Building a Collaborative Product Team

Transitioning from 1 on 1 negotiations to a unified approach

Your product is out in the market with a steady stream of new customers coming.  Your product team has learned a lot from the first customers, and your roadmap has a solid backlog of enhancements.  Your stakeholders want to open more channels to the market too.

But something is missing from your product.  Each enhancement and product change feels like a heavy lift.  Each function is operating independently and you are forced to negotiate each change separately with each team.  The product team is so consumed with handling customer onboarding and customer support that there is no capacity to optimize processes or address the backlog.  How can you break the cycle of constant negotiation to change this situation?

The good news is your product team is busy with customers and you can take a little time to strategize on a new approach.  Here are the steps to take:

1. Evaluate the current state: how does this current state affect scalability, customer needs, time to market, and the business plan?

2. Define objectives and benefits of changing: what is improved after transitioning?

3. Get stakeholder buy-in: show the advantages of the transition, request resources, and address concerns

4. Define the plan and communication strategy: let the team know the plan and provide regular updates

5. Implement the plan iteratively: incremental change over time

6. Monitor progress: use your communication strategy to celebrate success

Evaluate the Current State

Go with your gut feeling on the issues today.  Potential issues you might be facing are:

• Delays in closing sales opportunities

• Too many special requests from existing and potential customers

• Few high-priority backlog items can be handled by the team

• Limited capacity to enter adjacent markets

• Customer support requests need escalation to get resolved

• Trouble hitting a conservative margin forecast

Now keep this pessimistic list close.  There is no need to go into doomsday mode. This issues list is to help you consider the most important objectives to target for improvement.  You can become optimistic about a better future.

Before taking the next step, document the impact of the current state on your customers.  For example, if your product is a SaaS product, then you would show a typical customer journey with some consequences of the current state.

Example of Impacts in the Current State

Define the Objectives and Benefits of Change

Since you have reframed the issues to show the consequences from the customer's perspective, you can begin collaborating to identify better outcomes.  You work cross-functionally and get multiple perspectives on this.

You find that many teams are having to negotiate with each other to satisfy your customers’ needs.  It turns out you are not alone in needing to negotiate to reach your objectives!  Negotiation is a part of any cross-functional team but there seems to be too much discussion about each customer activity.

After collaborating on a better outcome, your customer journey has potential changes:

Changes after collaboration on the customer journey

In the example, your team has outlined some central management objectives:

• Ordering guide and a process for sales support

• A team responsible for moving barriers to service activation

• Internal tool changes for better handovers among support teams

• Performance metrics to monitor customer satisfaction

With some product and operations coordination, the product team is prepared to support the customers better together.

Stakeholder Buy-In

Now that you have a high-level objective

- implement product operations

and benefits

-helping customers get requested service

You can coordinate stakeholder buy-in to the changes and the benefits.  Address any concerns from the stakeholders.

Plan the Transition

Now that your stakeholders have agreed with the product operations changes, you can work with program management on the incremental change.  Kick-off tool updates that support product operations. Don't forget to work with program management on the communication strategy for the change.

Implement the Transition Plan Incrementally and Monitor the Results

Follow your usual process to address the changes over time.  Request feedback periodically and make adjustments based on the feedback.  Celebrate successful milestones and recognize contributions.

Conclusion

Sometimes in product management, you need to step back and initiate a transition.  When you see experienced teams that are struggling to manage workflows among themselves, then you need to take action before customers are affected.

Jumping to a solution too quickly hurt the team’s ability to work together on changing. Evaluating the current situation and collaborating on a better outcome frequently leads to newfound optimizations. 

Here is a strategy to start building a collaborative product team:

1. Evaluate the current situation

2. Define objectives and benefits of change collaboratively

3. Get stakeholder buy-in to the change

4. Develop an incremental plan and communicate about the transition

5. Implement and monitor results

Taking these steps sets the stage for celebrating incremental improvements!

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Interesting Link

Fostering Product Sense Hallmarks of strong product sense: lots of good ideas, structured product opinions, non-linear solutioning, and easily testable solutions. This article by Stay Saasy discusses ways to develop your own product sense too!