Level up your cross-functional collaboration with product managers and engineers
This week, our guest is Emily Tsai, Senior Design Manager @Autodesk. In this article, Emily provides a practical guide and an artifact on how the functions of Design, Product Management, and Engineering can get ahead of collaboration challenges.
While we can all agree that cross-functional teamwork is crucial for delivering successful products, teams too often jump right into division of labor before maximizing their collective potential. It can cause a number of challenges, which can result in poorer outcomes or sometimes no outcome at all, especially if products don’t make it to production.
Here are a few examples:
A designer's proposed solution could take x times longer to implement than anticipated, and therefore impractical to take to engineers for execution, let alone to take to market (e.g., a technical challenge was discovered way too late).
Critical project information was lost due to communication blunders between designer, PM and engineer.
Since everyone was focused on their own phase of the process, little energy was put into integrating each other’s perspectives early and often, which is key to solving problems thoroughly.
It can be daunting to address cross-functional collaboration challenges. You might each evaluate your product challenges via a different lens and constantly feel like you are talking past one another. In this article, I provide a practical guide and an artifact on how the functions of Design, Product Management, and Engineering can get ahead of collaboration challenges. It can also be adjusted to include additional functions on your team.
When innovating products, we’re often taught to balance a holistic set of perspectives for an ideal outcome. You might see Venn diagrams like this one (which I call the Trifecta diagram) about Customer (desirability), Business (viability), and Technology (feasibility).
In a classic product team structure, teams sometimes assume Product Management represents Business, Design represents Customer and Engineering represents Technology. More practically however, each member of the team likely has skills or experiences in multiple areas of the circle, which makes the above assumption unlikely in practice.
In the following three tips, I reference this diagram to illustrate how you and your team can play a role in up-leveling your collective Trifecta problem solving ability.
1. Start projects on the right foot by understanding each other’s why and designing your alliance
This shouldn’t come as a surprise – all functions on the team are collectivelyaccountable for the success of the product. The key is to balance user-centricity with business goals, data-driven insights with qualitative empathy, and collaborative decision-making with focused execution. At its core, trust is of the essence.
As Forbes’s Mark Samuel describes, “Trust is initiated by understanding, respecting and adhering to commitments, agreements and expectations”. Designing your alliance is really a team exercise to craft your collaboration agreement. Before kicking off a new team or a new project, get together to feature the team’s shared goal, acknowledge the value that each member brings to the table and have a conversation on how best to leverage each other’s strengths. Each of you is on the team for a reason (you were able to demonstrate the people/craft/process skills required for the job). But you are also human with a unique background and distinct needs. Perhaps you used to be an engineer who transitioned into a UX role and have a unique eye for elegant but practical solutions, or perhaps you are well-versed in the business value of your product and can inspire your cohort of colleagues with a gripping vision that pairs well with your design ideas. Build that into your collaboration model and have those conversations.
2. Use a decision-making framework to productively divide-and-conquer
Each function can assume responsibility in an area that falls directly under one of the three circular areas, but the best decision often balances multiple angles, thereby creating interesting nuances around the question of “who decides?”.It might seem obvious that the designer owns the decision around which UX option to implement, but what if the project is rooted in deep technical complexity? It might make sense instead to have the designer narrow down design options but to defer the final decision to engineers. Explicitly breakdown what each function is primarily responsible for (ie. tasks that your role solely owns), denote aspects that require buy-in from other functional partners, and consider ways to arrive at an agreeable decision. The below worksheet intends to help the team think through this. Share it with them, experiment if you need to, and align!
-> Download the full Example and Artifact using the form above <-
I’ve attached a worksheet with a sample scenario that breaks down project-level decision-making. Note that the right answer isn’t necessarily what is on the worksheet; it is one that works for your team, and is also based on your organization’s needs and expectations.
3. Uphold a continuous improvement mindset and iterate on your designed alliance and team process
Over time, the dynamic of your team will evolve and it is very possible that you might outlive team rituals or designed alliance agreements. To safeguard that trust that your team has established, remember to reflect, iterate and experiment! Keep going on those regular retrospectives, but remember to have a little bit of fun with it too (because who doesn’t love a good bonding moment with their teammates?). Good team synergy takes time to build, while maintenance requires continuous housekeeping.
A product team is cross-functional in nature because the combined brains from different backgrounds maximizes the chance of making well-balanced product decisions along each Trifecta dimension. Have those open conversations, lean in and embrace the differences on your team. In time, maybe you’ll come to appreciate the power and beauty of the healthy discord that comes with a multidisciplinary team!
Emily Tsai leads a group coaching session once a month as part of the RETHINK Leadership Circle for senior, staff designers and managers.
If you’d like to join, please fill out the interest form.
Topics she covers in her sessions.
