Most organisations get this order backwards. They start with the product, build process around it when things start breaking, and treat the people as the resource that absorbs whatever the first two decisions cost.
I work the other way round, and I want to explain why, using two situations most leaders will recognise.
Part one: people
Two people on your team cannot stand each other.
Not dramatically. No incidents, nothing you could point to in a review. Just friction that shows up in every meeting, and work that quietly gets routed around it.
Most leaders know this situation. Most of us handle it the same way, by waiting. Keep them apart. Route around the friction. See whether one of them eventually leaves.
That approach costs nothing today. That is exactly what makes it tempting.
I had this on my team, and I decided to work on it instead.
I coached them separately, then sat them down together. Using an approach I had trained in, we treated the conflict itself as something with its own shape, rather than treating either person as the problem to be solved.
What surfaced was not what either of them had assumed.
I will be honest about the outcome. That relationship still needs work. It did not resolve into something neat, and I am not going to pretend it did.
But something else changed. Both of them understood more about how they were landing on other people. They had a way to talk about it that did not involve going around each other. And they knew the organisation had been willing to invest in them rather than quietly wait for the problem to remove itself.
What people first actually means
Not as a value on a wall. As a series of specific decisions that are usually harder and slower than the alternative.
- Trusting someone before they have fully proven themselves
- Not burning a person for a mistake, or for a decision they made with the information they actually had at the time
- Giving someone an opportunity that stretches them slightly beyond what they have already demonstrated
- Working on a relationship that would be cheaper to route around
Each of those carries a short term cost, with an obvious cheaper option sitting right next to it.
But leadership is judged over years, not quarters. What you build in people compounds long after the immediate problem you were tempted to route around has been forgotten.
Part two: process
Some leaders flinch at the word process.
The assumption is that it means bureaucracy. Forms, approvals, committees. Something that slows everything down and gets in the way of people doing actual work.
I understand where that comes from. Bad process does exactly that.
But the absence of process does not produce speed. It produces improvisation, and improvisation only looks fast from a distance.
A small example
Six teams, six roadmaps, six different formats. Each one perfectly sensible on its own. Each built by a capable team that chose a structure that suited them.
Now try to see the organisation.
You cannot, not without first learning six different ways of reading a roadmap, then translating between them, then building a seventh view that stitches them together. Every time anything changes, you do it again.
Nothing about that was anyone's fault. But it was slow, and it was slow in a way that was invisible, because the cost was spread across everyone who ever needed to understand more than one team at a time.
Same six teams, same autonomy, one shared format, and the picture assembles itself.
What good process does
Not control. Sequence.
It tells people what happens next without them having to ask. It makes work legible across boundaries. It means a decision does not depend on whoever happens to be in the room that day.
And there is a quieter benefit that matters more than speed. Process is what makes an organisation predictable to the people inside it. When there is a known way things happen, people can plan, and they are less exposed to decisions that arrive from nowhere.
Which is the link back to the first half of this piece. Process built without people becomes bureaucracy. People without process end up doing the same work six different ways and wondering why it is so hard to see what is going on.
Part three: product
I have given the third part the least space here, and that is deliberate.
Product is the part everyone wants to start with, and it is the part that requires the least defending. Nobody needs convincing that the product matters.
What I would say is this. When the first two are in place, the third tends to follow with far less drama than expected. Teams that trust their leadership and understand how decisions get made ship better work, more predictably, with fewer heroics.
When the first two are missing, no amount of product focus compensates. You get talented people working hard in slightly different directions, a roadmap that nobody can read end to end, and a quarterly surprise every time something lands late.
The order is not a preference. It is a dependency.
Where to start
If you are somewhere in the middle of this, the useful question is not which of the three to prioritise. It is which one is currently missing.
| Symptom | Usually a signal of | |---|---| | Good people leaving quietly | People | | The same conflicts recurring | People | | Nobody can describe how a decision gets made | Process | | Each team reports in a different shape | Process | | Everything lands late but nobody saw it coming | Process | | Teams shipping steadily but in different directions | Process, upstream of product |
Almost none of those are solved by talking about the product.
Reuben Chircop is a product management consultant, OKR specialist and leadership coach based in Prague.