The Backbone of Product Excellence (3/8)
A living system that holds things tight, even in the chaos of early-scale startups.
In the previous article, we laid the philosophical groundwork for building high-performing product functions. Now, it’s time to move from beliefs to structure—the Backbone of Product Excellence. This isn’t just about processes or frameworks; it’s about creating a system that ensures the consistent delivery of valuable products, even in the chaos of early-scale startups.
The Backbone is the operational spine of your product function. It’s the systematic and visual representation of how resources, activities, and outcomes interconnect to drive meaningful impact. Without it, your product organization risks becoming a collection of disjointed efforts, chasing features instead of solving real problems.
Inspired by proven methodologies for program planning and evaluation (see W.K. Kellogg Foundation Logic Model Development Guide), this Backbone provides more than a structure—it offers a lens into how change happens in product organizations. What makes it particularly powerful in early-scale environments is its ability to reveal the productive tensions that drive evolution and growth.
The Four Layers: A System of Productive Tensions
This Backbone comprises four interconnected layers: Product Impact, Product Usage, Product Work, and Product Team. Each layer plays a critical role in sustaining excellence, and together, they form a dynamic system that aligns your product strategy with measurable outcomes.
Most content about product management focuses on individual layers—Impact, Usage, Work, or Team. But the real magic happens in the connections between these layers. By understanding and managing these connections, the Product Leader can create a product function that is not just effective but resilient, adaptable, and truly high-performing.
So, I won’t go deeper into the definition of each layer… the web has plenty of it, and also LLM could help you with that. Below follows only a brief explanation about each one, but I’ll be glad to discuss more if you need it, just leave a comment about it.
1. Product Impact: the overall results layer
The Product Impact layer defines the change you aim to create in the world. It’s the North Star that guides every decision, ensuring that your product delivers value to users and achieves the desired effect on the market. This layer is deeply rooted in your Core Philosophy of Product Management—those principles that transcend quarterly goals and market pressures.
Narrative: The story you tell about your product, its purpose, and its intended impact. This narrative should resonate with your users, guide your decisions, and be deeply aligned with your North Star.
Segments: The specific groups of users you target with your product. Understanding their needs, motivations, and pain points is crucial for delivering relevant value.
Value Delivered: The tangible benefits users receive from your product. This is the core of your value proposition and should be measurable, whether through user satisfaction, increased efficiency, or other key performance indicators.
By focusing on Impact, you create a feedback loop that allows you to continuously refine and improve the product. Worth mentioning that an Impact can be:
Measurable: A numerical value can be placed on the product
Non-measurable: The product has value that is non-numerical
Direct: The value can be unambiguously traced back to the product
Indirect: The product has value that is not easily traceable
2. Product Usage: the outcome layer
The Product Usage layer focuses on how users interact with your product. It’s about understanding their journey, their behaviors, and their experience. This layer ensures that your product not only solves problems but does so in a way that feels intuitive and delightful.
Acquisition Flow: How users discover and start using your product. This includes marketing, onboarding, and initial setup. A well-designed acquisition flow ensures that users not only find the product but also understand its value from the very beginning.
Activation Flow: The steps users take to experience the core value of your product. This is about getting them to that “aha!” moment where they realize the product’s potential. A smooth and intuitive activation process is critical for retaining users and ensuring they derive immediate value.
Core Experience: The central features and functionalities that keep users engaged and coming back. This is the heart of your product that correlates directly with the narrative. By focusing on the core experience and its outcome, you ensure that the product not only meets but exceeds user expectations, fostering long-term loyalty. The experience is the product.
3. Product Work: the output layer
The Product Work layer describes the portfólio of initiatives you undertake to build and maintain your product. There are different kinds of product work, each with their own processes, measures of success, and strategies. Not understanding the different types of product work leads many individuals and orgs to the wrong process, the wrong measure of success, and the wrong strategy.
Innovation Work: Exploring new ideas, experimenting with new technologies, and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. At its core, innovation means doing something that is new, different, and better.
Growth Work: Focusing on expanding your user base, increasing engagement, and driving business growth.
Debt & Evolution Work: Addressing technical and experience debt, refactoring code, and ensuring the long-term maintainability and scalability of your product. Once a product reaches initial product market fit, evolution work creates and captures value by extending a product's functionality and market into incremental and adjacent areas.
4. Product Team: the people and resources layer
The Product Team layer focuses on the people who make it all happen. It’s about building a high-performing team with the right skills, culture, and structure. This layer ensures that your team is not only capable of executing the current vision but also prepared for future challenges.
Key Capabilities: The essential skills and expertise required to build and deliver your product.
Maturity Level: The level of experience and expertise within the team.
Org Design & Topology: The structure of the team and how it interacts with other parts of the organization.
These four layers are not isolated silos; they are deeply interconnected, forming a dynamic system. Your Philosophy of Product Management acts as the conductor of this system, ensuring that all parts play in harmony.
Impact to Usage: The desired impact informs how we want users to interact with our product. By understanding the change we aim to create, we can design user experiences that are not only intuitive but also deeply aligned with the product’s purpose.
Usage to Work: How users actually use our product and the outcomes of it dictates what we need to do. User feedback and data analysis provide critical insights that inform our innovation, growth, and maintenance efforts, ensuring that the product evolves in response to real market needs.
