1. Culture Is Built Through Practice, Not Just Posters
When new stakeholders join a product team—especially a Head of Pricing and a new Product Manager—it’s a pivotal moment. These roles don’t just bring domain knowledge; they shape the culture of collaboration, decision-making, and customer orientation. That’s why we didn’t just give them access to our roadmap or Slack channels. We invited them into our OKRA process.
Because culture isn’t what you say—it’s what you do consistently, especially when planning, aligning, and adjusting. And in a product team, culture becomes visible in how decisions are made, how we trade off between user value and business need, and how we treat learning as work.
OKRA gave us the scaffolding to co-create that culture. It allowed new voices to shape outcomes from day one, not just observe. And that matters—because trust doesn’t scale without shared context and accountability.
2. A Product Manager’s Role in Shaping Team Culture
Marty Cagan, in Inspired, makes the case that a great Product Manager isn’t a mini-CEO or a backlog manager—they’re the person most obsessed with the customer. They bring clarity not just about what customers say, but what they struggle with, what they value, and how we might test solutions.
A PM who can articulate real user pain and connect it to business outcomes becomes a cultural lever. They help engineering and design see the “why” in the work. They reduce thrash by focusing effort. They remind the team that features aren’t value—impact is.
In our case, the new PM used OKRA sessions to bring in that customer perspective early. During ideation and milestone mapping, they challenged assumptions, highlighted friction, and tied feature bets to observed behaviors. The result? The team didn’t just align on what to do—they were aligned on why it matters.
3. How OKRA Builds Shared Ownership and Learning Loops
OKRA isn’t just a framework for writing OKRs—it’s a rhythm for distributed product thinking. By grounding objectives in shared vision, co-creating hypotheses, mapping value to effort, and sequencing outcomes based on constraints, it makes sure the whole team—not just the PM—is accountable for outcomes.
This process avoids the classic anti-pattern where Product says “what” and Tech says “how.” Instead, everyone contributes to “why now” and “what would validate this.” Our Head of Pricing, for example, was able to connect monetization goals to customer pain and friction in booking flows. Instead of being an approver, he became a co-creator of value.
OKRA also made learning visible. We treated each milestone not just as a delivery unit, but a bet with a hypothesis. The PM tracked results, facilitated retrospectives, and helped turn learnings into strategy. This built momentum—not just velocity.
4. Inviting Stakeholders Into Culture Through Process
Too often, new stakeholders are expected to “catch up” while the team marches on. But culture isn’t static—it evolves with new relationships. By involving our new PM and Head of Pricing in the OKRA cycle, we didn’t just onboard them—we embedded them.
They saw how the team reasons, not just what it ships. They contributed to shaping the direction, not just reacting to it. And they felt heard and responsible—which is how psychological safety and performance emerge over time.
Culture isn’t a kickoff event. It’s every sprint, every retro, every session where ideas are shaped and committed to. OKRA gave us a practical, repeatable way to invite others into that space—and to evolve how we work together with every quarter.
5. Final Thoughts
Strong product teams don’t happen by accident. They’re built intentionally, one collaboration at a time. When Product Managers bring the customer into every room, and frameworks like OKRA invite everyone into the strategy, we stop acting in silos and start thinking like a unit.
This isn’t just efficient—it’s energizing. And in a world where customer needs shift fast and trust is fragile, that might be your team’s greatest advantage.