The 6 Key Ingredients for Effective Product Collaboration

To create great products, you first need great product collaboration. Bringing a product to life is a complex process that involves many teams, and if you aren’t working together effectively, everything can quickly fall apart.

Adrienne Tan, the CEO of product management service provider Brainmates, and Kathryn Shepherd-King, the General Manager at Brainmates, recently chatted about how to better collaborate on product. Watch the video here, or read on for their top ingredients to create effective product collaboration, along with actionable tips and insights from other product leaders. 

Ingredient 1: Shared vision and strategy

Creating products requires collaboration, but not just any collaboration. “The most important thing is that we’re collaborating with more than product people,” says Kathryn. Working in cross-functional teams will help everyone align on a shared vision and strategy, a key ingredient to product design and management. 

“The entire business needs to know where they’re going, what the guardrails are, how to get there, and what you’re focused on,” adds Kathryn. 

This is especially important in a world of digital collaboration full of so many different tools, where it can be easy to get lost in the weeds. “There’s this tendency in tech companies for over-collaboration,” explains Valentina Dunoski, the former Head of Product at CES, UBank, and more. “Having a clear North Star helps us know where we’re going and the things we need to solve for our end customers.” 

And while having a shared vision and strategy helps get people on board for what you should be doing, Kathryn notes that it also crucially helps everyone better understand what they should stop doing. Being aligned as a team lets you surface the rationale of why something should be stopped (e.g., revenue objectives, customer feedback, etc.). 

“Whether you’re killing something or launching something new, celebrate all your milestones and make sure everything’s taking you down the path to achieving your outcome,” says Kathryn.

Ingredient 2: The right capabilities and structure to operate in

In order to achieve the vision and strategy you set forth, you’ll next need to understand what key areas you want to focus on, then make sure you have the structure in place to empower teams to deliver. 

“You need to ensure that the right people are grouped together to get the highest-performing team,” says Kathryn. “Different people bring different things to the table — it’s not as simple as a role.” 

By looking at your team’s holistic performance, you can remove skill gaps to more effectively drive your strategy forward. “You don’t often hear Product Managers talk about outcomes and customer value, but rather features and functionality,” observes Sandeep Gondekar, the Director of Client Services at Brainmates. “But before you can tackle features, you first need to empower your team to bring their expertise to drive value. In the right structure, it’s not about giving orders, but about giving direction.” 

Kathryn emphasizes that discovery is a vital, but often underrated, capability in product: “There’s a lot of focus on delivery, but working through the strategies, finding the right problems to solve, and figuring out how to solve them are such important parts of the product lifecycle.” 

Ingredient 3: Scalable systems and tools

Once you start working on the product, the next key ingredient is to have the right systems, processes, and tools in place for consistent, scalable operations. This is especially true for when you’re looking to scale across multiple products or teams. 

“There’s just so much data to ingest,” says Kathryn. “Being able to pull that in and attach it to your core product work is such a powerful system.” 

Sanket Bhat, the Senior Group Product Manager at accounting software company Xero, echoes these sentiments: “Having the right tools in today’s digital era — such as Productboard itself for cross-collaboration — is really crucial since not everyone is in the office or working face to face.” He adds that without tools that help your team scale, you can end up burning through your resources and budgets, which is a big problem for organizations. 

Ingredient 4: Broader operating cadence

From there, it’s all about putting everything together in a way that makes sense across the entire organization. “It’s important to have that broader operating cadence,” says Adrienne. “You need to see how the product pieces of work really fit into the business context.”

What you want to avoid is having your teams work in silos, which can lead to unnecessary overlap or out-of-sync processes. “You need to have outcome-based discussions,” states Jasper Streit, the Head of Product at WooliesX. “Talk about what you’re trying to achieve, the big picture, what’s important to use, and why.”

Kathryn adds, “It’s critical for product teams to be able to effectively communicate the key outcomes they’re hoping to achieve throughout the year, demonstrate how they contribute to the business strategy, and engage stakeholders at the right time to get essential buy-in.” This alignment between the product and business sides of the organization on both cadence and calendar can make the entire product process much smoother and more efficient.

Ingredient 5: Strong product leadership

To really enable your teams to deliver what they need to, you need consistent, clear product leadership. After all, leaders establish the culture in the organization, provide guidance for their teams, set guardrails, and much more. 

“If you’re not supporting and managing your team effectively as a leader, then ultimately, you’re going to have people going in all different directions,” says Kathryn. “You need to lead by example.”

“Good direction from the top is essential,” adds Diane Sexton, a Senior Product Consultant at Brainmates. “Leaders have to understand where they’re going, and make sure they’re speaking to the ‘why’ so that people can commit to goals together.” 

But Adrienne also points out that it’s not as easy as it might seem. “It’s all about balance,” she says. “Product leadership is tricky because not only do they need to know how to make product, but they also need to know when to lean in and model good behavior, and when to simply guide and shepherd.” 

Effective product leaders need to understand what level they’re operating at, and know when to empower their teams to focus on certain things while they turn their attention and energy elsewhere. 

Ingredient 6: Known values guiding good behavior

The final ingredient is an extension of strong product leadership — good leaders need to lead by example and model the right behavior so teams follow suit. “People ultimately look at what you do,” says Kathryn. “You need to look at how you collaborate with your peers and your leadership, and also how you support your team, because they’ll follow that behavior.” 

Leaders need to set up what the values of the team and business are, and what “amazing” looks like (and how you can support your team to achieve that). “We can sometimes get stuck in predefined roles,” says Lyn Tran, the Chief Product Officer at cashback platform Cashrewards. “You need to start with the mindset that we all have something to bring, even at the beginning.” 

When leaders can establish that mindset at the start and then put it into practice, they can drive their team to work effectively and become truly amazing.

Your recipe for successful product collaboration

These six ingredients are your building blocks to create fruitful collaboration across your entire organization (and not just your product team). It’s imperative to thoroughly and honestly assess your current processes to see which ingredients you can improve on or that you’re missing entirely. 

And it doesn’t stop here! Improving product collaboration is a constant, iterative process. Be sure to check out our full collection of interviews with the product leaders featured in this post to get even more insights and best practices.