Understanding Cross-Functional Collaboration

Each week we talk about ways to use quality during design and product development . I'm your host , diana Dini . I'm a senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design . I consult with businesses and coach individuals on how to apply quality during design to their processes . Listen in and then join us .

Visit QualityDuringDesigncom . Cross-functional collaboration . First , let's talk about what a cross-functional team is . They are people that are assigned to a project to represent a certain function of the organization . They usually have decision-making capabilities when it comes to the project decisions and decisions about the product itself .

Cross-functional team members may be representing the production and manufacturing facilities , marketing , reliability , quality and I would even consider project management as part of that cross-functional team . All of these different functions bring a different perspective of the project and the product when it comes to product development .

There are some challenges when working in a cross-functional team and I bet if you've been in product design , you've probably seen some of these challenges . For one , there's a perception that too many voices just get in the way of productivity . I just need to know what I need to know so that I can design something already and we can move on with the project .

And there is something to say about just lolling in a project and not making progress on it . And if you have too many cooks in the kitchen , so to speak , that does make it more challenging . Another challenge with cross-functional teams is how do you work together ?

A lot of times , teams get together and do brainstorming sessions , and I mean true brainstorming sessions . I think we've all had some bad experiences with brainstorming , but there is a place for it . When brainstorming was introduced about 50 years ago , it was the thing to do , it was easy to set up and a way for people to talk together .

Also , during those 50 years , people experienced a lot of difficulty with getting productive brainstorming sessions or having results of a brainstorming session that they could actually use . And there were lots of studies done on brainstorming and how brainstorming groups work .

Some of the quotes from some of the research is there's no advantage to brainstorming group over a group of the same number of individuals working alone , or the brainstorming group came up with fewer ideas than the individuals , or just the quality and creativity of the ideas generated was actually lower .

So some of our experiences with brainstorming may give us a negative viewpoint of cross-functional development . The last challenge that I'll mention is sort of an obvious one is conflicts . Whenever people are working together , there's going to be conflicts .

From my experience and from other people's experiences , those challenges center around not being aligned with the same priorities , there's no end-to-end project leadership and not having a system that everyone worked within together . I'll link to some articles in the podcast blog about these kind of challenges .

So why do we even bother doing cross-functional product design or getting together with our cross-functional teams for product design ? Because , despite its challenges , which we can overcome , there are a lot of benefits that we don't want to ignore . For one , talking with people from different perspectives gives us a more complete picture , especially of the use space .

Now , I'm a fan of cross-functional team collaboration , which is why I'm doing what I do .

My main reason is that the different perspectives that each person brings from their respective areas of the business and also their independent individual experiences , helps create a more complete vision of a product and performance , both for the user and the risks it could introduce . People have studied this too .

Involving multiple roles for example , users and developers in the risk identification process will result in a more complete set of identified risks than if only one role is included in the process . Cross-functional collaboration also gives us clarity Now .

I've seen time and again the power of bringing people together to get a better understanding , greater alignment and improved designs , just to name a few of those benefits .

With cross-functional collaboration , you're communicating , interacting and talking with other people , so you have that space and that opportunity to get clarity on what it is you're trying to do and your own goals and the goals of the greater project .

The last benefit of cross-functional collaboration that I'll talk about in this episode is that , as a product designer , you have lots of internal customers .

You might be responsible for the design aspect and making decisions about how it's going to look , how it's going to be made and the materials that it's made from , but we all know that it takes a team of people to make a design idea a reality where someone is using and interacting with their product .

In the field , product designers have many internal customers to their design contribution , meaning that the decisions that designers make affect many other people , including all of the people on the cross-functional team . We know that team building , creation and management take skill and there's a lot of methods and techniques for managing that .

But you may be thinking , diana , I'm not managing a team . I'm not the one who decides who's on it . I'm assigned to a cross-functional team and I'm the product designer on the team . Even still , we need to build something together with our cross-functional team .

I encourage you to facilitate meetings with a cross-functional team , so we need a way to work with our team on design decisions and design inputs . The challenge for product designers is in getting design inputs and their priorities based on things that matter . We're talking about product design concepts . At this point in our project , we've identified a need .

There's a gap in the market , a potential new product , and we don't have anything developed yet . This is really when we need to get clear on design inputs before we start the designing process . What we can do with our cross-functional team is to collaborate using directed co-work .

We work toward a common goal , something that is not so big as the project goal , but something smaller and more focused that can be achievable within one working session and we want to focus on the user . We're designing and developing something for them , for them to be able to use it . We'll have a starting point .

We don't just show up with a cross-functional collaboration meeting with nothing . We do want to do some homework and not show up empty-handed and then have a roadmap to follow a general direction that we're taking . The group prompted questions , scenarios within which groups can be creative .

We're really collecting our design inputs with our cross-functional team in a collaborative co-work meeting . What I'm not talking about is I'm not talking about design sprints , whether the agile kind or the sprints product development kind , where you develop something in a week . I'm not talking about designing something together with a team .

I am talking about exploring the use space and the concept space with our team for design inputs . The other thing I'm not talking about is I'm not talking about that typical brainstorming session that we mentioned earlier . There are elements of creativity and some brainstorming techniques , but it's within a structure .

Having structured working meetings is much better than sharing reports where marketing creates a market needs analysis , writes it up in a report and then throws it over the wall to the engineering and design department , because our structured meetings are going to give us an opportunity to talk with and better understand the perspectives of our cross-functional teammates .

That is going to give us easier buy-in on our design ideas that we're going to be making later , because we made them part of the design process .

We're also going to avoid surprises because we've verified and checked and left room to explore interpretations and hidden problems in the use space , things that alone we wouldn't have noticed , but together we figured out . As much as the members of our cross-functional team is part of the project .

They do have their particular goals and they focus on their own particular part of the project or product . We just need to recognize that Our goal as a product designer is to give them opportunities to talk together and with us so that we can gather design inputs . And that's really what we want are the design inputs against which we can create a great design .

That may seem selfish that we're gathering our design inputs and identifying more opportunities for design options , but it really isn't selfish because the rest of the team is also getting the inputs they need . Manufacturing production is getting more information about what they may need for their manufacturing plan .

Marketing is getting more clarity for their marketing plans . Reliability is gaining an understanding of some of the use space and use environment and limitations . Quality is getting an idea of what quality measures may be important for the user , and project management is getting an understanding of where there could be project risks .

As a product designer , it's really our responsibility to ask our cross-functional team for these inputs , because they are the internal customers or they represent our end users , which are our external customers . So what's today's insight to action ?

If you approach collaboration in a structured way , with questions already formed and a way to communicate and facilitate your meeting so that you get the design inputs that you need , you're going to have more success with getting the design input that you need and you'll have a more successful design because of that .

Next week , we're going to be talking about leveraging proven frameworks for concept development , so we're going to be getting into some of these different frameworks and structured meetings that you'll be able to use in working with your cross-functional team . At QualityDuringDesigncom , under training , there is a free lesson engineering products from a concept space .

It's a video introduction to the use space and some of these frameworks that we'll be talking about next week . You get access to an online portal where you'll be able to log in time and again to view the video , read the transcript or get the downloads . I look forward to meeting you here next week . This has been a production of Dini Enterprises .

Thanks for listening .