Work to Team: The work we need to do determines the skills, structure, and culture of our team. By aligning team capabilities with the product’s goals, we ensure that the right people are in the right roles, driving the product forward.
Team back to Work: The team itself, through its experiences and learnings, can also influence and refine the Work over time, and the Work will influence Usage and so forth. This creates a feedback loop that ensures our true north remain relevant and effective, even as the product and market evolve.
The Product Leader Owns the Backbone
The Product Leader—whether a CPO, VP of Product, or Head of Product—is the architect and steward of the Backbone. Her role is not just to define the layers but to ensure they work together seamlessly, balancing future vision with present execution, and managing both above the line (the product itself) and below the line (the operations that support it).
You will be planning from the top down, ensuring that every layer of the Backbone is aligned with the Product Impact and Core Philosophy, and executing from the bottom up, ensuring that the Product Team has the skills, structure, and culture needed to deliver on the vision. Always going back and forth throughout the whole Backbone, addressing the inner cracks, managing the tensions that arise between the layers, and ensuring that Quality is not a one-time achievement but a constant measure of success.
How I Applied the Backbone at Nubank
When I joined Nubank's Transfers Experience & Platform (TEP) unit, I encountered a situation that perfectly illustrated both the challenges and power of the Backbone approach. The annual planning was already defined, and the teams were coming off an intense period of implementing PIX (Brazil's instant payment system) the previous year.
Initial Assessment: Using the Backbone as a Diagnostic Tool
Instead of diving straight into execution, I used the Backbone to diagnose our current state. For this, I employed a framework that evaluates 20 key aspects of high-performance product environments—from vision clarity to psychological safety. The results were revealing:
The Product Team layer showed significant opportunities for improvement
Our environment was at 40% of its potential for high-performance product management
This 40% wasn't about individual performance—As the saying goes: when a flower doesn't bloom, you fix the environment, not the flower. This insight led us to focus on systemic changes rather than individual interventions. One of the root causes of it was thas a lot of our feature development was driven by regulatory demands from the Central Bank (BACEN), and this had become the "standard" way of working in our TEP teams. The assessment clearly showed we needed to relearn how to be a product team of excellence.
Identifying Systemic Issues
The diagnosis revealed several interconnected challenges:
Unbalanced Portfolio: Our work mix was heavily skewed toward regulatory compliance, affecting our ability to innovate and address user needs
Shallow Usage Understanding: We had a superficial view of how our products were being used
Team Environment: The regulatory-driven approach had created an environment that wasn't conducive to high-performance product management
The Path Forward
Based on this diagnosis, I presented and secured buy-in for a three-pronged approach:
Raise the Product Management Maturity Level
Implemented structured learning sessions
Created clearer connection between impact and daily work
Established new routines for product discovery
Deepen Usage Understanding
Developed better instrumentation for user behavior
Created stronger feedback loops between usage data and product decisions
Ensure Portfolio Balance
Restructured our work mix to balance regulatory needs with user needs
Created space for innovation while maintaining compliance
Established clear criteria for different types of work
This approach opened a healthy opportunity to better balance leadership guidance with team autonomy. It allowed us to strengthen the foundation of product management as a function within TEP, improve the product experience and its outcomes in the short run, and gave me consistency to outline the beliefs and bets that would inform product strategy in the long run.
The Continuous Cycle of Improvement
The Backbone isn't just a framework—it's a living system that connects every aspect of product development. Most systems fail because they're reactive, focusing on what's urgent instead of what's important. The Backbone flips this by making the connections between long-term impact and daily decisions visible and manageable.
It’s about seeing the connections, managing the tensions, and staying focused on what truly matters.
In early-scale environments, this systemic view is crucial. You're simultaneously building for today and tomorrow, managing both immediate product gaps and future innovations. The Backbone helps navigate this complexity not by eliminating tensions, but by making them productive.
Remember: excellence isn't a state to achieve—it's a system to nurture. The Backbone is your guide in this journey, helping you create conditions where excellence can naturally emerge.
A Personal Note on the LLMs Augmenting the Backbone
As we continue to explore my architecture of product management and refine the Backbone model, I believe LLMs will play an increasingly important role as thoughtful companions in our pursuit of product excellence. The key is to approach this integration with the same rigor and thoughtfulness we apply to the Backbone itself.
What excites me most isn't the technology itself, but the potential to see our product organizations in new ways, uncover hidden patterns, and challenge our established thinking. The Backbone provides the structure; LLMs can help us see new possibilities within that structure.
I'm curious to hear how other product leaders are thinking about this integration. How are you using AI to enhance rather than replace the fundamental elements of the Backbone? What new tensions and opportunities are you discovering?
For example…
The Impact layer has always been about understanding the change we create in the world. What I've discovered is that LLMs can help uncover blind spots in our impact thinking. This one bellow isn't about letting AI define our impact - it's about expanding our thinking space. It’s a prompt that can change an impact perspective:
"Analyze our stated product impact and identify:
1. Second-order effects we might be missing
2. Unintended consequences (both positive and negative)
3. Impact dimensions we haven't considered
4. Assumptions about value that might not hold across different contexts"