The Mindful Product Company

The future of product development is mindful.

Product orientation broadly, or Product-led Growth specifically, is quickly becoming a must-have for companies building any sort of digital products or experiences. The rationale of product management—a focus on customer needs, development by rigorous iteration and experimentation—is increasingly being applied to all manner of projects and initiatives within companies as well.

The best practices and approaches of modern digital product development—from technical methods like Lean, Agile, and Human-centered Design, to support for psychological safety and growth mindset for employees, and even the leveraging of more authenticity, diversity, and sustainability in strategy, branding, and marketing—are all increasingly embraced by bold and progressive companies that are not only more successful in the market relative to their competitors, but also lauded as great places to work.

So product clearly matters. But what do we mean by mindful?

Mindfulness is also becoming more common in today’s business lexicon, but there is much confusion about what it really means. A quick Google search finds mindfulness defined as “a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations.”

Mindfulness through this lens is a perfect companion to product-thinking. Products, and particularly technology products, are designed and built by teams of people. Mindfulness is a powerful set of practices that make one’s ability to work with all kinds of other people more effective but also more creative and joyful.

Thus, the companies that embrace product, mindfulness, and other currents such as empathy, transparency, autonomy, and diversity, will be the more successful companies in the decades to come.

Still, companies today struggle to integrate modern methods, hindered as they are by legacy thinking and management styles. Even a clear-eyed CEO with a strong sense of empathy and a belief in servant leadership or worker empowerment will still face obstacles from the sheer complexities of the modern organization. To say nothing of pressures from outside the company in the form of board and investor demands, shifting customer attitudes, and tumultuous societal changes.

To meet this demand, Startup Patterns has built a diagnostic tool to help you and your team power your continuous improvement efforts towards becoming a more mindful product company. My forthcoming book, “The Mindful Product Company,” scheduled for release at the end of this year, is a companion to the diagnostic tool. The chapters of the book align to the seven dimensions of a product company which are built into the diagnostic tool. The diagnostic tool gives you immediate feedback and actionable recommendations that can be applied in your organization, while the book will offer a deeper dive into each of the seven dimensions of mindful product companies.

As a CEO or founder of a growing startup, trying to achieve success in the market while staying true to the entrepreneurial spirit that was the reason you started your company in the first place, you will face a barrage of organizational, technical, and process challenges at every phase of growth.

You want to achieve your vision without compromising your integrity. You want to build a company where people want to work, and that continuously releases new and exciting products that customers love. And you want to leave a legacy of having made the world just a more livable and happy place.

It is hard to know where to focus your improvement efforts. There are too many decisions. There are books, courses, podcasts, and blogs. And there are advisors, investors, mentors, all telling you what they think you should do.

Building a great product company requires using both your head and your heart. There needs to be a balance between intellectual rigor and freedom and creativity. After all innovation comes from variation not from standardization.

We feel you. We’ve been there. We’ve started companies, and we’ve succeeded sometimes, and failed other times. We’ve worked with hundreds of companies and thousands of individuals and their teams, and we have boiled all of that experience into a set of criteria that makes the difference between a successful company and just another failure.

The Mindful Product diagnostic tool is built on our many years of direct product development experience, 5 years of research and refinement of the tool and methodology itself, and a vast library of literature on leadership, product, development, organization design, neuroscience, and psychology. It probes seven core dimensions of your company, surfacing critical insights like your ability to discover customer needs and execute on them, or your ability to establish a strong leadership, organization structure, and culture to survive and scale without your constant supervision.

The diagnostic can tell you exactly what parts of your organization need the most urgent attention. It removes the pointless arguments and debates, and builds alignment across the team. It allows you to apply the same methodical iterative tuning that you use for product development to the growth and improvement of your whole company.

Most leaders are simply looking for information that supports what they already believe. They surround themselves with yes-people who are unable to challenge their thinking. Those leaders build companies that never really achieve their potential. The true innovators crave feedback and improvement. The Mindful Product diagnostic gives you that feedback.

You don’t have to agonize about how to build an effective product company from scratch. Leverage lessons learned by others and skip their mistakes.

And for the moment, the Mindful Product Diagnostic is totally free. We have plans for developing a sustainable monetization strategy in the coming year. But for now, we want to allow as many companies and teams as possible to benefit from the power of the diagnostic tool and make real and immediate progress with it.

Finally, every CEO or founder who takes the diagnostic survey, creates an organization profile in the tool, and invites at least 5 colleagues who also successfully complete the survey, will be entitled to a free 90 minute strategy session with me and the Startup Patterns team to review your diagnostic results together and make an action plan you can start immediately. Try it now.