Radical collaboration: every product business needs it but not everyone does it

Is collaboration in your product organisation as strong as it should be? Here are five ways to test it, by Magnetic product expert Simon Garrard.

Collaboration can be an overused word but, in a product-led business, success absolutely depends on it. When working with companies to bring new products to market and adopt more customer-centric, agile ways of working, I’ve seen how culture and behaviours sit at the heart of successful product operating models.

I’ve previously written about how the ‘framification’ of product and Agile dilutes the behaviours required to make this model work successfully. Collaboration exemplifies this more than anything else. It’s in the DNA of every great product creator. It’s both a mindset and a skill to learn.

Our Magnetic Thought Report, The truth about product-led growth, takes an in-depth look at how businesses can apply the principles of a successful product operating model. It shows that collaboration is a critical part. In my experience, this model centres around three levels of collaboration:

1. Within product teams. Your product manager, your engineering lead and your product designer are all equally important and have to work as if they’re joined at the hip.
2. Between product teams and the wider business. The needs of the product team and the other enabling areas of the business don’t always intersect perfectly. It’s essential that these points of friction are minimised through effective collaboration.
3. With customers. If you’re not collaborating with your customers, you’re not doing product properly. You don’t have to be Lego or Monzo, but your product teams must have (or make) routes to directly interact with their customers.

One of my favourite things about my job is helping to build an environment that enables teams to create great products. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to facilitate this kind of collaboration and understanding the cultural signifiers that change is needed. To test if your collaboration is as strong as it needs to be, there are five questions you can ask:

1. Can you speak to customers easily?

• This one’s simple: if you want to know how mature a company’s product model is, try to speak to customers. It’s generally the first thing I do when I land in a business.
• This can be everything from quantitative data such as product telemetry and analytics to research and testing directly with your customers. Really you should be doing all of these things, but there’s no substitute for building empathy face-to-face with your customers.
• The ideal is to have regular access on a sprint-by-sprint basis to test, learn and iterate with the people whose problem you’re solving.
• ACTION: Show don’t ask. You’ll gain better insights from testing ideas with customers than from asking what they want. My colleagues Dean and Jason have written about the myriad of ways you can do this.

2. Do your stakeholders suffer from shiny object syndrome (SOS)?

• Can someone drop something into the backlog with zero evidence? Are your product teams constantly being pulled in different directions by a senior team member’s latest ideas? Then you have shiny object syndrome to contend with.
• SOS isn’t just an annoyance. It’s a debilitating cultural issue that stunts progress and detracts from teams’ ability to focus on a problem in a meaningful way.
• Collaboration means a flat hierarchy when it comes to ideas. Product decisions should always be driven by evidence. It’s morale-sapping for product teams to be held to different standards to senior stakeholders and it can result in incoherent feature sets.
• ACTION: Disagreement should always be resolved by experimentation. If your CEO really won’t drop their idea for an AI chatbot (or whatever it is), find a quick but effective way to test it. Monzo is a great example of a business that runs lean experiments to rapidly validate ideas.

3. Is engineering involved from day one?

• In fairness, this could also be asked about design — but people are more likely to understand the need for design during early stage new product development. Engineering is too often the one left out.
• Collaboration within the product team is the cornerstone of a successful POM, and your engineering lead is a critical part of your team. Establishing this from day one is an essential part of setting a team up for success.
• Your engineering lead brings diversity of thought and skillset, knows your current/future architecture and can help teams quickly make ideas tangible.
• ACTION: Test working software with customers ASAP where feasible, while balancing pace and progress. While most code for experimentation will be disposable, you never know which ideas will work and give you a headstart on the next phase of work. Amazon was able to launch Prime in a matter of months because it had built much of the supporting infrastructure through prior experiments.

4. Are you making progress quickly enough?

• When working inside businesses, I’m constantly surprised at how making fast progress can be revelatory. Sometimes this is because product teams struggle to collaborate successfully with other business units, such as compliance, and sometimes it’s because quality management processes are still waterfall (as opposed to embedded into development cycles).
• Of course different businesses have different compliance and regulatory requirements, but too often these departments lag behind product teams in agility. It needs a committed push from senior leadership to change this.
• A word of caution: velocity is critical, but it should always be balanced with a relentless focus on validating value to the customer.
• ACTION: Run a pre-mortem to work out what factors will stop your progress dead in its tracks and who is accountable for mitigating those risks. At Stripe, product managers use a pre-mortem format to stop problems from slowing them down.

5. Are you thinking of MVPs as thin slices to meet a customer need?

• Your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) should be the apex of your collaboration with your customers. It should be the leanest (but well-designed) version of your product that addresses a core customer need.
• A common misconception with MVPs is that they are simply a product with a basic feature set, rather than ruthlessly focusing on meeting a specific customer need.
• That’s why I prefer the concept of Thin Slicing. Think of your product like an orange: you can still enjoy a single slice in the same way as the whole — there’s just less of it. Design and build just enough to test your value hypothesis. With every successful experiment, rinse and repeat to an ever-increasing fidelity, iterating all the core elements of your product — from functionality to brand — based on customer feedback.
• ACTION: MVP techniques such as Wizards of Oz are a great way to bridge the gap between complex tech builds and speed to market, faking automation with manual processes behind the scenes (there are lots of SaaS tools that can help you do this too). I’ve run experiments like this in sectors as heavily regulated as finance and healthcare. One of the most famous examples of this type of experimentation is Zappos. I also love this video case study (an oldie but a goo) of the Nordstrom Innovation Lab’s rapid prototyping with customers on the shop floor.

Our new Thought Report is an in-depth look at moving to a product-driven, customer-first approach, including interviews with product leaders at Mastercard and Rightmove. Download it here: The truth about product-led growth.

Author & Product Expert: Simon Garrard

Magnetic is a design and innovation company that helps design better futures. We’ve worked with global organisations to build capabilities, products, services and transform organisations.