What’s the best way for Product, Design and Engineering to work together for maximum output?

The most productive product, design, and engineering teams are those that work closely together. Strive to create processes that over-encourage communication, insight, and participation between the product, design, and engineering teams.

To that end, at Nomad Health all major feature builds are run through a product development process that requires collaboration from all three teams at every step. For each build, a “Lead” from each of the product, design, and engineering teams is chosen from the outset. These three work together on each phase: synthesizing business requirements, product research/user interviews, project scoping, design, technical specifications, user acceptance testing, documentation, and launch. Within that framework, it is generally the Product Lead’s job to move everyone through the process.

Better products are built (and built faster) when a diverse range of expertise has input into the feature architecture. This process also eliminates “surprise” inter-team communication — while Nomad is still a small company, it’s already valuable to eliminate this potential friction.

Most importantly, a collaborative process creates ownership and excitement about the product. This holds true for other teams as well — we include representatives from marketing, BD, sales, and operations teams at each touchpoint as well. And the same values should hold true for higher level issues, like product roadmapping.

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