Designing High-Performance Team Habits
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
When I was Chief Product Officer at Fetch, I became fascinated by the science of behavior design. One of Fetch's keys to product success was building strong customer habits through simple but powerful mechanisms: repeatable actions, immediate rewards, and fun celebrations that drove high customer retention.
This deep dive led me to explore game design principles from products like Fitbit and Super Mario Bros., alongside behavior design insights from experts like B.J. Fogg, James Clear, Owain Service, and Rory Gallagher.
What I discovered: The same principles that make your product addictive or help you train for a 10K can dramatically uplevel your team's performance.
The Science Behind Behavior Change
There's remarkable consistency across these diverse sources because these principles are fundamentally effective. Some of the core themes include:
Define Meaningful Goals
Establish what you're trying to improve or the identity you want to embody. Determine your single most important area for improvement right now and focus there.
For maximum effectiveness, create a short list of key behaviors to emphasize. At DoorDash, we had team norms and picked one at a time to emphasize. This focused approach helps the team internalize "this is what's most important."
Start Small
Building habits through repetition and consistency matters more than magnitude. Small changes often work better than big ones. Make it as easy as possible to practice good behaviors, then build up to larger expectations gradually.
Celebrate Wins
Provide timely, specific, and actionable feedback. This creates a positive emotional response that helps encode the desired behavior. James Clear calls it "The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change:" "What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided."
The most effective recognition has several key elements:
Timeliness: Recognition delivered soon after the behavior is worth more than delayed feedback
Specificity: Include the behavior observed, by whom, why it was valued, and the result
Focus on outcomes: Make the recognition about results as much as possible, or at least behaviors that correlate to getting strong results
Genuine positive recognition make people more open to constructive feedback and managing change, especially in environments where psychological safety may be developing.
Make sure recognition emphasizes these behaviors disproportionately during a period of focus. For example, many teams say they want to be outcome-focused, but they ask about launch dates much more frequently than launch results. What you consistently recognize signals what truly matters.
Involve Others
People naturally imitate their peers and those with status as they seek approval, respect, and praise. Comparison with others is also a powerful form of feedback that reinforces behavior change.
Share encouragement in public forums like Slack channels or all-hands meetings. This enhances recognition for the team being celebrated while providing an example for others to emulate. This accelerates adoption. Leadership engagement is also helpful for reinforcement; even a simple emoji reaction to praise helps, while comments are particularly effective.
Getting team members to recognize their peers, not just having recognition flow top-down, builds a stronger culture. This could be through nominations that leadership reviews and highlights, or through peer reward systems in Slack.
Applying Behavior Design to Product Teams
One hallmark of high-performance teams is their relentless pursuit of improvement. Our products are never perfect and thus never finished. The same applies to how we work and what we learn.
This is where leaders can intentionally shape team culture by applying these principles. While there's no single "right way" to implement recognition, having some structure significantly increases effectiveness:
Create a shared language: Name the behaviors you want to encourage so there's common repeated terminology for discussing these elements
Provide support: Help team members learn skills to feel confident adapting to new ways of working
Show examples: Recognition demonstrates what "great" looks like, proves it can be done, and showcases its value
Be consistent: Make recognition a regular practice, whether through recurring Slack reminders, dedicated time in team all-hands, or other reliable forums
Different Approaches, Similar Results
Just as habits form through repetition, they get encoded through different forms of recognition. I've seen various approaches drive powerful behavior change across my career:
Fetch Rewards celebrated small wins constantly by giving team members virtual tacos in Slack channels
eBay UK's weekly all-hands meeting included peer-nominated examples of "catching people getting it right"
Groupon Goods had quarterly nominations and awards highlighting people who exemplified each core value
DoorDash made improved outcomes, company values, and team-first behavior explicit factors in performance evaluations and promotions
In my experience, a combination works best: consistent, timely feedback creates a positive feedback loop immediately after the desired behavior; larger recognition like performance evaluations and promotion decisions rewards consistency and magnitude over time.
The Bottom Line
If you're looking to improve something about your product team—and I hope you always are—remember this simple truth: reward what you want repeated.
By thoughtfully applying behavior design principles to your leadership approach, you can create lasting cultural change that drives better outcomes for your team, your customers, and your business.
Want to discuss how to transform your product team? Let's talk about your specific challenges.
