Effective Cross-Functional Collaboration WAS a Tough Nut. Here’s How We Cracked It

Meesho has grown from a team of 400 employees in 2019 to 4,200 in 2022 — this is a +100% growth in 3 years. With more team members, come new challenges — one of which is collaborating across teams on common projects.

Anyone working in Product/Tech teams would know what a mammoth of a task this is. Teams “asking” the support of engineers would have to rely on the teams “delivering” to prioritise their ask.

How would teams prioritise projects?

How would teams allocate engineering bandwidth to projects that are the team’s own projects and other team’s projects that need to be supported?

How would teams continue to deliver flawlessly even with the challenges that may come while collaborating?

Here at Meesho, we use a super-reliable structured approach to solving all kinds of problems. We rolled up our sleeves and got to the task -

1. Step 1 — Problem-first, User-first: Listen to the problems of the users
2. Step 2 — Size the problem: How big is the problem and for which cohort of users?
3. Step 3 — Outside-in: How are best-in-class companies solving this problem?
4. Step 4 — What are our solution options? Synthesise solution archetypes with pros and cons for Meesho → Draft a solution for Meesho; long-term and short-term
5. Step 5 — What will it take for us to implement the solution? Define next steps, owners, timelines, launch!
6. Step 6 — Constantly take feedback! Iterate when needed.

1. Problem-first, User-first: Listen to the problems of the users

Our Listen or Die program is popular amongst all Meeshoites to solve user problems. So when it comes to problems that affect the Meeshoites themselves, this was our obvious modus operandi i.e. start by understanding the problem from those who were impacted by it.

For this problem statement, we spoke with Product Leaders, Product Managers, Engineering Managers, Product Design Managers and Business stakeholders through a series of detailed questions to identify where exactly the collaboration gap existed. What impact does it have on organisational speed?

Finally, the following problems were highlighted -

1. Teams were not sure how to prioritise cross-functional tasks
2. Co-ordination and planning for bandwidth allocation were unstructured, ad-hoc
3. Lack of long-term visibility of when such projects would come up was bleak and made planning hard for teams

2. Size the problem: How big is the problem and for which cohort of users?

We realised that better collaboration should finally result in faster execution of projects. Keeping “speed” as our ultimate metric, we tried to look for hotspots of collaboration inefficiencies that impacted “speed” the most.

We found out that product-engineering collaboration for cross-functional projects was the biggest bottleneck and wanted to start by solving for this cohort of employees.

We also found a way to measure our product release velocity, which we used to measure the success of this exercise.

3. Outside-in: How are best-in-class companies solving this problem?

Well, we weren’t the only company at this scale that faces this challenge. We looked at companies across the world, and identified basis —

a) Size and complexity of org

b) Reputation of highly efficient, evolved cross-org collaboration processes

c) Reputation of speedy product/tech releases

— and shortlisted the companies that we wanted to review.

We asked 3 broad, non-leading questions -

1. How are teams designed for cross-org projects?
2. How are projects prioritised by each team?
3. What enables these teams to succeed?

And we found some very interesting solutions from the companies we spoke with for the problems we faced! Why reinvent the wheel?

4. Solution options: Synthesise solution archetypes with pros and cons for Meesho → Draft a solution for Meesho; long-term and short-term

We heard from other companies, we heard from our users, we gathered stakeholders, and brainstormed solutions.

What we did in this step was very critical: we did not just hand over answers to the open questions but created scalable frameworks, and aligned all stakeholders on the framework —

1. We came up with a solution framework for teams to prioritise tasks
2. We set up guidelines on how to allocate bandwidth
3. We set up monthly cadences and the operating mechanism of these cadences to make collaborating most effective

— in the long-term, as well as in the short-term

We got the right stakeholders on a call and debated the solutions — coming up with a plan of action.

5. What will it take for us to implement the solution?

We never leave the room without aligning on a timeline for immediate next steps for any project while assigning ownership of the steps. This is critical to get things moving with speed.

Talking about speed…

After 30 days of solving this problem on paper, we had already implemented all short-term measures to solve it in reality.

After 45 days, we had taken feedback from stakeholders and made edits in the solution.

After 60 days, while we continue to iterate on the solutions, we have already successfully solved the problem of “cross-org collaboration” amongst Tech and Product teams to a great extent.

Come solve problems with us, the Meesho-way. Join our team by applying to our open roles here.

Credits:

• Written and edited by Sheeba Mammen (LinkedIn, Twitter)
• Creatives by Shoumita Dhar (LinkedIn, Dribble)
• Special thanks to Anant Gupta, Nimit Kumar Singh, Aastha Shah, and Rituparna Das who gave inputs for this blog