychological safety is high enough that people challenge assumptions openly 🙌
Marty Cagan’s Empowered and Transformed are both substantially about product culture - what it looks like when it’s working and what it takes to shift it when it isn’t.

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Can you change culture?

Yes, but slowly and through behaviour, not proclamation. The levers are: who gets hired and promoted, what gets rewarded and punished, how leaders behave in moments of stress, and which stories get told and retold about how the company operates. Lesson learned: I’ve never seen a culture change programme succeed that didn’t start with at least one senior leader changing their own behaviour first. Culture follows the leader. Everything else is decoration.