Lessons in Building a Culture of “Collabotonomy” in Product Design

Culture is key to fostering innovation at all levels in an organization. It drives creative energy and channels a level of positivity and productivity within the members of your team. Ro was founded with a strong cultural foundation with passionate founders, talented people, and a constant emphasis on its values and mission.

As the company’s first Product Designer, my role was to help the Product Design team create an environment that promotes everyone’s creativity and collective contribution. We coined a term for the strategy our team uses to maintain this culture: Collabotonomy.

Collabotonomy is a synergy between two seemingly distinct values: promoting collaboration between team members and imparting individuals with autonomy in their respective work. This approach has built on Ro’s cultural foundation to establish a highly effective Product Design team that shares a strong sense of trust in each other and shared ownership in our work and mission.

In this article, I’d like to share key takeaways from my experience shaping our approach to Collabotonomoy, in hopes that you can bring some of these insights to your own organization and team.

1. Set and share standards for Product Designers.

Building a new team is like building an identity within an organization.
If you Google, “What does product design do,” this seemingly simple question, will get different responses as it varies from organization structure, design maturity level, and/or size of the company.

As a leader, you owe it to your team to provide a clear definition for how Product Design contributes to the business and its users (in Ro’s case, our patients). This creates a culture of accountability among individuals and the team as a whole.

A snapshot of Product Design Playbook

• Set a team mission that closely aligns with the company’s values and vision through regular team offsite each year.
• Invest in and emphasize cross-functional partnership building — work with teams, like Product Management and Engineering, to practice Collabotonomy day-to-day.
• Share guidelines for how the team should work and what it should deliver based on the cultural values.
• Enable members to contribute ideas and suggestions for team improvement.

2. Learn everyone’s superpower.

Collaboration works best when people see the power of working together — genuinely believing collaboration helps accomplish goals more effectively. Sharing positive success stories motivates teams to proactively seek help and bring their ideas to the table without hesitation.

In order to achieve this, it is critical that the team respects each other for their differences, knowledge, expertise, and skill sets — what we call their respective superpowers. As a leader, you should help each team member accurately assess their limitations and strengths as well as areas they can compliment others. This sets positive expectations for how the team can support each other and achieve their goals.

• Foster team initiatives match their superpowers and paired with peers.
• Create forums for sharing work and feedback openly and often.
• Offer frequent reflections and assessments individually and as a team.

3. Encourage strong ownership.

As organizations scale, they often divide teams into multiple domains and groups that tackle different problem areas. While this allows team members to go deep into their respective work, it can challenge the context of a holistic user experience.

Leaders should empower individuals to go deep to become experts and decision makers in their problem spaces. However, it’s also important to regularly provide visibility into how the Product Design team’s work fits into the organization’s goals and the overall user experience.

A snapshot of a Product Design meeting that each designer presents their work across domains each week.

• Provide clarity to each team member’s role and expertise in relation to the domain/team initiatives.
• Create regular forums for each team member to educate and share their respective domain knowledge with all team members.
• Foster a culture of honest feedback.

4. Foster radical transparency.

All of the above advice points to one very important value: mutual trust that everyone has a positive intention of making things better. Fostering an environment with high psychological safety is not simple, but it’s critical for building a high performing team. If any one person feels unsafe about sharing their work, asking for help, making suggestions, or voicing their opinions to others, Collabotonomy can’t exist.

• Welcome any and all opinions and ideas. Discuss them based on shared principles and goals.
• Voice your own reflections and turn your team’s feedback into opportunities for growth.
• Give the team a chance to voice their concerns. Help channel them into solutions that bring desirable outcomes for their growth.
• Share fun/positive memories through team bonding activities.
• Assess a level of safety as a team regularly.

5. Culture doesn’t magically ‘happen.’

Culture is something that’s highly visible from afar and invisible up close. In the end, there’s no shortcut to building culture. It’s an iterative project that requires frequent evaluation, improvement, and adjustment as team scales.