✨ Effective ways to Manage Up
✨ Common misconceptions about working in a cross-functional setting
✨ How to set clear expectations, upfront
✨ How to build trust but also acknowledge differences
✨ How to ask the right questions
✨ How to apply a decision-making framework and clarify the collaboration model with your group
✨ How to reframe your design challenge into a business opportunity
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While we can all agree that cross-functional teamwork is crucial for delivering successful products, teams too often jump right into division of labor before maximizing their collective potential. It can cause a number of challenges, which can result in poorer outcomes or sometimes no outcome at all, especially if products don’t make it to production.
Here are a few examples:
A designer's proposed solution could take x times longer to implement than anticipated, and therefore impractical to take to engineers for execution, let alone to take to market (e.g., a technical challenge was discovered way too late).
Critical project information was lost due to communication blunders between designer, PM and engineer.
Since everyone was focused on their own phase of the process, little energy was put into integrating each other’s perspectives early and often, which is key to solving problems thoroughly.
It can be daunting to address cross-functional collaboration challenges. You might each evaluate your product challenges via a different lens and constantly feel like you are talking past one another. In this article, I provide a practical guide and an artifact on how the functions of Design, Product Management, and Engineering can get ahead of collaboration challenges. It can also be adjusted to include additional functions on your team.
When innovating products, we’re often taught to balance a holistic set of perspectives for an ideal outcome. You might see Venn diagrams like this one (which I call the Trifecta diagram) about Customer (desirability), Business (viability), and Technology (feasibility).
In a classic product team structure, teams sometimes assume Product Management represents Business, Design represents Customer and Engineering represents Technology. More practically however, each member of the team likely has skills or experiences in multiple areas of the circle, which makes the above assumption unlikely in practice.
In the following three tips, I reference this diagram to illustrate how you and your team can play a role in up-leveling your collective Trifecta problem solving ability.
1. Start projects on the right foot by understanding each other’s why and designing your alliance
This shouldn’t come as a surprise – all functions on the team are collectivelyaccountable for the success of the product. The key is to balance user-centricity with business goals, data-driven insights with qualitative empathy, and collaborative decision-making with focused execution. At its core, trust is of the essence.
As Forbes’s Mark Samuel describes, “Trust is initiated by understanding, respecting and adhering to commitments, agreements and expectations”. Designing your alliance is really a team exercise to craft your collaboration agreement. Before kicking off a new team or a new project, get together to feature the team’s shared goal, acknowledge the value that each member brings to the table and have a conversation on how best to leverage each other’s strengths. Each of you is on the team for a reason (you were able to demonstrate the people/craft/process skills required for the job). But you are also human with a unique background and distinct needs. Perhaps you used to be an engineer who transitioned into a UX role and have a unique eye for elegant but practical solutions, or perhaps you are well-versed in the business value of your product and can inspire your cohort of colleagues with a gripping vision that pairs well with your design ideas. Build that into your collaboration model and have those conversations.
2. Use a decision-making framework to productively divide-and-conquer
Each function can assume responsibility in an area that falls directly under one of the three circular areas, but the best decision often balances multiple angles, thereby creating interesting nuances around the question of “who decides?”.It might seem obvious that the designer owns the decision around which UX option to implement, but what if the project is rooted in deep technical complexity? It might make sense instead to have the designer narrow down design options but to defer the final decision to engineers. Explicitly breakdown what each function is primarily responsible for (ie. tasks that your role solely owns), denote aspects that require buy-in from other functional partners, and consider ways to arrive at an agreeable decision. The below worksheet intends to help the team think through this. Share it with them, experiment if you need to, and align!
-> Download the full Example and Artifact using the form above <-
I’ve attached a worksheet with a sample scenario that breaks down project-level decision-making. Note that the right answer isn’t necessarily what is on the worksheet; it is one that works for your team, and is also based on your organization’s needs and expectations.
3. Uphold a continuous improvement mindset and iterate on your designed alliance and team process
Over time, the dynamic of your team will evolve and it is very possible that you might outlive team rituals or designed alliance agreements. To safeguard that trust that your team has established, remember to reflect, iterate and experiment! Keep going on those regular retrospectives, but remember to have a little bit of fun with it too (because who doesn’t love a good bonding moment with their teammates?). Good team synergy takes time to build, while maintenance requires continuous housekeeping.
A product team is cross-functional in nature because the combined brains from different backgrounds maximizes the chance of making well-balanced product decisions along each Trifecta dimension. Have those open conversations, lean in and embrace the differences on your team. In time, maybe you’ll come to appreciate the power and beauty of the healthy discord that comes with a multidisciplinary team!
Emily Tsai leads a group coaching session once a month as part of the RETHINK Leadership Circle for senior, staff designers and managers.
If you’d like to join, please fill out the interest form.
Topics she covers in her sessions.
✨ Effective ways to Manage Up
✨ Common misconceptions about working in a cross-functional setting
✨ How to set clear expectations, upfront
✨ How to build trust but also acknowledge differences
✨ How to ask the right questions
✨ How to apply a decision-making framework and clarify the collaboration model with your group
✨ How to reframe your design challenge into a business opportunity
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