Culture is Product

Every company builds two products—one for customers and one for their team

Dharmesh Shah
Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company

Culture is Product

"Culture is a product. Every company builds two products—one is the product they build for their customers, and the other is a product they build for their team. That's what culture is, it's the product you build for your team." - Dharmesh Shah

What It Is

Culture is Product is the insight that organizational culture should be treated with the same rigor, iteration, and customer-focus as the products you build for external customers. Your employees are the customers, and culture is the product you're building for them.

This reframing transforms culture from an abstract, often-ignored concept into something concrete and actionable. It also eliminates the perception that working on culture is "fake" or "inauthentic"—you're simply building a product like you would any other.

How It Works

If culture is a product, then several implications follow naturally:

  1. Never build without talking to customers - Just like you'd never build a product without customer input, you should never build culture without employee input. Use NPS surveys regularly.

  2. Never call it done - No product person would say "I built this product. It's awesome. I'm done." Culture should be continuously iterated, not preserved.

  3. Bugs exist and should be fixed - Categorize cultural problems as "bugs" and address them publicly. Some you'll fix, some are "working as designed."

  4. Needs evolve - What employees need changes as the company scales. The culture that worked at 50 people may not work at 500.

  5. Core values are product principles - Just like products have core constraints (e.g., "built for SMB," "easy to use"), culture has core values that remain constant through iterations.

How to Apply It

  1. Run regular NPS surveys asking employees: "On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend [Company] as a place to work?" and "Why?"

  2. Publish all results transparently (anonymized) so everyone sees the feedback

  3. Categorize feedback at all-hands meetings:

    • "Here are bugs we're fixing" (with committed timelines)
    • "Here's what's working as designed" (things some people don't like but you're keeping intentionally)

  4. Iterate quarterly on cultural practices, policies, and principles

  5. Distinguish federal vs state - Have core values that are non-negotiable company-wide, but allow individual teams to adapt other practices to their needs

When to Use It

  • When culture feels abstract or hard to work on
  • When employees push back on culture initiatives as "fake"
  • When you're scaling and culture is degrading
  • When you need to make the case for investing in culture
  • When deciding whether to preserve vs. evolve cultural practices

The framework is particularly powerful because it:

  • Makes culture concrete and measurable
  • Removes the stigma of "working on culture" as inauthentic
  • Provides a clear model for how to iterate
  • Helps distinguish between core values (preserve) and practices (evolve)

Source

  • Guest: Dharmesh Shah
  • Episode: "Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company"
  • Key Discussion: (01:20:00) - Explains the genesis of HubSpot's Culture Code and the "culture is product" insight
  • YouTube: Watch on YouTube

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