Driving Effective Conversations-Taking the Lead in Working Meetings

We're not getting what it is we need or , worse , we're just waiting for the phase gates or technical design reviews to get their input on what it is we've been working on by ourselves for months . This is a communication problem which then morphs into a product development problem .

Let me tell you a story about a communication problem that I think that you'll be able to relate with . I was a board member on an HOA and the HOA managed the outside of the buildings , including the roofing and the landscaping . We met quarterly , that's four times per year .

One of my neighbors one of the other homeowners came to the fall meeting prepared with a complaint . The complaint was that there was a butterfly bush that the landscapers had planted years before overgrowing and it was next to her front door .

Now , butterfly bushes if you're into landscaping , they are very fragrant and they attract a lot of butterflies and other things , like other bees and other bugs . So this bush was growing next to her front door and it was overgrown and it was crowding her front door and covered with bees . She was allergic to bees . She was afraid of going in her front door .

She would sort of dive into it . She came prepared to this meeting to describe all about her problem and her question was why doesn't anyone cut back my butterfly plant ? Don't they see that it's crowding my front porch ? The HOA is supposed to hire the landscapers and tell them what to do . Why isn't anybody helping me ?

My neighbor waited through all of the summer months , through all of this growth of this butterfly bush , and waited for an HOA meeting to complain about it and to finally ask for help .

So I said , of course we can take care of that and I wish that next time you would reach out to someone on the HOA board to ask for help earlier instead of waiting for a meeting . I reminded her that we're neighbors . We would have arranged for something to help her , but instead she kept to herself and dealt with it until a formal HOA meeting .

On the other side of that , as part of the board members of the HOA , is there something that we could have done to make it easier for her to communicate with us ? How does this story relate to product development and design engineering ? As engineers , we may see things like why don't they like my design ?

Or why don't they tell me what they need instead of waiting until we're nearly done ? And that has to do with communication with the cross-functional team , getting those design inputs . On the other side of that , our cross-functional teammates including quality and reliability say things like why didn't the engineers involve me earlier in the design ?

I could have helped them with that . It looked like they had a lot of problems . I have experience or ideas that could have made it easier for them . Or , worse , they say things like why don't the engineers design what I want ? Or this design makes it so much harder for me and it didn't need to be .

As design engineers , we don't want to wait until phase reviews or formal meetings to work with our cross-functional team . We want feedback and input for our designs . We want that input to be able to design against .

If it's information that we need , then we need to be able to go get it , and that involves figuring out a way to get design inputs from a cross-functional team . Think of your cross-functional teammates as your internal customers to your design and you are doing research into what it is your internal customers need or think they need out of the design .

It's a form of self-advocating . There was a previous episode of the Quality During Design podcast titled how to Self-Advocate for More Customer FaceTime and why it's Important , and it is important . I'll link to that podcast episode in the block for this one .

In that episode we talked about getting involved with those external customer , the end user meetings that our companies have , the discovery meetings and the customer interviews and even the usability testing Engineers getting more involved with that interface with external customers .

The insight to action from that episode is that there's certain things that we can do to help us self-advocate for that customer experience so that we can get the design inputs that we need . And those same kind of steps also apply when we're working with our cross-functional team or our internal customers .

And those things were preparation , getting involved in knowing our role , keeping an open mind and doing something with what we've learned . Let's go over each one of those in relation to working with our cross-functional teammates and our internal customers for design inputs . Preparing involves figuring out what it is you want to learn . You've heard this before .

When you're trying to accomplish something , have the end in mind . So by the end of whatever discussion you want to have , you want to have learned about this and get specific . And the way we can get specific about doing this is by doing some pre-work . You can choose a quality tool to get started and that will help us identify what it is we need to learn .

And that quality tool can also help us facilitate the discussions with our cross-functional teams . In many of the cross-functional team meetings I've facilitated , there's only been a few times where I came unprepared , where I hadn't had the end in mind and I didn't do some of that pre-work . Those handful of times were not very useful or constructive .

