Draft experience principles

Overview

We recently started a conversation around product or design principles.

While organizations handle product/design principles in different ways, they are generally defined as “a set of guidelines that empower a team to make wise decisions and appropriate trade-offs when designing, building and innovating.” People use them because, “applying [them] fosters a cohesive problem-solving approach, [promotes] efficiency, consistency and user-centricity.” (Source.)

We do have principles in place at GitLab, but they are currently different for each of the three departments that are primarily responsible for building the product: Product, Engineering, and Design.

Problem statement

Having three, separate sets of principles can lead to inefficiency and inconsistent decision making, both of which impact our teams, our customers, and the people who use our product.

That also means we have an opportunity: By creating a unified set of principles that guide day-to-day decision making across departments, we can increase our alignment and efficiency, helping us work better, together.

Proposal

Let's work towards defining a set of principles that can be used to make day-to-day decisions that support our experience vision as a company, which can be shared across product, design and engineering.