The Five Principles Behind Great Products: What 15 Years as Founder, CEO, and Investor Taught Christoph Behn

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Christoph Behn has spent the past fifteen years building and scaling consumer businesses, investing in mission-driven founders, and navigating the emotional highs and lows that come with leading a five hundred-person company through hypergrowth, recessions, COVID, and near collapse. As founder of kartenmacherei, CEO of Celebrate, and angel investor in more than forty impact startups, he has seen what makes companies thrive and what makes them lose their way.

In this deeply personal talk, Christoph shares the five principles that shaped his way of building products and teams, why ignoring them almost broke his company, and how rediscovering them helped Celebrate return to growth.

This is not a talk about frameworks, AI, or playbooks. It’s a talk about the real work: listening to customers, listening to your team, and, ultimately, listening to yourself.

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The early years: Building with the customer, not for them

When Christoph and his wife founded kartenmacherei in 2010, they were the customer. They spent the first years talking to customers daily. Christoph even worked full-time in customer service for two years. Those conversations created the foundation of their early success:

• High-quality, beautifully designed products
• A frictionless UX with fewer features done exceptionally well
• A deep understanding of the emotional jobs customers wanted fulfilled

By combining quality and convenience, the team built a two to three times better experience than everyone else on the market. The entire business grew from a single principle: listen deeply, understand emotionally, and design around how customers want to feel.

‍This became the first principle: Delight your customers by deeply understanding their emotions and needs.

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‍Breaking the plateau: Iteration, ambition, and the power of small moves

Around 2013, growth stalled. Their wedding category underperformed every other business line, ranking lower on Google and losing conversions.

Instead of guessing, the team went back to customers—but not the ones who bought. They called one hundred twenty customers who didn’t purchase wedding invitations. That research revealed something crucial: customers wanted more uniqueness, more formats, more craft-like elements such as ribbons and die-cuts.

Three small product changes led to a forty percent conversion lift, which unlocked a one hundred forty percent annual revenue increase once marketing spend was scaled behind it.

Christoph frames this period as a simple equation:

‍Ambitious focus + small, fast iterations = exponential impact.

‍But only if you talk to the right customers.

Iterate to excel, became the second principle.

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Scaling the team: Why empowered teams require ownership, not just autonomy

By 2016, Celebrate was financially successful, but employee NPS was shockingly low. Teams didn’t feel ownership, decisions bottlenecked at the top, and functional silos slowed everything down.

Inspired by Daniel Pink’s motivation theory and early “Spotify model” ideas, Christoph and his brother redesigned the org into cross-functional, empowered teams. They introduced product and business owners responsible for decisions end to end. But they discovered something counterintuitive:

‍Autonomy only works if people have the mindset to own decisions, including saying “no.”

‍Celebrate shifted hiring to focus on mindset first: drive, decisiveness, risk tolerance, and the willingness to challenge stakeholders. Personality tests became a standard part of recruiting to identify people who could thrive in a business-owner role.

The result: faster decisions, clearer accountability, and teams that acted like entrepreneurs.

Ownership became the third core principle, empowering teams to make decisions, set boundaries, and drive outcomes with clarity and confidence.

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Losing the way: Legacy, shortcuts, and the slow erosion of product culture

Then came 2020.

Christoph stepped away after ten intense years to found Better Ventures and support climate and social impact startups. Meanwhile, Celebrate struggled under immense external pressure:

• COVID crushed demand for events.
• Ukraine and recession reduced births and weddings.
• Teams stayed busy, but not on what mattered.

They made small improvements instead of building the future. They pursued revenue over customer needs. They avoided replacing critical legacy systems because it felt too risky. Developer velocity collapsed.

And, most importantly, they stopped talking to customers.

The principles that once powered the company were quietly abandoned.

When Christoph returned as CEO in 2023, he expected a strategic or structural problem. Instead, he found something deeper:

‍The culture lacked psychological safety.

‍People saw the problems, but didn’t speak up.

They avoided conflict and difficult decisions.

They felt the weight of expectations and fear of being wrong.

Teams said “yes” to projects they didn’t believe in.

To rebuild, Christoph didn’t start with a reorg or roadmap. He started with conversations. He visited every office, held town halls, listened to individuals, and realized the root cause:

‍When people cannot be vulnerable, they cannot take ownership.

‍Inspired by concepts from Brené Brown, Patrick Lencioni, and his own coaching journey, Christoph introduced a practice of meaningful connection inside teams: wonder, empathy, impartial listening, and open conversations about fears and pressures. This work unlocked honest communication, bolder decisions, and a renewed ability to act.

Embrace meaningful connection became the fourth principle, reminding teams that psychological safety and genuine human connection are prerequisites for bold decisions and strong product cultures.

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The hardest realization: Begin with yourself

The turning point came when a coach told Christoph:

“Christoph, you put your trauma into your company.”

Like many founders and product leaders, Christoph operated with deep self-reliance:

• I must handle everything.
• I must not fail.
• I must always be enough.

That internal pressure shaped the culture, often unconsciously.

By working through his own fears, learning to express emotions, and speaking openly about burnout and loneliness at the top, Christoph made it safe for others to do the same.

This became the final principle. The one that aligns everything else: begin with yourself.

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‍The Five Principles

• Delight your customers
• Iterate to excel
• Act with ownership
• Embrace meaningful connection
• Begin with yourself

Together, they guide decisions, reduce fear, and bring teams back to what matters.

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Why it matters

Christoph’s message lands with unusual emotional truth. Product managers often carry huge responsibility: vision, details, stakeholders, team alignment, customer understanding, and constant trade-offs. Many operate in silence, under pressure, and without the support structures they need.

This talk shows a different path: one rooted in self-reflection, connection, and principled decision-making.When teams feel safe, listen deeply, and take true ownership, they don’t just ship better products.

They enjoy building them.

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