Designing intentional moments of collaboration
Tips for building more connected and effective distributed product teams
Collaboration is hard. Even harder at scale within Enterprise teams. This became more tricky during the sudden shift to remote in 2020 and getting super burned out on zoom meetings. Sound familiar?
Product, engineering, and design teams were having to find new ways to build together, and it was hard. In the chaos of covid, and as an eternal optimist, I saw a bright silver lining: there was an opportunity for Designers to be the superhero.
Teams were (and still are) having a hard time working together in a remote setting. We designers were in a unique position to help and improve how the cross-functional team worked together. After all, we have a toolbox to help us improve and create new experiences. Why not put that to use to create a better team experience?
While it sounds promising, this isn’t always easy. There are still plenty of companies that reduce Design to the more tangible and visual aspects of our discipline. Although we’ve made significant strides to unlock Design’s value across the industry, many orgs still don’t leverage their Designer’s potential. This is especially true in engineering-driven Enterprise teams.
So the challenge is often twofold. How might we:
• Design the optimal conditions for remote collaboration
• Expose teams to new practices to catalyze customer centricity
5 step approach to better collaboration
The following came out of a lot of trial and error. Here’s my 5-step approach to creating intentional moments of collaboration that maximize the team’s time together, improve shared learning, increase alignment and speed, optimize meeting times, and ultimately democratize Design and make our methods available to the entire team.
1. Learn & define
Before jumping in to focus on collaboration, it’s essential to understand the bigger picture and get a baseline of all aspects of your team’s practices. This will expose other foundational and systemic problems you may need to prioritize first.
There are a few ways to audit your team’s design practices. You can bring in an outside party, like a consultancy or maturity subject matter expert, to run a design maturity assessment or do it yourself. I find both helpful.
I typically spend two weeks in discovery, learning about practices, meeting with Designers, Product Managers, Engineers, and leadership for a 30-minute casual 1:1. I’m a big fan of Leah Buley’s work on the New Design Frontier, so I like to frame questions that give me a sense of where the team is across the nine dimensions of design maturity. If your teams are struggling to collaborate better typically, you’ll see themes emerging around Key Partnerships.
When this theme emerges, I dive in to understand more. Talking to Design Program Managers and Technical Program Managers can help create a clear picture of the end-to-end product life cycle experience and expose where links are broken or don’t exist.
Now it’s time to look for insights. There will be some obvious ones as well as others that point to more considerable systemic challenges. While it’s tempting to look for low-hanging fruit and avoid more complex organizational issues, I don’t like to rule anything out.
2. Create your strategy
Your new insights will need to turn into action. But you won’t be able to or should you tackle all things, so it’s crucial to create a clear strategy. If you come from a Product background, there are foundational components that can translate easily to the world of Operations. These are some of the key ingredients for a good strategy:
- Outcome: Get clear about your outcome. Common outcomes of collaboration can be to maximize the team’s time, improve shared learning, increase alignment and speed, reduce meeting churn, create more connected teams, and ultimately create the conditions for innovation.
- Measure: Now you need to define the right signals to measure your progress. There are different ways to measure collaboration. These are some of the signals I recently leveraged to measure a workshop series I created for VMware teams:
- Reduce the time it takes to align.
- Reduce the number of meetings
- In session: attendees actively participate.
- Post-session: attendees give positive post-workshop feedback.
- There is an increase in the number of PMs & Eng requesting to learn and part of the product development flow.
- Designers are involved earlier in the product development funnel.
- Previously “Design practices” is adopted as “Product team practices” and part of the product development flow.
- Focus: Chances are you’ve uncovered many opportunities, and your operations team is spread thin. Zeroing in on the top insights and narrowing your focus to the most impactful challenges is key.
Focus: The importance of truly “picking your battles” as an organization.And I don’t just mean deciding what to work on and not work on, but picking the few things that can truly make an impact.
— Marty Cagan
3. Design the new experience
As as you begin to brainstorm solutions to design the collaboration touchpoint, you’ll most likely need to answer the following:
Key questions:
- What are the critical touchpoints for collaboration in the product development lifecycle?
- Are there touch points that are more critical than others?
- Is there an opportunity to introduce new practices that could enable teams to be more customer-centered and consider end-to-end experience?
