To build and sustain a healthy working relationship through team interdependence, I’ve developed a tool called the MatchUp Canvas. The MatchUp Canvas-A Tool for Healthy Team Interdependence
What goals do we have? What skills and knowledge do we possess? Can we help each other develop and grow as we collaborate toward shared product outcomes? Answering these questions leads to a mutual understanding of each other’s capabilities, builds a team with healthy interdependence, increases each person’s motivation, and leads to better product outcomes. Social contracting includes making explicit agreements that start from a place of genuine curiosity about your teammates. Borrowing a term from political philosophy, organizational development, and management experts refer to this as social contracting. Everyone working on a team wants to know, “Am I in?”, “Am I out?”, or “Does my team need me?”. To improve this situation, simply discuss it and make explicit agreements about what each person can expect from each other. I have found a way to make this unhappy teaming situation better. This results in lower personal motivation and job satisfaction. Too often, this weakened form of “teaming” results in less than satisfying product results. Team members can feel overwhelmed with too many requests for help from teammates while others feel underutilized. They are unaware of each other’s personal development goals and don’t consider how they can be a resource to each other.
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They struggle with knowing how to ask for help, how to get help, and how to help each other. To this day, I witness product development teams constantly stressed about who does what during a project lifecycle. Reciprocal interdependence, the most complex form of interdependence, embodies how agile teams need to collaborate, whereby the team mutually adjusts uncertainty and change. These are less complex forms of interdependence, and require standardization and planning to achieve. The other forms of interdependence identified by organizational theorist James Thompson are sequential and pooled. Their reciprocal interdependence relies on the team adjusting their work as new information arises. This team collaboration throughout discovery and delivery is the basis for interdependence as a form of mutual dependence.
Adjustments can be made and retested in another round of discovery and delivery.
They conduct a brief Structured Conversation, identify several backlog items with clear acceptance criteria, and proceed to run a discovery sprint to try out their ideas.Īt the conclusion of this discovery, the team reviews the outcomes of their key results using both qualitative (NPS or Net Promoter Score) and quantitative (time on task data instrumented into the product) methods. Once completed, the entire team gets involved to discuss their findings to identify the best bet for improving the user experience and reducing customer pain. Typically, the Product Manager, UX expert, and engineer work together to design and conduct research via observation and low-fidelity prototypes. Their OKRs include reducing customer pain in one area of the product that takes customers too long to successfully complete. Together, a great team continually adjusts what and how they are working together.įor example, the Product Manager identifies and shares product outcomes for the next quarter via Objectives and Key Results (OKR). Agile Teamwork Requires Reciprocal InterdependenceĪgile product teams rely on each other’s skills and knowledge to achieve shared outcomes. While achieving outcomes with joy and purpose, a great team also enhances its own skills and knowledge. Have you experienced working with a great product development team? Key characteristics of a great team I’ve witnessed include clear product outcomes understood by everyone, outstanding product leadership, regular customer engagement, and continuous product discovery and delivery cycles. August 4th, 2018 By Ellen Gottesdiener What Makes a Great Product Development Team?
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