I have a confession...

I was a product manager before we even called them product managers here in the UK. That’s how long I’ve been working now 🙈

Product management was a well-established discipline in the US tech scene for at least two decades before the term was popularised across the pond. I remember being a "digital experience" manager, a "customer experience" manager - broadly with the expectation that I would be responsible for a value proposition. But because it was a service, not a product, it wasn’t framed that way.

Thankfully, over the past 10 years (helped by brilliant thought leadership from the likes of Marty Cagan, Melissa Perri, Teresa Torres and others) product management has become a critical and recognised discipline that’s now spread far beyond tech. That, to me, is the real value of thought leadership: making the intangible and ephemeral feel concrete. Being able to articulate in plain language what some people may intuitively understand, but others can't quite put their finger on.

Culture is one of those still-esoteric topics. Everyone has a different definition, and yet we all know how powerful it is. It shapes performance, trust, innovation, retention — everything. And yet it's often overlooked, or worse, handed off as “HR’s problem.”

Whilst we can’t (and shouldn’t) try to productise everything, I’ve found that some of the mental models from product management become especially valuable when thinking about how to intentionally build, shape and transform culture — whether that's in a zero-to-one startup, a multi-billion-dollar Fortune 500, or frankly, anything in between.

Culture by Design

When I talk about culture, I tend to use organic metaphors more than mechanical ones. But there is one exception: culture is the operating system of an organisation. Upgrade the culture, and every application running on it performs better.

That said, a favourite analogy of mine is the rose trellis. Company values (when well defined and reinforced) are like the trellis that gives just enough structure to allow growth to happen around it. But you can't force this kind of growth in a particular direction or speed, because culture is "emergent". We can tidy it up here and there, prune around the edges and trim the bits that are not useful, nurture the growth of the parts that are, but culture is a fundamentally emergent property.

Still, just because culture is emergent doesn’t mean it can’t be shaped. In fact, precisely because it’s so ephemeral, leaders must approach it with real intention. If you want predictable, positive outcomes, you can't leave culture to chance.

Applying Product Thinking

If we borrow from the product management toolkit, we can treat culture less like a vague aspiration and more like a live system we can interact with.

Culture sprints are one way to do this. Just as product teams use sprints to release new features and gather feedback, leaders can run short, focused interventions to test behavioural change.

Let’s say you want to build a stronger culture of feedback. Rather than launching a company-wide programme, you might try something simple: a 30-day experiment where every team starts meetings with one piece of appreciation and ends with one piece of constructive feedback. After 30 days, you gather feedback and see what stuck.

Similarly, cultural metrics — used thoughtfully — can help you understand progress. Not everything that matters can be measured, but directional data like employee NPS, psychological safety scores, or qualitative pulse surveys can signal where to look. Just avoid turning culture into a scoreboard. Metrics are there to prompt curiosity, not control.

The goal isn’t to impose culture from the top down. It’s to create the conditions in which the right behaviours can take root and grow.

The CEO as Culture Product Manager

It breaks my heart when I hear people say “HR owns culture.”

No offence to my HR colleagues (I’ve worked with some incredible ones) but they can't own culture. They support it. They facilitate it. But they don’t own it.

There are only two acceptable answers to the question of who owns culture:

A) Everyone, or...
B) The CEO

Everyone owns culture in the sense that it’s co-created by every individual because culture is the sum of all the micro-interactions and behaviours that emerge from the group.

But the CEO holds disproportionate influence. More than the exec team. More than any policy or process. If the CEO rewards the wrong behaviours, punishes dissent, breaks their own rules, or tolerates toxicity in a high performer, the entire culture warps instantly.

Conversely, when a CEO models honesty, humility, feedback-seeking and care, that behaviour cascades. Culture is a mirror. People watch what their leaders do, not what they say.

You cannot delegate cultural leadership. If you’re the CEO, you’re the culture product manager — whether you like it or not.

Actionable Steps to Build Culture Intentionally

If you're ready to apply some of these product principles to your cultural leadership, here are a few places to start:

Co-create and codify your company values Involve people from across the business (not just senior leadership) to define what your organisation stands for. Language really matters here, but so too does giving people the opportunity to meaningfully participate and be heard.
Embed values into every people process Make them real by integrating them into hiring rubrics, onboarding flows, performance reviews, promotion decisions, leadership development - and definitely into exit decisions.
Define a behavioural “source of truth” Build a matrix that shows what each value looks like and what behaviours would contradict it. Having a values-fit matrix is just as important as having one for technical competencies.
Run regular culture sprints If you're working to transform a culture (especially a legacy one) don’t try to overhaul it all at once. Run 30-day experiments on key themes (e.g. Courage, Ownership, Psychological Safety, etc) and iterate.
Use rituals to reinforce identity Anchor values through repeatable moments: all-hands storytelling, first-day welcome lunches, Friday wins, Slack channels for recognition. They seem like small things (and they are) but done repeatedly, these are the reps that build cultural muscle in an organisation.
Treat onboarding as cultural immersion Story-telling at this stage is crucial to help new colleagues understand the journey the company has been on and "why" specific values are championed in the organisation.
Create a lightweight culture roadmap Pick 2–3 cultural priorities per year. Treat them like product features: scoped, resourced, and sequenced. Culture compounds when built over time, not when dumped all at once.

Culture by Intent, Not Accident

Its really important not to over-engineer the measurement of culture. As the saying goes: "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure", so trying to improve any specific KPI can backfire spectacularly (I've even seen companies have all-company bonus metrics tied to employee satisfaction scores, absolutely nuts).

But we can approach culture-development with the same intentionality you’d bring to anything else that drives growth and performance.

It means asking:

What does great culture look like here?
What would it take to build that?
And what’s stopping us right now?

Culture is the hidden infrastructure that makes everything else either easier or harder.

As someone who’s built products, led teams, and turned around businesses, I’ve learned this the hard way: culture eats strategy for breakfast — but only when you're not paying attention.

When you are paying attention, culture becomes your strategy’s unfair advantage.