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True collaboration with cross-functional peers (Engineering + PM + Design)
One of the biggest lessons I learned in my last corporate job at Facebook was how to truly collaborate with my cross-functional peers. As a design leader, my main collaborators formed the trifecta of PM/engineering/design—the core team that got products shipped while being supported by many other functions including research, data science, content strategy, and product marketing.
While I’ve found a lot of articles written by designers on collaboration with engineers (examples from Facebook, Dropbox, and a seasoned designer) and product managers (example from Facebook), I had a hard time finding articles about leadership collaboration, so was inspired to write this post. Many of these points are familiar and are relevant to all leaders, whether you manage people or not. I am writing this from the perspective of how to collaborate as the design/eng/product leader of a team in technology.
1. Build Trust
A three-headed leadership team can’t function as leaders without genuine trust and affection between all three members. Trust takes time and is slowly built over many interactions, meetings, successfully launched products, and crisis situations. To help accelerate trust building, there are two foundational values:
- Understand what matters to the product manager and engineering manager, both personally and professionally
- Genuinely like each other. It’s easier to develop affection and find more things in common when you spend more time together.
The main tactic to facilitate trust is setting up weekly 1–1s. This regular cadence prioritizes your partners in a busy calendar and the first meetings should be used to create an atmosphere of mutual respect. The meetings must be co-created to meet both party’s needs. The bonus efficiency move is to combine the meetings into a weekly 1–1–1 with all three members. In the meetings, make time for informal hanging out and understanding of the person’s context and life in addition to strategizing about the road map or problem solving the latest resource constraint. One tactic that’s worked for me in the past is scheduling weekly 2-hour lunch.
