EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 57Collaboration

There are several forms of collaboration that are essential, yet often confusing to product organizations as they work to optimize for team autonomy and empowerment. Let's consider two specific kinds of collaboration: shared team objectives and common objectives.

Shared Team Objectives

The first and most basic form of collaboration is the concept of a shared team objective—when multiple teams share the same team objective. For an important objective, this is not at all unusual.

This is especially common in the case of large, company initiatives, which are essentially problems large enough that they require help from many product teams.

The most straightforward example of this is when both an experience product team and a platform team have the same objective because the platform team is expected to need to provide one or more new services to enable the experience product team.

In this case, the teams will normally collaborate to establish a simple form of contract with each other in the form of an API, and then both proceed to figure out their sides, and then they will again collaborate on testing and delivery.

Another form of shared team objective is when multiple teams temporarily combine their talents to solve a particularly hard problem. Especially on problems that benefit from a range of different skills brought to bear, bringing the teams together can often provide the knowledge and synergy required to quickly come up with an effective solution. ...