How can we do cross-functional collaboration better?

Why is it often difficult for us to collaborate across functions?

Teresa Torres of Product Talk reckons it’s because “Most of us have never had to truly cross-functionally collaborate.”…

🗒️ Side note: She also suggests that might be because executive leadership often models poor behaviour but that’s not the topic of today’s post.

*Back to our regular programming*… Which begs the question, what do we think we’ve been doing all this time?

I suspect it’s been doubling-down on our own domain knowledge, while conveniently ignoring the inconvenient aspects of our collaborators.

In episode 25 of #BraveUX, I explored how we could do cross-functional collaboration better with Teresa and she told me:

“The more ways you can think about how to frame the problem and how to integrate those perspectives, the richer your understanding of the problem, and the richer your understanding of the problem, the better you’re going to be at solving it.”

Sounds good but how do you do that?

Teresa recommends that we approach it in two steps:

🔵 First, start by individually understanding why we believe what we believe.
🔵 Then take turns in communicating those beliefs to each other.

Being clear and open about our underlying beliefs is what Teresa is certain makes it much more likely we’ll be able to effectively frame and solve difficult problems.

Does this resonate with you?

How have you been approaching the challenge of cross-functional collaboration?

Watch the video for Teresa’s insights and share your thoughts in the comments below 👇.

#Collaboration #IntegratingPerspectives #ProductManagement #UXDesign #UX

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Who is Teresa Torres?

Teresa is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, product discovery coach, and the principal of Product Talk.

She has worked with hundreds of product teams, at companies of all sizes, including Spotify, CapitalOne and Snagajob. Teresa has also trained over 7,000 people in how to conduct world-class product discovery.

Teresa holds a BA in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, and a Master of Science in Learning & Organisational Change from Northwestern University.

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Find Teresa here:

Teresa’s book:

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Hosted by Brendan Jarvis:

[vikx]

Oh! Such a great structure to think about and drive collaboration. Almost akin to laying out all assumptions and how they relate to each participants views. Absolutely wonderful and so useful.

[wildbatever]

great tip especially in aligning UX/Product and Dev Team which is often super hard, I tried this approach before once and indeed it works

[larryirons]

Cross-functional collaboration is tough because dialogue is tough. At least in part, this results from our assumption that conversation is enough.