Natasha Hampshire - Mastering Collaboration in a Product Team: 70 Techniques to Help Teams Build Better Products

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What do you think of when you imagine a great product team? Go on, think about it for a second

Seriously, think about it before reading on. We will wait for you...

Got something? Cool.

If your answer was along the lines of, all of the originally planned features were built by the team, and they delivered the product according to the initially planned schedule and budget, then this book might just change your perception of what it means to have an effective product team.

If, on the other hand, you answered with something like the team delivers something that is valuable, the team produces something that meets a need, the team solves problems, or something similar, then you may already have the mindset that we believe is needed to be part of a great product team.

Having such a mindset is a good starting point; however, product teams need an array of practical tools in their toolbox in order to successfully work together, deliver products of value, and solve peoples problems. In this book, we have brought together a plethora of practical tools and techniques that can be used collaboratively to help you succeed with modern product development. Few of them will help you with the what or the how but instead, and more importantly, the why. Why should your product exist? Why would people want to use it or buy it? These whys are the fundamental questions to be answered for any modern-day product initiative and to answer them requires you to tap into deep levels of creativity and innovation.

And by you, we dont mean you as an individual, but as a collective. Aside from some rare exceptions (and they are exceptions), great products require a great team of people to develop them. Notice where we have placed the great there. It certainly helps to have great people, but it helps even more to be a great team.

Great teams have great collaboration between its members. Collaboration goes much more deeply than people completing a task and then efficiently handing over to a teammate. This could be described as cooperation. And it is hard to identify a group of people working in this way as a team at all. Instead, collaboration is what makes a team a team. The team as a whole feels the challenges they face as one. They build empathy for one another, and for those whose needs they serve. There is a sense of collective accountability for what the team does, its achievements, its failures, and above all, how the user experiences the product created by the team.

This book is for such teams. The collection of tools and techniques in this book are to be used for collaborative product development. The intention is that they are not for an individual Product Manager, Product Owner, or User Experience (UX) Designer to use in isolation, but unless stated otherwise, they are tools that the whole product team can and should get involved in using. Too many times, we have seen individuals craft the why or separate UX teams carrying out user research in isolation, resulting in the handover of requirements to a team focused only on building the features. This approach relies on the luck and judgment of an individual or team of specialists, and is a waste of the collective intelligence and creativity that could be drawn upon.

This is not to say that we are advocating that all team members must be made generalists. Some of the tools and techniques presented in this book may be seen as belonging in the domain of a particular specialism, such as UX research or product management, and from our own experience we understand the importance of expert knowledge. What we are recommending though is to involve everyone in the creative and knowledge acquisition process, to utilize the wide range of available experience and perceptions, while encouraging specialists to lead, mentor, facilitate, and guide rather than working in isolation.

With better collaboration comes better products. Mastering collaboration as a product team gives you the best chance of producing the best products. Exploring and practicing the tools in this book as a team will help you (and yes we mean you, as in a collective group of people) master collaboration and build great products.

For us, truly great products are those that serve a purpose to people. Be it to entertain, to educate, to make life easier, to make life healthier, to save time, to save the environment, to do social good, or anything else that people find valuable. Making a profit for many organizations is of course important, but it is something that we think should be viewed as a side effect of creating something really great. To solely chase profit as your main motivator is more than likely to lead to failure.

This collection includes tools and techniques from respected thought leaders from across a variety of industries, and they have been consistently proven in the field. Where appropriate, we have acknowledged the source and provided further background information in the Appendix. The collection also includes ideas expanded upon from the authors own experience.

The aim of this book is not to provide an in-depth explanation, analysis, and critique for every tool and technique featured. Such an endeavor would fill volumes! You will not become an expert in using any of the tools and techniques by reading this book. You will need to explore them further and, more importantly, practice using them. Instead, our goal is to spark curiosity. We want to take you on a tour of the rich array of options available to you for product discovery and innovation (while having some fun on the way!). For each tool or technique, we give an overview, including why it might help you as well as accompanying pointers. Think of these as a guide for getting started. For some of the tools, we have included a Try This further ideas that you can experiment with. We have also provided further resources in the Appendix for you to explore more deeply the tools of particular interest to you.