So , preparation in what it is you want to learn and what you want to get out of the discussion , and also preparation of your cross-functional team to be able to discuss and have ideas about what it is you want to discuss . Both of those are very important . The second step was get involved and know our role .

In the case of asking cross-functional teammates or co-working with them for design inputs , design engineers may want to facilitate the meeting I mentioned using a quality tool to help with preparation . These quality tools also act as frameworks for team to work around , have discussions around .

Using a quality tool like that can help you with facilitating and you can also get help with facilitating by setting up a process At Quality . During Design , we use ADEPT Align , discover , examine , prioritize and Teamwork . Those are not only steps , activities that you can take with your cross-functional team as you're meeting with them .

It's also the kind of things that you want to target . You want to target alignment , you want to take time to discover and examine and you can prioritize what's important . The fourth important aspect was to keep an open mind .

The most important thing to think about when you're working with your cross-functional team for design inputs is this we're not looking to eliminate ideas . We're looking to develop ideas into the best solution we think there could be .

Sometimes this is different than the typical engineering approach , where we do expand our thinking and look at different alternatives , but then we quickly want to narrow down and make decisions about the design , about the components , about the layout and etc . All things engineering .

When we're working with our cross-functional team in order to get design inputs , we want to ensure that we have the mindset that is more open . We can handle ideas systematically with our team so that we can get maximum benefit out of it .

We can do that around the quality tool that we choose , but we want to approach activities with the spirit of developing creative ideas , so saying things like well , that's a great idea , what can we do to make it work ? Or what is it about this idea we can use If we approach our cross-functional teamwork from a viewpoint of ?

I want to learn from this other person who has different experiences and viewpoints than I do . I'm going to ask them questions and gather their ideas so that we can decide together , come to a consensus on what the best solution might be for this product . The last thing is just to do something with what we've learned .

I've participated in some useful meetings where things happened , decisions were made , there was a lot of consensus , everybody had aha moments , we felt good leaving the meeting and then , I don't know , something just didn't happen with what it is we learned or what it is we developed .

Nobody took the time to capture what it is we learned so that we could do something with it , or the things that we learned . We decided there are different priorities in our day and we didn't implement what we learned . So that's the last important step of working with the cross-functional team . Things are going to happen . People are going to have discussions .

There's going to be a lot of ideas . You need to be able to collect that and come to a consensus of what it is you're going to do . What are you going to do with this information ? Are you going to translate it into a design input ? Do you need to do more investigation into something that someone brought up to even see if it's a viable solution ?

Is there more research that needs to be performed on a particular topic ? These action items are really important coming out of a cross-functional meeting , because you want to be able to have them be constructive . So what's today's insight to action ? We may have access to a cross-functional team or to people that would be on a cross-functional team .

We may meet with them once a quarter or during phase reviews or official meetings that are part of the product design development process .

When we're working in the design space and collecting those design inputs , there are times where we're going to need to work with our cross-functional team to really understand the concept space and the product ideas so that we can start developing the design inputs . This isn't typically something that they're just going to give us .

We can't be like my old neighbor who is just hoping that somebody would notice that this butterfly bush was causing her a lot of angst . If you want to be proactive , reach out . We know what it is that we need for design . Our cross-functional team doesn't .

With a little pre-work and being willing to step up to be a facilitator , to ask those questions , we can avoid a lot of the communication problems that lead to product development problems .

On qualityduringdesigncom , there is a podcast blog . It's not just the podcast episode , it's also show notes and transcripts and links to other episodes and , like I promised earlier , I will link to that other episode of the podcast where we talked about self-advocating for-end-user customer interfaces .

There's also the catalog of all the other podcast episodes that we've published in the last two and a half years . Please visit the website and explore what we have to offer . This has been a production of Dini Enterprises . Thanks for listening .