First Principles of Building Products: Principle #4
This is part 4 of a series of articles. If you haven't read the previous articles, you can check Principle #1 here.
Isn’t it weird to have collaboration in this series? I mean, this is about building products, what does this “corporate” trend have to do with it?
Collaboration actually has a lot to do with innovation. Building products entail things such as conceptualizing the product, figuring out how to sell it, making sure that it aligns with the goals of the business, and the actual production of the product, to name a few.
What this means is that there are a lot of people involved in the process of successfully getting a product to the market, it’s never just 1 person. How these people would work together, however good or bad, affects how the product would end up.
When products don’t make it to market or fail in the market there’s a pretty good chance that it was because the team didn’t execute well. I would bet my bottom dollar that one of the reasons was a gap because a stakeholder or team member didn’t have enough input into the project. It could even be because the team executed too slow that they completely missed the best opportunity to enter the market.
At the end of the day, how a product team executes directly affects the success of the product. Slow project execution and oversight are results of a product team that isn’t working very effectively. A product team can have a good vision, a good strategy, and well-thought-out steps, but if they can’t execute well together there is a lot of room for the product to fail. A bad team can only get so far.
Going into the product world myself, I didn’t see collaboration to be something vital for my career. It wasn’t even a thing that I had to think of as I was learning design. Early into my career, like most product people, I thought that long, dragged-out projects with surprises along the way were how things were done and a form of tax that I had to pay.
As my career progressed, I noticed that the dynamics of how I worked with other designers, product managers, devs, and stakeholders had a big impact on my output and even on the product.
This brings us to our 4th First Principle for Building Products
Work on your collaboration
The thing is, good collaboration doesn’t happen by chance. It’s easy to think that having good collaboration happens because you magically hired people who can work well together, but it’s not luck. Good collaboration is something that you could actually work on.
There are a lot of tools and methodologies that could improve team collaboration, regardless of the members’ individual working styles. It’s a matter of finding out what works best for your team and you have to do the work.
But why should you work on it? What can good collaboration offer for your team?
Why
This may be the most obvious one, but having great team collaboration means that your team can execute faster. And we all know that with products, speed is king.
If you don’t have to suffer through waiting for approval from stakeholders, you can focus on creating more value for your customers. Additionally, when team members are completely aligned, you won’t have to spend time convincing them to execute on things.
This kind of speed will help you run through more product experiments and iteration, which will ultimately speed up your learning and getting product-market fit.
As you learn more about your customers(users), the more changes you have to make to your product, both in small improvements or in big pivots.
Having a team that’s aligned and working well together will be critical for the adaptability that you’ll need to zero in on what the market wants and even as it changes. The better your collaboration, the easier it is for your team as a whole to adapt to these changes.
When team members are coaching each other, communicating well, and building on top of each other’s ideas and efforts, they can elevate the team as a whole and find new ways of delivering customer value.
A team’s diversity is moot if they can’t share their knowledge and experience with each other. You want your team to work well together to maximize each other’s strengths.
Good collaboration allows members to speak freely and get their ideas heard without the fear of being shut down or hurting another team member.
This doesn’t only help improve the output of the team but helps keep the relationship of the members in a good state. Team members that feel psychologically safe can and will execute well.
Not only that, but a good team environment motivates the team members to fulfill their potential and keep them from leaving.
How
I hope at this point, you’re convinced that collaboration offers a lot of benefits for your product and your team. So the next question is how? How do you work on your collaboration or how do you improve it?
Again, this isn’t to prescribe specific solutions, but here’s a general outline that you could follow.
1. Establish team principles
Before you start finding and implementing tools for your team. It’s important to first establish what’s important to your members. Which things matter to them individually and the team as a whole?
These are things that matter to your team, so you want to use these as criteria when you’re choosing your collaboration tools and methodologies.
I would argue that these principles are more important than the exact tools that your team will use as those things can change or get outdated, but the things that matter to your team would probably stand the test of time.
A few examples would be “Work-life balance”, “Speed of execution”, or “Kind Candor”.
2. Working methodologies, tools, and rules.
Once you’ve established your principles, you’ll find tools and methods to use for your team or even make your own.
There are a lot of tools and methodologies available out there depending on what you want to solve for your team. For goal setting and alignment, there are OKRs, for execution there are Workshops, and for team communication, there’s Butter or Zoom.
If you want to establish specific rules for your team, you can ideate directly off of your principles. Going back to our previous example of “Work-life balance”, “Speed of execution”, “Kind Candor”, your rules could be “No work messages after 6 pm”, “Add feedback on figma files to avoid documentation”, or “Use the feedback sandwich”.
3. Testing the tools and optimizing them
When you find tools and methodologies, don’t be afraid to test them out or even tweak them according to your team’s needs.
Just like products, tools and methodologies can be iterated to fit the user. It’s about finding what works for your team so you can experiment on it too. But of course, these have to be controlled.
Give your team 2 weeks to try out a new communication tool and see how it goes. Try new video conferencing tools for shorter meetings and see if it’s any better than your current one. You can even run an ideation workshop for your next team-building activity to see if workshops are any good for you.
Collaboration, despite not being in the spotlight of product development, has a big seat on the table. Products don’t get built magically by one person’s efforts, so collaboration must be one of your priorities as a product team.
Not only does good collaboration offer a lot of advantages for the product, it also makes your job and your team’s job a lot easier, better, and even more fun. It does, however, take some work to achieve.
You don’t have to be stuck with the usual ways of working if it’s just not working for your team. A lot of collaboration problems can be solved by simply changing the tools and methodologies used by the team. Don’t be afraid to try out new methodologies and scrap endless meetings or clunky tools.
If you need help with your team’s collaboration, feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to lend a hand.
Send me an Email: abel@teneleven.design
Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abelmaningas/
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