Enhancing Cross-Functional Collaboration: Integrating Perspectives in Product Teams (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: You've spoken about this in that talk that I referenced as well. This is about showing your thinking. It's also, you talked about how this is beneficial in terms of aligning stakeholders outside of that product trio or the product organization so that they can understand what it is that you're doing and that they can also participate in the shaping of whatever the solution or the problem is that you're trying to explore. It also reminds me of a quote that I've written down, I believe from that talk, where you said, when you're trying to collaborate as a product team, step one is to integrate your perspectives. We like to think that the product manager is the voice of the business and that the designer is the voice of the customer and that the engineer is the voice of what is possible with technology. And instead of trying to integrate those voices, we argue about which voice should take precedence. You know, tell me more about that and how that relates to what we've just been talking about.

Speaker 2: Yeah, here's the reality. Cross-functional collaboration is really hard. We're not good at it, right? Most of us have never had to truly cross-functionally collaborate. It's why I get questions all the time like, well, who gets to decide? No, if you're designating someone a decision maker, you're not collaborating, right? It's also why organizations struggle with alignment because we don't even know how to cross-functionally collaborate at the executive level, right? Our executives don't agree and so we see that disagreement propagate through the entire organization. Well, I was really fortunate during my master's program, I got to sort of nerd out on problem-solving and how it relates to design. And I got introduced to this researcher, oh man, David Joneson. I blinked on his name for a minute. David Joneson, he was at the University of Missouri and he just studied types of problem-solving. If you've heard any of my talks, we talk about ill-structured problems versus well-structured problems. That comes from his work. And it's just this idea and he studied like, how do we be good at these messy, ill-structured problems? Some people call them wicked problems, that might be a more common name for them. But they're problems that have complexity, right? We have to define the problem before we can even solve it. And Joneson really recommends like, the best way to tackle an ill-structured problem is to consider multiple perspectives. Because the more ways that you can think about how to frame the problem and how to integrate those perspectives, the richer your understanding of the problem. And the richer your understanding of the problem, the better you're gonna be at solving it. And so I think when we talk about a product manager, a designer and an engineer and they can't agree, and they all have their different solutions and they're struggling to align, they haven't integrated their perspectives. They're each relying on unique knowledge that they haven't surfaced and shared with each other. And that's, I think the real work of collaboration is aligning around what we know. Taking the time to one, individually say, why do I believe this? What is it dependent upon? And this is the critical thinking piece. This is where John Dewey, I think, wrote some amazing things, right? I hold this belief. What led to me holding this belief? And being really clear about why do I believe this? And then taking the time to communicate that chain of inferences to our teammates. And looking at what were their starting points? What were the inputs to their beliefs? So that we get to the point where all three of us are starting from the same inputs. And we all start from the same inputs. We may not draw the same conclusions, but we're much more likely. And we're gonna have much smaller differences when we can start from that same shared understanding. But it does take a lot of work. And I think that's where business culture of 30 minute meetings back to back all day long don't really support that kind of work. So some of the practical part of it is you gotta just clear your calendar, get rid of all the meetings that don't matter.