Building coalitions

Organizing people to build cohesive products is hard. If there’s one constant truth about fast-growing companies, it is that the next reorg is always right around the corner.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. The goal of each reorg should be to further optimize the company for whatever challenges are most pressing, or whatever opportunities currently hold the most potential to pursue.

The downside lies in breaking up of formerly close-knit teams. This pain point is particularly acute in fast-growing companies. As teams expand and take on ever more scope in their work, it’s only natural that they start forming their own “silos” and focusing inwards. Team members’ attention must first be spent on each other before leaving room for outsiders. Soon, people that used to stay in sync just by chatting in the hallways can go months without seeing each other — drifting apart and eroding organizational trust over time.

So as a product manager, how do you combat the negative effects of freshly divided teams? The answer is to actively build coalitions that span between them. Here at Dropbox, we recently went through this exercise with our mobile teams, which had grown to the point where they needed to be divided in the latest company-wide reorg. We went from two mobile engineering teams to six spread across our larger R&D organization. Combined with a physical desk move, these teams had much less opportunity to organically meet, share ideas, and collaborate on shared projects going forward.

As product managers, one of our responsibilities is to enable everyone’s best work by building essential bridges to partner teams. Not only do we need to resolve dependencies, but we also need to identify opportunities where one team’s work can enhance another’s. The goal is a holistic product story that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Hence, after the reorg was complete, the product managers within each of the mobile teams banded together and decided to form an official cross-team working group — in other words, a coalition. Here is how we built it and how we keep it healthy.

Regular cadence of focused meetings

Of course, PMs naturally schedule meetings to solve problems. :)

But when you have so many partner teams involved, it becomes all too easy to let a recurring meeting lapse into a status update round table where participants only pay attention when it’s their turn. We attempt to make our regular meetings as valuable as possible by:

• Starting weekly, but always open to cancelling or shortening
• Limiting attendance to one stakeholder per team per meeting
• Having a Dropbox Paper document as our rolling agenda that anyone can contribute to
• Only suggesting topics that would be interesting to all attendees
• Regularly inviting “special guests” from other teams that can share specific insight or work that affects every party
• A “no devices” policy so people stay attentive (admittedly hard as we are mobile folk after all)

Shared Principles

Early on, it was clear that each of our teams would come with their own priorities, goals, and decision making processes, and we didn’t see any value in dictating how to execute on these. Many of our team’s parent groups and leadership had already set goals for the year as well, and our coalition couldn’t really trump those.

So instead, we decided to start with a set of shared principles — statements about our users, our long-term strategy, and how we build product — that we could all agree to at a high level. We also followed the rule that if a principle wasn’t adding clear value (i.e. not useful for decision making or too obvious), we removed it.

An example of a good mobile Principle that we could all rally behind:

Push notifications should always be timely, personalized, and actionable.

An example of a Principle that we cut because it wasn’t going to help inform decision making:

Our customers are open to using mobile devices for work purposes.

Shared initiatives

While agreeing to a set of principles was an important step, we also wanted to ensure we were all working towards a shared long-term vision. It was essential that we defined the ways we would be creating value for the broader company as a coalition beyond our impact as individual teams.

We did this by thinking deeply about how our teams should interact in our new configuration — asking questions and looking for opportunities. Were there certain customer funnels (or user journeys) that spanned the surface area of many teams? Were there things that one team could build that another could monetize? How could one team’s work influence the design decisions of another?

We made sure to document our thoughts extensively and align on certain collective, long-term OKRs. These may not be goals that our teams can pursue directly this year, but they offer a North Star for us all to align to over time.

Source of truth for tracking work

Like any modern, collaborative group, we needed shared workspaces where we could store our collective knowledge and stay in sync with each other as our teams executed.

We decided to maintain two main assets that we all regularly refer to as our “sources of truth”:

• A unified shared release calendar that contains input from all the mobile teams shipping customer-facing features
• A mobile analytics dashboard that contains the data on our long-term goal metrics

Regular outbound communications

Finally, as a fully functioning coalition, we wanted to ensure that the whole engineering, product, and design organization was aware of the work we were doing. We also wanted to request feedback on our initiatives from a broader audience. We chose to deliver the message via an internal newsletter we call “The Mobile Monthly.”

This newsletter serves a couple of other purposes as well:

• It gives our group a sense of identity and responsibility to deliver
• It acts as a regularly recurring forcing function to reflect on the progress we’ve made and measure results against our goals

It’s still early days for the “mobile coalition” here at Dropbox, but we look forward to the journey together.

I hope this set of tactics can help you build and maintain your own coalitions across your organization. By doing so, you will undoubtedly ship more holistic, coherent products for your customers and strengthen your company’s underlying culture. You are also actively defying Conway’s Law (or as Steven Sinofsky put it, “shipping the org chart”), which is a great way to stay focused on the end user experience… instead of the effects of the most recent reorg.

Have some tips on how to handle reorgs or how to build more cross-functional coalitions? Let us know — we’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

Until next time!