Improve Alignment and Collaboration through Effective Communication Within and Between Teams

Communication is one of the most foundational aspects of a strong, healthy relationship. Communication within an organization and between organizations is equally important and necessary for the company to operate effectively.

Let’s use a platform organization as an example. Platform groups are often required to collaborate with numerous teams and partners around various parts of the company. Some organizations have a top-down mandate for leveraging platforms, while others require the platform teams themselves to prove their value and convince partners to leverage their technology. In either case, evangelization, or effective communication is incredibly powerful for fostering strong collaboration both internally and externally. It’s critical to set expectations and boundaries on what a healthy working relationship intra-teams looks like.

Think of a platform team like a B2B enterprise startup and product teams like your traditional B2C or B2B Saas startup. The platform group’s mission is to provide the tools and infrastructure for their enterprise customers to move fast and ship remarkable products. You may know the value your platform provides, but how do you share this value proposition with your customers so they know how and when to best leverage these services? In startup terms, your team has to find product-market fit and sell the platform to the right market. What does this mean?

WIKIPEDIA “Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. Product/market fit has been identified as a first step to building a successful venture in which the company meets early adopters, gathers feedback and gauges interest in its product(s).”

Internal teams unfortunately do not have the choice of being in a different market, so let’s focus on how one can satisfy the given market (or partners and peer teams in the company). Platform groups must first understand the shared needs of their different partners; next, solve and demonstrate how their technology solves these needs for each individual customer in a way that the customers can understand and use it.

I’m going to break down this process into 3 stages:

1. Create a Charter: Aligning your internal team.
2. Communicating the Vision: Effective Communication is not only how well you present the information you wish to communicate but also how accurately it’s been received.
   a. Tailoring your content: Identify Audiences and Tailor content to match the needs of specific audiences
   b. Sending the content: Setting up different channels of communication and pushing/pulling communication when it’s needed will help your content reach the right audience at the right time.
3. Measure Success; Adapt, Iterate, and Evolve

Effective Communication is not only how well you present the information you wish to communicate but also how accurately it’s been received.

Stage I | Form a Charter and Get Organized

We can’t evangelize something without first agreeing on what that something is.

Start by forming a charter.

The charter includes the Mission, Vision & Strategy:

Mission is why does our team exist? What problem(s) are we solving?
Vision is an image of what that solution looks like in X years. There are different visions at different time intervals.
Strategy is how does the team go about achieving this vision?

Doing so can provide many benefits that include but are not limited to:

1. Clarifies the actual problems the team is trying to solve
2. Unifies the internal team and motivates everyone to advance towards a shared future
3. Helps partner teams understand the value of building on top of a platform vs building things individually.
4. Clarifying the contract between the two partnering teams forms a healthy working relationship and thereby improving cross-team communication and collaboration.

I’ve included a generic charter template for you to use at the bottom of this article.

Ok that all sounds great, but how do I create a charter?

Forming a Charter

Chartering is a recursive process. This means it starts at the very top and recursively splits into organizations, then into teams, etc.. Every aspect of the charter is recursive.

Mission

Let’s start with the mission. Using LinkedIn as an example (This is a guess from my understanding — they could have great plans I am not aware of since I do not work for LinkedIn)

Something I learned from product: Always start by identifying the problem you are trying to solve.

Starting with the problem: Professional individuals need a way to connect and network with other individuals to look for new opportunities, hire great talent, further their careers by meeting like minded people, all around the world.

LinkedIn’s mission is to be the platform that connects career professionals and gives them the ability to accomplish their professional needs.

That can then be split into various organizations: Messaging org, Profile org, Recommendations, Homepage Feed, Talent,

Messaging’s mission could be something like: create a messaging platform that makes sending and receiving messages from other professionals easy and effective.

Profile’s mission could be: Allow professionals to showcase their resume in an short and concise way: easy to update and easy to consume.

Under profile, you may have 2 teams: one focused on the update experience and helping customers produce content for their resume page. The other is focused on display, etc..

As you can see, how teams are organized will affect this chartering exercise. Chartering may also reveal confusion and overlap between teams. We can discuss effective team organizations in a different post. This one will assume your company’s organization is working effectively and the focus will be organization of content, alignment, and communication.

Vision

The vision is your team’s solution to the mission it’s assigned. Keep in mind, this vision may look very different at different time intervals.

Every engineer on the team must understand and believe the story, the team’s future, and how his or her work contributes to this future.

Strategy

The strategy is how your team will go about accomplishing this vision.

For example, take a platform team that supports 20+ product teams. One strategy is to staff up the platform team to handle all requests and build product integrations and allow product teams to stay focused on product development. Another, equally valid, strategy would be to keep the platform team lean but pass ownership of product-specific platform components to their respective product teams. In this case, the product engineers are required to learn enough about platform integrations and maintenance but can lean on the platform engineers are partners and consultants for more complex interactions.

I’ve seen both strategies work — it all depends on the company, the product, the culture, and the people. What doesn’t work in all cases is operating in one model while expecting a different one. Hence, having a written charter and making sure it’s well communicated is crucial.

Get Alignment Internally

A great way to get alignment internally is to run this chartering exercise with the teams recursively. Ie, executive leadership comes up with a company charter, functional organizations run the next round, and then their organizations, teams continue down the chain. Since the exercise is recursive, it’s important to start at the top. One thing to note though, if you don’t want the company to be completely top down, the high-level charters must be very very vague. This allows for execution teams to be innovative and feel ownership and buy-in at all levels. For example, facebook’s company mission is simply “connect the world”. Square’s is “economic empowerment”

Leave a comment below if you’d like me to dive deeper here. Finding the right balance is not always straightforward. The higher-level charters must be high-level enough to empower the teams to feel independence but also give enough direction to guide the teams in the same direction.

I would love to hear your thoughts and learnings on chartering and building alignment in your current or past organizations. What worked and didn’t work for you and your teams?

Appendix A: Charter Template

[Team Name] Charter

Last Modified:

Every team should keep this a living doc due to how fast things change. Try to keep this doc as short but concise as possible. This doc is separated into

Mission is why does our team exist? What problem(s) are we solving?
Vision is an image of what that solution looks like in X years. There are different visions at different time intervals.
Strategy is how does the team go about achieving this vision?

Our Mission

In a pithy paragraph, describe What are the problem(s) your team is trying to solve? Whose pain points are you trying to solve? What is the value of your product(s)?

Our Vision

What is the X year future version of your team in an ideal world? The vision describes where an organization wants to be. It is the product aspiration, the north star, the ideal future. There are different visions at different time frames and they must all align in chronological order.

Where are we today? What are the gaps between the current state and the ideal future.

Our Strategy

How will your team go about creating this vision? This section answers the question of how we achieve the vision?

Next up >> Stage II | Communicating the vision