True Collaboration with Cross-Functional Peers (Engineering + Product Management + Design)
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
One of the biggest lessons I learned in my last corporate job at Facebook was how to truly collaborate with my cross-functional peers. As a design leader, my main collaborators formed the trifecta of PM/engineering/design—the core team that got products shipped while being supported by many other functions including research, data science, content strategy, and product marketing.
While I’ve found a lot of articles written by designers on collaboration with engineers (examples from Facebook, Dropbox, and a seasoned designer) and product managers (example from Facebook), I had a hard time finding articles about leadership collaboration, so was inspired to write this post. Many of these points are familiar and are relevant to all leaders, whether you manage people or not. I am writing this from the perspective of how to collaborate as the design/eng/product leader of a team in technology.
1. Build Trust
A three-headed leadership team can’t function as leaders without genuine trust and affection between all three members. Trust takes time and is slowly built over many interactions, meetings, successfully launched products, and crisis situations. To help accelerate trust building, there are two foundational values:
Understand what matters to the product manager and engineering manager, both personally and professionally
Genuinely like each other. It’s easier to develop affection and find more things in common when you spend more time together.
The main tactic to facilitate trust is setting up weekly 1–1s. This regular cadence prioritizes your partners in a busy calendar and the first meetings should be used to create an atmosphere of mutual respect. The meetings must be co-created to meet both party’s needs. The bonus efficiency move is to combine the meetings into a weekly 1–1–1 with all three members. In the meetings, make time for informal hanging out and understanding of the person’s context and life in addition to strategizing about the road map or problem solving the latest resource constraint. One tactic that’s worked for me in the past is scheduling weekly 2-hour lunch.
Sample questions to help get to know a cross-functional peer.
What matters the most to you about working here?
What leaders & leadership style inspires you?
How was your weekend? Can you share something you did that would be surprising to me?
What’s most pressing for you right now?
What keeps you up at night?
What one thing can I do to help you this week?
2. Align on a Common Goal
You’re a leadership team together for a reason. Why are you here? What is the vision for the team & the products that you are building? Do you share the same long-term vision?
In addition to long-term vision, which at a tech company could mean 1 to 3 years out, there must be alignment on the short-term, the next 3–6 months. Many disagreements happen when there is agreement over long-term vision, yet disagreement over sequencing over how to get there. I may believe that we should start with A, before moving to execute on B and C simultaneously. You could have a different opinion. Lock yourself in a room, understand the variables and get to some agreement for the short-term.
Also important to discuss is how will we know we’ve achieved that vision. There are various ways to paint this picture:
Quantifiable metrics. Our app has X downloads or Y daily users. This program was adopted by Z people.
Qualitative metrics such as net promoter score (NPS) or sentiment surveys about how users feel about the product.
Ensuring you have a crystal clear vision of common long-term and short-term goal will make it easier to work through the inevitable disagreements.
3. Disagree and Commit
When working in fast-paced, ambiguous spaces, momentum is key. The three-headed leadership team will inevitably have disagreements. True collaboration is how you handle them.
First, always assume good intent. Each person has the best interests of the team in mind. Each person wants to achieve the common goal. Have arguments based on data and hypothesis, not personal attacks. Time-bound the arguments as it will likely be more important to pick a direction to move forward rather than spend another week debating.
What’s important is to agree to disagree. Even if the path forward wasn’t the one you would have independently chosen, be able to articulate the reasons why it’s the current part forward. Let your team know that you are on-board with the decision. Also, share an understanding of the risks and open questions. Have a clear commitment that this is the current path for now. It can be re-evaluated when new info or new data comes in.
4. Mutable Perspectives
In this leadership triad, there are stereotypical roles. The design leader helps dream the vision & pushes for building more, the engineering leader gets the MVP built the most efficiently, and the product manager is the CEO who keeps all the workstreams going by driving the roadmap.
Imagine the nirvana state where each of the three leaders could just as easily take any of the other two perspectives. I’ve had an amazing engineering leader push the product quality and argue for higher design excellence. I’ve occasionally been the voice of restraint, wanting to test many paths simultaneously, including some where I doubted the design. Having mutable perspectives ensures leadership trust and empathy and helps the entire team realize the value of multiple perspectives.
Wrapping Up
While all my teams have been amazing, I’ve had the rare pleasure of having a handful of cross-functional trios that have felt like mind-melded Voltron machines. When that happens the entire team soars. We work through adversity together. We ship better products faster. Work is fun and feels like effortless play. How might you strive for true cross-functional collaboration with your peers? Take the first step to building more trust.