Doing the heavy lifting together
How product teams can work together to maximize impact
“Driving is easy if you are the only one the road“
… my driving instructor had many wise words to share. This one stuck with me as it is applies to so much more than driving a car.
Today, we rarely see one single product team driving product development. Instead, multiple teams are working on it together. Product development is not a lone highway anymore. And growing product organizations need to learn how to steer their newly created product management fleets.
But these teams are not really driving together on the same road you might argue, waving the flag for product-team-independence, arguing the case for autonomous teams who — like mini startups — deliver value fast without needing anyone else in the organization. Independent teams are great, I respond. But maybe idealizing team independence as the only way to achieve value, has made us partially blind to the leverage that collaboration can bring in achieving said value. Or would you ignore a major growth opportunity for your startup just because it means collaborating with another company?
A solid collaboration culture enables an organization to generate more value faster, compared to what individual teams can create on their own.
Products that grow bigger than the sum of their parts
The opportunity for collaboration between product teams can be difficult to spot. But once you start looking, it shows in many areas:
- Company-wide initiatives: Some changes are so fundamental that they require the whole product to change. For instance, when you want to improve the overall user experience through a major redesign of user flows and interactions, you need every team to adapt to newly defined patterns and simplify common user journeys that span across multiple teams. While these company wide initiatives are difficult to manage due to their size, the alternative to the collaborative approach look grim: A frankensteinish, incoherent redesign with no improvements to cross-team user flows.
- Cross-team releases: To make an impact for your users with a new functionality you sometimes need to aim big. And big most often does not stop at the walls of your own team. Facebook’s Live Video is a great example of such a functionality. I don’t know Facebook’s internal setup, but I do see that for this feature to work smoothly people with experience many areas, like newsfeed, streaming, comments, sharing, recommendations, looked across the pond, and worked together to created a powerful end-to-end user experience.
- High-impact initiatives: In their product discovery phases each team is searching for gold in a sea of uncertainty. Once a team identified an opportunity, it should move forward quickly. However, team size can prevent the team from releasing to our users quickly. It might take some quarters to materialize that revelatory insight from product discovery for the company. Should it though?… If teams uncover a major opportunity for the company, collaboration with other teams should be considered an option to move faster.
For all the examples above, we see that collaboration helps product teams to deliver high value items. One product team would not have been enough to do this. It would have either taken a lot longer, or would not have happened at all.
Collaboration helps to achieve what Peter Drucker, father of modern management, calls a True Whole — an organization that is bigger than the sum of its parts.
“A manager has the task of creating a true whole that is larger than the sum of its parts.” Peter Drucker
Of course, if each team had worked autonomously on their backlog we still would have seen improvements. However, these improvements would be on a smaller level. Instead of creating something great we would be trying to sum the parts of individual small outputs and try to aggregate upwards.
Depending on their mode of collaboration, I’ve seen teams struggle in adapting to their newly intertwined setup. When teams are only contributing an isolated piece of the pie, there is not much change from their existing autonomous way of working. Once team goals are more tightly connected, the required collaboration maturity in the organization increases.
Crafting a collaborative organization
Enabling collaboration starts at the top: Team behavior is a reflection of their incentivation. If you are tasked to deliver double digit activity growth in your product area, you will focus on optimizing exactly that. Everything else becomes a distraction from the plan. And the same will be true for the behavior of other teams in the organization. However, if it becomes a company wide goal to improve the experience for a certain customer segment, the teams are more flexible in defining how they can contribute to this goal together. Setting objectives on the company level is a key incentive for collaboration. This incentive is further strengthened by a management team that not only cheers for individual team performances but also praises cross-team efforts.
Still, collaboration is not only triggered from the top. It is the product teams who need to work together after all. And they need to be aware of the big picture, and other teams contributions to it. Focusing on their own, smaller part is not enough — teams need to see the forrest and the trees. Only when the importance of working together is understood, there is going to be an honest effort to make collaboration work.
The more teams you work with, the more difficult it gets — Developing knowledge and empathy for the work of other teams helps to become more precise and forward thinking in your interaction with them. When you work in collaboration mode you are not just thinking for one but two or three teams and what is going on in their world.
Of course, it is not just about knowing what other teams do. It’s also about knowing about how they tick. Collaborators who know each other, for instance from past projects, can build upon the existing relationship and trust. Two teams who don’t know each other, on the other hand, will need time to establish an effective working relationship. Just like with sports teams, the star players do not guarantee a championship, it is about the chemistry between the individuals that is of importance when bringing them together.
Especially for very close cooperation, where the work cannot be seperated into isolated packages, it is wise to have at least one or two collaborators from each team know each other, who can then help to bridge the trust gap.
When teams come to help out others in a new area it helps when everyone speaks the same language and the ways of working are similar. This concerns a wide array of topics such as the tech stack, the roles in the team and also common workflows. Organization can put guiding principles in place that ensure a degree of consistency across teams in these areas to reduce friction and onboarding time.
Lastly, the ability to succefully collaborate requires an all-agile-no-ego mindset. Being able to reorganize around the most important goal of the company to deliver value quickly demands a high level of agility — Not just organizational agility, personal agility as well. When opportunity comes knocking, a product team must be willing to pause their plans for a moment to support a greater good. This can also mean helping out to bring a high value functionality from another team to market. In a truly collaborative environment there is no room for envy and but-what-about-my-product complaining,
Let’s go for a ride together
Now, I am not saying we should start moving people around like sport teams with the trade deadline approaching. Stable, empowered product teams are the backbone of a grown product organization.
At the same time, we should not, for the sake of keeping teams autonomous, close our eyes to opportunities that are bigger than a single team and that can be conquered faster together.
The best roadtrips are not about people travelling alone for a reason.
