EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 16Team Collaboration

In this chapter, I continue the series on coaching product people by talking about another critically important skill that is so often misunderstood or underappreciated, and that is team collaboration.

Collaboration is one of those words that is used so often in so many different ways that it has lost its meaning for many people. Of course, they think they're collaborative. Few people view themselves as anti‐collaborative.

But in the context of an empowered, cross‐functional product team, being collaborative has a very specific meaning, and it is most definitely not how many people, especially product managers, are inclined to work. So, this is often a critically important area for the manager to focus on during coaching.

It's also worth pointing out that when your product team has remote employees, this collaboration often suffers, so your coaching of collaboration needs to increase for your remote workers.

In INSPIRED, I talk about the three critical characteristics of strong product teams, no matter what processes they use: the first is tackling risks early; the second is solving problems collaboratively; and the third is being accountable to results.

Regarding the second critical characteristic—solving problems collaboratively—it is no longer the old, waterfall process of a product manager defining requirements, and handing them off to a designer to come up with a design that meets those requirements, and then handing that off to engineers to ...