- What can be done asynchronously to maximize the team’s time together?
- How might we frame this to resonate with team members who are new to collaboration and penetrate their existing biases?
Key components of collaboration:
As you create your solutions, it’s helpful to consider and account for the following aspects contributing to collaborations.
- Mindset and behavior: Team’s current habits, rituals, and perceptions. Do they see the value in coming together? How might we reframe this so it’s not just another long meeting? What are the existing biases that we have to overcome about roles and responsibilities?
- Practices and methods: What are the product team’s existing practices? Is there an opportunity to improve them or introduce new techniques to help align them with their customers’ outcomes? What methods best leverage the unique and diverse perspectives of the team? Are there new practices to help us bridge the gap between the different working styles?
This lens is helpful to frame the challenge and brainstorm solutions. In this new remote world, some teams spent much time having the same meetings about the same thing with different people. It takes time to align and time to shift how we use our time together. In my experience, most teams like to meet to speak about features and requirements. There are usually a few clear opportunities to introduce more outcome-focused, user-centered, and remote-first practices.
- Tools and technology: What are the go-to tools of the cross-functional team? What are the gaps in their tools? Tools like Miro, Mural, or Freehand create environments that mimic physical space with a digital whiteboard and a ton of templates.
4: Pilot and deliver the new experience
It’s not enough to create your solution, give a presentation, and hope your teams adopt it. I’ve run into so many organizations that think a well-documented process is all they need. Like a good science experiment, you need to control all the variables and see first hand what’s working and not. To get accurate results, it’s crucial that you design the entire end-to-end experience for the team and facilitate, so you immerse them in a new way of working.
Reflecting here are some of the guiding principles that I’ve used in creating an environment for collaboration.
Guiding principles:
- Neutral facilitator: It’s critical to have a neutral, experienced third-party facilitator to keep the group on time and topic.
- Clear outcomes: Define what success looks like for the workshop and share that with the team before the workshop.
- Design the experience: Finalize your agenda, prep your remote collaboration space ( I love Miro). Next, write an email and invite your attendees so they know what to expect. I always find it helpful to reach out to key participants in advance, thank them for attending and answer any questions they might have. This will help you build a good relationship and encourage them to participate more during the workshop.
- Safe space: Begin the workshop with a reminder of the mindset and best practices. If teams are new to collaboration and workshops, you need to have defined norms to help them succeed. It’s essential to follow this up with a quick icebreaker to get to know the teams and practice using the tool they’ll be working in. During the session, make sure to call on the more quiet voices so you can capture the difference in perspectives. Remember, the goal is not for everyone to agree; the goal is to make room for diverse perspectives and make more informed product decisions.
- One team, one dream: To combat any existing bias shift the conversation from Design team to team. Everyone owns and impacts experience. I like to start the session with “we’re here to explore [topic], but more importantly, we’re here to collaborate like some of the best product teams in the world.” These words help to prime the attendees. After all, who doesn’t want to operate as the best team in the world?
- Optimize time: Decide what can be done as homework vs. what needs to be done in the session. This applies to your attendees as well. Figure out who needs to attend the session and who can be part of the post-workshop wrap-up email. Not only will this save their time, but it will also save time during sessions. Smaller teams can move with speed and make room for everyone to be heard.
- Celebrate wins: Positive reinforcement is usually underrated and super important to a lasting shift in team behavior. I like to end each session with a group high-five, take a screenshot and share it in the post-wrap-up email. This does wonders for team bonding and is an excellent opportunity to showcase the work to critical stakeholders who are always looking for ways to optimize team performance and happiness.
5: Measure, iterate & scale
After each session, immediately reach out to the attendees to get their feedback. This data will help you work out the kinks and iterate to make the sessions even better.
These are my go-to ways to get feedback:
- Quick in session Plus/Delta retro.
- Post-session survey (keep this super short).
- Personalized Slack message asking for feedback. This is a white-glove approach but will help you get more detailed feedback and further reinforce the new relationship.
Final thoughts
Using the above, you can create the right conditions for collaboration to take place. By being the facilitators of collaboration, we become a strategic partner to our friends in Product development and Engineering.
I hope this helps you in your quest to improve your team’s remote collaboration practices.
Best of luck creating more connected and aligned teams! 🙌🏽
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