Bringing product teams together for the benefit of your business

Product teams are often working in parallel, meaning they have their own scrum teams that they work with on a daily basis, but how do they interact with other product managers? How do they keep each other informed on their team’s work? How do they get the feeling of being part of a product management team?

In order to bring a strong product team together, they need to have a shared understanding of their activities and responsibilities, as well as having shared goals and visions for how the product should be created and managed in their organisation.

Jon R. Katzenbach & Douglas K. Smith discuss these challenges on The Discipline of Teams in the Harvard Business Review (1993) and in their book “The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization”.

Goals help a team keep track of progress, while a broader purpose supplies meaning and emotional energy.

Jon R. Katzenbach & Douglas K. Smith

A great example of product managers guiding cross-team relationships can be found at Piktochart, where they describe the core ideals for successful collaboration are based on:

• Mutual respect and appreciation
• A common goal and overall vision
• A common vocabulary

Having this commonality documented will help to bring a basic level of understanding between all product managers. These product managers may not work with each other on a daily basis, but do collaborate on certain projects throughout the year.

Creating shared documentation, like a team or department manifesto, is a great way to record the common goals, shared vision and responsibility.

Armed with a manifesto that voices your values, you can ensure team culture is aligned. When your team acknowledges and ratifies the manifesto, all team members know what’s expected of them, and they know what they can rely on their teammates for. Kimberly Zhang writes on Entrepreneur

A team manifesto is a document that can highlight:

• Behaviours that embody your shared team values and purpose
• How you work together
• What you do and do not stand for
• How you hold each other accountable to remain a united front