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In the divisive public safety market, Axon's philosophy is not to impose its own policy views. Instead, its product teams focus on creating flexible tools with the right "knobs and dials." This empowers individual police departments to implement policies appropriate for their specific communities, making the product adaptable and widely adoptable.
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Police are paradoxically resistant to change while also being dissatisfied with current conditions. This creates a challenging but navigable path for technology adoption. Founders must frame innovations as inevitable, beneficial evolutions rather than disruptive shifts to succeed in this market.
Instead of a siloed advisory board, Axon's ethics council—comprised of academics and activists—is embedded directly with product managers. This makes ethical considerations an upfront design input and proactive part of the development lifecycle, rather than a final compliance check, shaping products from their inception.
To move beyond 'customer-first' as a slogan, Vasion adopts a 'build with, not for' philosophy. This is operationalized through mechanisms like customer advisory boards that directly influence the product roadmap, ensuring the voice of the customer is embedded into pricing, features, and support.
Instead of aligning with pro-police or pro-accountability factions, Axon focused on a universally accepted goal: reducing deaths involving police. This unifying message allowed the company to secure growth across different political administrations, providing a playbook for navigating and thriving in politically charged markets.
A true product-led culture doesn't mean the product team dictates decisions. Instead, its primary function is to surface and clearly frame cross-functional tensions and trade-offs, enabling the entire organization to make cohesive, system-wide decisions.
Axon follows a "build what you must" AI strategy. They develop proprietary, first-party models for specialized, performance-critical tasks like real-time license plate detection where they can create a market advantage. For general applications like text generation, they use best-in-class foundation LLMs to avoid reinventing the wheel.
Unlike enterprise software that forces businesses into a standardized box, Palantir's goal is to create 'malleable software.' This approach embraces complexity and helps companies enhance their unique competitive advantages rather than making them more similar.
In 2019, Axon publicly halted its use of facial recognition, deciding the technology's capabilities and inherent biases presented too much risk versus its value in law enforcement. This demonstrates a proactive, ethics-first approach, delaying monetization until the technology was mature and safer, rather than rushing to market.
Instead of creating bespoke features for individual clients, Aliaswire's product-centered culture prioritizes building solutions that can be replicated for thousands of customers. This architectural mindset turns specific sales opportunities into platform-wide leverage, delighting partners with unrequested but highly valuable new functions.
When product, marketing, and sales all compete for seller attention, enablement becomes highly political. The solution isn't to mediate these conflicts directly. Instead, build an objective system with clear governance and processes. This system becomes the arbiter of priority, sidelining political influence and focusing on customer-centric outcomes.
