Season 03 - Newsletter 2 --> 5 Hacks to Create a Super Team via Collaboration and Shared Ownership
Friends -
Well it’s been a week since I wrote the first edition, so we are staying on track. For this newsletter I wanted to continue on taking a more pragmatic approach and recommending some more techniques I’ve leveraged to get meaningful collaboration out of the entire team. Having earned a living as a programmer, User Experience Architect and now Product person, I don’t subscribe to the notion that a good ideas or strategy or thinking are the domain of a single discipline. Quite to the contrary, I’ve continuously found that the best ideas typically come from the most unexpected parts of the room if you will.
As always I appreciate you sharing this newsletter if you think it could help a peer of yours improve their product skillset or a friend enter the world of product management.
Q: My team members complain they are not part of the decision-making process. What are some of techniques you’ve leverage to get meaningful collaboration and ownership from the entire team?
I’ve leveraged the 5 techniques throughout my career numerous time with great great success. While you certainly can pick and chose which to leverage, especially early on, I’ve found that over the life of a project leveraging all 5 produce the best results.
We’re all designers and product owners - To get meaningful collaboration, It’s important to rightframe (if this is not a word I’m claiming its use) that on a team, all members are working towards the same goal or outcome. Therefore all team members are designers. Whether they are a developer, a QA, an analyst, a creative, or the product manager. Insisting on this and declaring this will go a long way towards creating an environment where the team understand its not just okay but expected for them to take an active part in designing the product to achieve the outcome.
A common problem space - It becomes quite natural and even expected to focus in quickly on making solutions. We are trained to leverage first principles thinking to break down a “problem” into it’s simplest pieces and solve those. However, I would strongly recommend to push back against that instinct and try to understand the context in which this “problem” exist. An easy hack for me has been to reach out to the folks responsible for strategy or research in your organization. You will be surprised (as I have often been) how much context they can add. It’s important here to remember that this should be days not weeks. However stepping back, even when there is a looming deadline (isn’t there always a looming deadline?) to make sure we understand the following questions:
Why does the problem exist?
What is the broader context in which the problem occurs? What are the macro variables, trends with competitors, or the geography that might causing this?
What is the desired end state? How do we want customers to feel? How easy should it be or quick or simple? What amount of work should be required by our customers to make this happen?
John Cutler - Product team = Design Team Twitter Thread How Might We aka What If - Popularized by Google’s Design Sprint . This methodology is simple and very powerful. It starts by asking the team members, throughout the discovery and solution phases of a project, to reframe a problem as an opportunity. They do this by grabbing a sticky note, a sharpie and writing away. Remember one idea per sticky note. Start with the problem, keep them broad and don’t hint at or suggest a solution. Some examples of good HMW are:
How might we remove the need for a customer to complete the registration in a physical location?
How might we turn this data constraint into an advantage?
How might we connect education with finance?
Crazy Eight exercises - There is perhaps no more democratizing exercise than a crazy eight exercise. And the best part of it is that it’s actually quite simple to do and a lot of fun. I love seeing non-product and non-creative people talk through their ideas. This exercise typically should be happening as you are brainstorming or sketching solutions. All that entails is giving each team member a piece of paper and asking them to fold it into eight sections. In each section of the paper, they will sketch or write down an idea. And the last bit of instructions is that the goal is quantity not quality. the real aim is to get past everyones first idea.
Voting and Sharing aka Crazy Eights Part Deux - Once the pencils are down, each participants gets 3 minutes to walk through their ideas. Once the entire team is done presenting, each team member has 3 votes (dot voting) they can give to the best ideas. Some distribute their vote across many sketches while others will give one idea multiple dots.
I hope you find these recommendations useful and are able to apply them tomorrow to your project. While every organization is different, I’ve found that these do work whether at a startup or mature company, at an agency or in a bank. One thing is for sure, the goal is to try at least one of them and see how it can positively impact your team.
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