UX Wins When You Partner with Other Teams
5 ways to make collaboration work for you
It’s truly an exciting time to be at RingCentral.
During this time of expansion to new products, we need to support all our global product managers, UX, and Designers. That’s why I wanted to build a program where we could invite customers — both IT and non-IT — to join our council to give us product, UX, and design feedback.
We needed a UX and Design Council.
As we grow and ask for our customer’s time, I also wanted a well-defined program and to communicate when we would connect with our customers for research studies.
As we formalized our program, I saw an opportunity to collaborate with the community team. I felt a strong bond with the community team, even though they are in Denver, and I’m in the Bay Area. We both wanted to come together to support our community. Now when we are on calls, it’s fun. We not only get work done, but we also talk about our dogs.
Our first 45-minute webinar, Best Practices: How IT leads Business Transformation, was a success. We had three customers on our panel, two in financial services, and one in agriculture. The turnout was great for the first webinar, and we generated more topics for future webinars during the Q&A.
With the first webinar under our belt and the launch of the Council, we were well ahead of our goals to grow our community and to promote our IT champions.
Our success with the council — partnering with another business unit — has come with a few lessons worth sharing with you:
1. Find the mutual goal or value
First hone in on your goals and then connect to build a joint goal.
I first spoke to the head of community, shared my background, and explained how much empathy I had for their roles. It’s tough to keep an active community group running with a lean team of two.
Next, I asked the head of community about their goals for the year. Once I heard they wanted to promote their top community leaders, I asked them to consider the webinar.
2. Set clear goals and roles
We had a few working meetings where we discussed process, who could be the customer liaison, the lead promoter, and who would run the back-end of the webinar. Luckily, the community team took a lot of ownership of the back-end, so I could focus on formalizing the panel questions and setting up a dry-run of the webinar.
3. Centralize documentation or use a collaboration app
Track the little to-dos in a spreadsheet, or better yet, use a collaboration app.
We run RC App as our collaboration app, and we can pin and upload new content for our team to review.
4. Make time to meet
Though we aren’t on the same team, it’s vital to talk about process and discuss any issues as they emerge.
It’s easy — all it took were a few weekly 30-minute meetings and we used RC App to share progress.
5. Schedule 1–1 check-ins
It’s important to check in early with the other team lead. Luckily, the head of community is fun, bubbly, and easy-going. We only had one minor hiccup, so we went old-school: we picked up the phone and found a working solution within 10 minutes.
Overall, developing a partnership does take time. If you define, communicate, and have tools to collaborate, you’ll find the partnership to be not only meaningful for the business, but a lot of fun, too!
And who doesn’t need a little more fun in their work lives?
