Let’s talk principles: Exploring how we build product at Intercom

At Intercom, we follow principles over processes.

Principles are a way of encoding successes, allowing teams to repeat behaviors that lead to positive outcomes and avoid behaviors that lead to mistakes. Over the last ten years, we’ve developed, refined, and iterated on our principles to ensure they each represent an important part of the way we work, collaborate, and build product.

We’ve recently kicked off a blog series exploring these principles, written by the people that know them best – our R&D team. Each principle will have its own dedicated post, and be authored by someone that weaves it through the work they do each day. So far we’ve covered our VP of Design Emmet Connolly’s introduction to our principles and the series; VP of Research & Data Science Karen Church’s take on the importance of delivering outcomes; and Product Designer Charlotte Sferruzza’s laser focus on following fundamentals.

This week you’ll hear from two of these Intercom leaders. Emmet Connolly explores the reasons behind the series, what our principles mean to us, and how they’ve helped us get where we are. You’ll also hear Karen Church’s take on our “deliver outcomes” principle – one of the foundational beliefs that drives the work of our R&D team here at Intercom.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

Looking for a little more? Check out previous episodes of our podcast here. You can follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice.