Issue #52: You Don't Need Boundaries with Your Product Trio.

A top-down, bottom-up approach to having a healthy collaboration between cross-functional peers.

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If I had a Euro for every time somebody told me that they have a hard time collaborating with their Product Trio, I would be a millionaire by now.

And not just from the Product Managers, but I get this from the Designers and the Engineer Leads too!

There’s always a complaint about the other function that in the end, somebody’s always wondering what the boundary is between themselves.

“They’re overstepping their bounds and taking on tasks that are within my scope”
”They’re not stepping up and I end up doing tasks that are in their scope”

But when somebody asks me what the boundary is between them and their cross-functional peers, I almost always say:

“Nothing. There shouldn’t be any boundaries.”

Let me elaborate and also give the disclaimer that this is a nuanced scenario and like with a lot of things, context matters.

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Product Manager vs Product Designer (was my challenge)

I’ve actually never had any issue working with engineers, it was with product designers I didn’t know how to play with. Designers, in my early career days were in a separate team, too hipster and too cool to sit with us building nerds. We gave them a request, they designed, and then delivered. 😂

At least until I became the Product Manager of a team building a chat solution for our portfolio of marketplaces.

The product designer and I fought all the time.

He was always mad at me for not including him in discussions about priorities, strategies, and business-related things. Or for putting forward new processes with the team that never included his input.

On the other hand, I was always mad at him for bypassing me on implementation decisions, sometimes redefining the whole solution scope without me.

In hindsight, I was always squabbling with the designer because he and I had more overlaps in our job descriptions. I also understood more what he was doing vs I understood what our tech lead was doing.

And while we were still productive, the constant fighting for our “indivudual space” was holding us back from doing great things.

I share this story because it’s also this trio that eventually became my benchmark for best cross-functional collaboration. We started out as this disfunctional family, but towards the end we were a unit. We didn’t agree on every single thing BUT we never fought about overlaps ever again nor you would hear any of us complain about the other not pulling their weight.

In fact, the three of us left the team all at the same time. When the first one decided to leave, it just didn’t seem so fun anymore to stay and figure out how to play with a new 3rd.

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So how did we fix the problem?

1️⃣ It started with our leaders

Changing a collaboration model requires change management and political will. While I believe it can be done bottom-up, for it to be effective, top-down is the way to go.

1. Our leaders mirrored the behaviors they wanted to have. Since they wanted to have equal voice between the three functions, they walked their own talk. There was never a meeting, an all hands, a workshop where the three of them are not present at the same time. Even the little gestures of always signing important communication with all 3 names also made a huge difference.

2. They shared expectations. In one of our co-located sessions, the three leads shared the accountability triangle. This framework illustrates what they expect each function to be accountable for. And by accountable, what they meant was — if it didn’t exist, the accountable person needs to make sure it did. And this was non-negotiable. Who actually gets it done, they left it up to us. In fact according to them, “whoever had the capacity, the skill, the expertise” should step up and take the lead in getting something started.

   

3. They aligned incentives. We were expected to operate as a unit so to make that happen, we had to have a single goal. And we did. And that took away the feeling of competition between us. While our evaluations still included conversations about how we “performed” in our function, they were mostly centered about how our team performed against our goal. So it was in everybody’s best interest to help each other out. I think one of the most powerful ways they put this expectation into practice was when our leaders started asking the tech lead about design related questions, or the designer product related questions, and myself technical related questions. They really hammered down their point that they expected us to operate as one.

2️⃣ Then we figured out what it meant to act on those expectations

• We built a relationship with each other. While there was no need to be best friends, it was a shared value between the three of us to actually enjoy working with our colleagues, on top of respecting one another’s thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions. And this was our starting point. It was also a good thing we were a team who enjoyed having lunch with each other, so it was easy to build on that with after-work conversations, sharing personal interests with each other, etc. Just getting to know the human outside of the sprint reviews made trusting each other a no-brainer.

• We started acting as one. Honestly, we didn’t really sit down and have this conversation with each other, but it was built overtime through intentional moments + mimicing our leaders’ behaviors:

  • having weekly sync between the 3 of us

  • making sure all 3 of us are present in the same conversation (at least in the beginning)

  • getting each others’ input if something needed to be communicated to the team and to our stakeholders and not making a final decision without the other 2’s commitment (they may agree or disagree, but commitment is necessary)

• I put down my ego. I say “I” because I can only speak for myself here. There were many reasons for me to stop protecting my scope. I was already overwhelmed with my never-ending to-do list so I needed to ask for help. In some cases, while something was in my scope but I didn’t necessarily know how to do it well, so I needed to ask for help. And in putting down my ego, I would like to think my 2 partners in crime were able to follow suit.

a screenshot of the feedback from my product designer: i went from the PM that our product designer complained about because I overstepped on his scope all the time to being a shining example of collaboration 😂

3️⃣ But how can this work in other realities?

But the story I shared above came with a lot of nuances. But here are some thoughts on how different teams can start 👇

To the leaders who are reading this issue:

A lot has been said about the benefits of having a product trio who really operated as a product trio. Big influential names in this industry have given advice on how to get it started (and so have I!)

But the fact of the matter is, it has to start with you!

If you want your product trio to cooperate, look in the mirror first:

• are you operating as a product trio yourself?

• are you establishing shared goals between them or do you still have separate (often unrelated to each other) incentives between your functions?

Product trios will find it impossible to collaborate and operate as a united front if their goals are not the same or if they’re not even on the same team.

So if you don’t have any intention operating with product trios, then be clear about that to your teams who may want to so they can move on. On the other hand, you might want to rethink that position.

Often, what I’m seeing as a problem is that leaders are saying there’s not enough UXers to fulfill a trio - if this is your case I invite you to really look long and hard internally, do you really need more UXers or are you prioritizing too many things? Or are you scrimping on your design budget? Because either way, having designers function as a service won’t make it more efficient nor effective to deliver value.

To the PMs, Designers, and Tech Leads who are reading this issue:

If you’re not operating as a trio but you three want to (and it doesn’t look like you have your leaders’ support here), there are so many things you can start with on your own:

• Have each other’s back. If one of you looks like they're up to their eyeballs with deliverables, help each other out. Even if the task is not within your scope.

• You don’t need somebody else’s permission to start including each other more in different conversations, decisions, communications. There are zero risks to that and only high reward.

• Show the impact of this way of working and mindset to the rest of the organization. When you’re able to show how this new way of working has solved your problems and helped your team deliver more value, then other people (including your leaders) will be more interested to follow suit.

• But also take stock of your reality. Are you in an environment where working in trios make sense? Because it’s one thing to want to work that way, but if the work you’re doing doesn’t call for it — it’s just adding complexity to an already complex situation (but this isn’t a reason to stop asking for help!)

And lastly on boundaries:

People who often ask about setting boundaries are usually in either of the two situations:

1. Their cross-functional peer is doing the work that they feel they should be doing. And they’re afraid it’ll look badly on them. I hear you! There are two things I invite you to be mindful of the perspective you’re taking in this situation:

   1. Are they really taking your scope OR are you freed up to do the 5M other things that you need to get done? We can see it as competition or we can see it as delegation / collaboration.

   2. Are you afraid of this reflecting badly on you during your development conversations with your manager? Then align now and validate that fear. And if you yourself, don’t have any issue with this overstep, then frame your story well.

2. Their cross-functional peer is NOT doing the work that they should be doing. I still hear you and this can be annoying! But once again I invite you to explore first the situation before feeding your frustration.

   1. Are your expectations aligned with their scope? Maybe you just think they should be doing something but they’re really not supposed to.

   2. If you think there’s something that needs to be done (assuming it’s important and has impact), and nobody’s taking ownership, can this be a conversation of who has the capacity to do so?

   3. In the end, alignment of expectation is really critical here. Otherwise, it’s just complaining.

So when people ask me how do they draw boundaries between themselves and their cross-functional peers? My answer tends to be Don’t. In fact, I encourage you to start inviting other functions into this mess. (In reality, we were not a trio in my story. We were a quartet. We had a project manager in our mess but we all loved him so no complaints there 😂)

Draw boundaries between you and your work as in don’t let work eat into your personal time. Draw boundaries between your tendency to over-commit and your actual capacity as in don’t say yes to every single thing when you know physically you can’t.

But if drawing boundaries between you and your cross-functional peers, especially the other 2 sides of your trio is your first priority, I invite you to shift that mindset. It won’t help anybody, including you.

Because it’s not really about drawing boundaries, but about how can the three of you work best together so you can deliver value. And honestly, I’m still employing this mindset now that I’m working in a different kind of trio with my Magical Audios co-founders.

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If you want to talk more about product trios and cross-functional collaboration (as in how to make it better), I’d love to chat with you about it.

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5 Things To Help You With Your Product Trio Dilemma

1. Joy Adamson’s podcast episode with Product Weekend on building trust with teams. While it’s not specific to Product Trios, trust, I believe is a necessary ingredient anyway to have an effective collaboration with anybody.

2. Afonso Franco ‘s podcast episode with Niko Noll on Product Trios.

3. Ant Murphy ‘s episode on organizing backlogs makes a really important case for why building product is a team sport or a product trio effort.

4. chhavi, design lead from Preply has wrote awhile back about her collaboration with her PM counterpart

5. And if your collaboration with your cross-functional peers is causing you stress and sleepless nights, I invite you to take a step back and take care of yourself first. This guided self-hypnosis program from Magical Audios might help. :)

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If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me til the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.

❤️

Kax

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