While we know that delivering great products is nuanced and there are many ways to reach success, we also know that without a cohesive team—regardless of the framework we utilize—we will not be able to achieve it. A compilation of frameworks without great habits limits your chances of achieving success. You must focus on working together the right way to deliver quality products.
So how might you do that? More specifically, what are the habits and behaviors you should demonstrate when working together to successfully deliver products that provide value?
Building Healthy Collaborative Habits
How you build collaborative habits depends on your definition of ‘habit’. Some say a habit is a usual tendency or something learned through repetition. Others say it’s a manner of conducting oneself. At Dialexa, we go with the latter. It is about the way we conduct ourselves daily with both our teams and our clients. For us, delivering a quality product that provides value to our end user is everyone’s responsibility, achieved through mutual respect and collaboration.
This collaboration is so important to our engagements that we built our own product approach upon it, and our process within that approach is called Collaborative Quality™ habits.
This approach recognizes that no singular person can be accountable or responsible for a quality deliverable; it is about the people and how they interact. The key to success is bringing the right people together to understand and solve problems, and distributing and sharing responsibility to reach the desired outcomes.
Balancing Diverse Perspectives
Teams with diverse perspectives bring about varying ideas that challenge perceptions of what is effective or valuable. This is why, instead of “telling” or trying to “convince” clients to get on board with a certain solution, it’s better to meet them where they are. Our multi-disciplinary teams listen to our clients’ unique experiences, viewing the problem through different lenses, in order to extract actionable information and build the right solution with them.
Often, even in the middle of a project, stakeholders are lacking an integrated view of success, focusing instead on their own individual objectives: finance wants increased margin, operations wants reduced production costs, product wants to deliver high customer satisfaction, etc.
How do product leaders navigate the varying needs to achieve balance? Get the team on board working towards the same larger goal, while highlighting the benefits of this goal to their own objectives—speaking to their needs. Everyone should understand what we’re building, from stakeholders to the development team.
Tightening Feedback Loops
Throughout the product lifecycle, continuously evaluating and validating shared understanding, building trust within the team through transparency, and allowing the team to course correct as quickly as possible. Through open, empathetic, and continuous communication, you create stronger relationships within the team, and identify opportunities for improvement. You are able to pursue positive change in a mindful and deliberate way, and get ahead of issues that may propagate over time. The goal is to keep feedback loops as small as possible, pragmatically evaluating what was completed and how to make it better for next time, increasing both value delivered and team effectiveness.
Delivering on your promises
We’ve all seen projects go all the way through planning, design, and development only to deliver something the client ultimately did not want. Prioritizing collaboration is a proactive way to avoid such a catastrophe. It sets the precedent for how the entire team conducts itself through engagement to guarantee a great product clients want – and expect.
DOWNLOAD OUR PROCESS
Implementing Collaborative Quality™ Habits into your process is easy. Download this worksheet and get with your team to improve your collaboration on projects.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maria Gordon is Dialexa’s Delivery Excellence Manager, which means she works closely with product managers, designers, and engineers to ensure that on the day we deliver a product to our client, it is of utmost quality and expectation. Maria has obtained dual Project Management and Professional Scrum Master certifications and specializes in Product Management and Strategy, delivering products from ideation to market for our start-up to Fortune 500 companies.
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