Laying the groundwork for successful collaboration on a Product Team
A simple exercise to build a shared understanding
I’m a product designer at Animoto, an easy to use, drag-and-drop online video maker. At my company, product designers are typically embedded on a product team made up of a product manager, a product designer, web and platform engineers and a test engineer. We partner with people across other teams, like User Research and Customer Success, to create user experiences that are cohesive, elegant and easy to use.
I recently joined an existing product team, which is tasked with making enhancements to improve our users’ experience of our product. Our engineering lead suggested we gain a better understanding of how design and engineering could most effectively collaborate within the existing team. I’m going to share the process I used to do this. It’s super easy to do and I hope it’ll be helpful for anyone else who finds themselves in a similar situation.
The session
An exercise like this doesn’t have to take a lot of time. I planned a 30 minute sticky note session with all five engineers on the team. I like to provide questions in advance so that everyone has time to process their thoughts and come to the meeting with constructive input. I asked the team to think about previous positive experiences they’d had while working with designers. Conversely, I thought about previous positive experiences I’d had working with engineers. These are the questions I sent out, but you can set the stage for your own session with your own questions:
- What has worked well in the past? Why?
- Is it something we should start doing as a team?
I set up the meeting room in advance of the session with sticky notes in different colors, markers and pens. I chose a room with plenty of space so everyone could see the ideas when we added them to the wall. When we met, I quickly outlined the format of the session before we got started. I set a timer for 10 minutes for us to write our thoughts on individual stickies. When we were done, everyone had two minutes to present their thoughts to the group and add them to the wall. Consistently using a countdown timer with an alarm throughout exercises like this is a really effective way to ensure that every person has an equal opportunity to have their voice heard within the meeting. It also keeps the meeting focused and ensures we can complete the exercise by the end of our scheduled 30 minutes.
We grouped similar suggestions together to reveal common themes. I was excited to see the same themes emerge from both design and engineering. It’s a relief to join a new team and find you’re on the same page! And even if this isn’t the case, it identifies differences upfront and gives the team the opportunity to agree on ways to build a new, common approach. I took a picture of the stickies on the wall, and after the meeting, I sent a summary to the team.
The Results
I’m going to share some of the themes that emerged for our team and examples of actionable ways to achieve these. These themes don’t necessarily apply to every single team or process at Animoto, but are a reflection of how our team wanted to work together.
Transparent communication
Everyone noted the importance of frequent communication between Engineering and Design. The team suggested sharing design work early and often to gather feedback and input from engineering. We have a team Slack channel where all team conversations take place (even one-to-one) and it’s proved really valuable for keeping everyone in the loop.
Collaborative design process
Ensuring everyone has the opportunity to provide input into finding a solution creates a shared ownership of the entire project from the start. To manage this at your own business, try to get the whole team involved in ideation at the start of the project. Collaborative design sessions are a fun way to do this.
Flexibility and compromise
A shared understanding and valuing of each other’s disciplines is important. For example, sometimes I will propose ideas or a future vision that is not within current technical scope. This doesn’t mean that we can’t create a great experience for the user and stay within scope, but it does require working together to come up with a successful solution that meets everyone’s needs.
Efficient workflows
Workflows are dependent on how a given team prefers to work. Within our team, we talked about our hand-off process. We like to use Zeplin, a tool which allows designers to hand off detailed specs to Engineering quickly and automatically.
Our user comes first
We all agreed that ultimately, we are striving to design and build the best experience for our user. It’s really great to work in a team where Engineering will call out the importance of our user’s experience too.
Conclusion
This was a really quick and fun exercise to do. Joining a team that has worked together for some time can be a little daunting, and I found that sharing expectations from the start eased the transition process. The sticky note exercise helped to set us up for success and gave us a head start on removing any roadblocks or assumptions that may have unexpectedly cropped up in the future.
In our case, we were aligned on what was important to us as a team. But, what if we weren’t? An exercise like this would give us an opportunity to discuss and take action on any outstanding issues upfront.
Have you tried an exercise like this before with your teams? Do you have any other recommendations about easing the transition to a new team? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
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