Product Collective - Collaborating with Product Managers

How to collaborate well with others

It’s often said that product development is a team sport. How you work with people inside and outside of your product team can have a big impact on your product's success. So, if you think product management would be so much easier if it weren’t for the people, here are some tips for working with folks inside and outside of your product team.

Meanwhile, in product news, we see two companies taking different approaches to compete with rivals, a new law restricting the use of social media, and signs that HVAC is where it’s at.

Five reasons behind difficult product and engineering team collaboration. Over the years, Mauro Bagnato has invested considerable time and effort in building a strong partnership with product peers. While it hasn’t always been easy, he’s learned a couple of lessons along the way. Mauro shares the top five issues that can undermine collaboration between product and engineering teams, hoping that by recognizing them, it can be easier to find effective solutions.

Bridging the gap between product management & product design. Product designers and product managers are critical partners in building and improving the product. However, it can be hard for product managers to figure out how the relationship is going with product designers and what they can do to improve it. Given how critical the product design and product management relationship is to the success of the product, it is important to ensure product managers have a strong and healthy relationship with their designer. Tara Wellington and Bruno Bergher share how to identify if there is an issue in the product management and product design relationship and four ways to strengthen that relationship.

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This Week’s Video

Product Experimentation at Scale w/ Claire Vo

Managing your team like a product. We all want to manage happy teams. In this talk from INDUSTRY Virtual in 2020, Tami Reiss describes how to use good product management practices when thinking about managing your employees. She also explains how taking what you already do well as a PM and applying it to working with your team can lead to more productivity, less turnover, and a collaborative workplace.

This video and many others like it are available on our Member Hub. If you don’t have access to the Member Hub, you can join the community today for free.

Collaborating on and off the court

As I sit in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, I can't help but marvel at the incredible energy that has taken over the city. The Women's NCAA Final Four is in town, and the excitement is palpable. Fans from Iowa, North Carolina State, South Carolina, and UConn have flocked here to support their teams, and the city has embraced them with open arms.

It's a beautiful thing to see people from all walks of life coming together to celebrate the power of sports and the incredible talent of these young women. Caitlin Clark and her Iowa Hawkeyes have been particularly impressive (and I’m pumped that my daughter will get to see her play live tonight!)

As I watch these teams compete, I can't help but think about the parallels between basketball and product management. Building a great product, like a great basketball team, requires collaboration, communication, and a shared vision. Each player on the court has a specific role to play, just like each member of a product team has their area of expertise. But magic happens only when everyone works together towards a common goal.

Watching these teams play is a reminder that greatness is rarely achieved alone. It results from countless hours of practice, preparation, and partnership. It's about trust, respect, and a willingness to put the team's success above individual glory.

So, as you go about your work to finish out this week, take a moment to reflect on the power of collaboration. Whether you're working on a new feature, launching a new product, or just trying to solve a tricky problem, remember that you're part of a team. When everyone is working together towards a shared vision, there's no limit to what you can achieve.

In order to beat ‘em, buy someone else. Canva, the Australian design and visual communication startup acquired Affinity, a creative tools company based in the U.K. Canva has typically targeted beginners, but the company sees this acquisition as helping them appeal to more advanced users. Industry analysts see this acquisition as positioning Canva to better compete with Adobe’s creative tools.

Here’s a novel idea - using AI to help with meetings that could have been an email. Zoom continues its expansion outside of its core communication as it unveiled a major new release called Workplace. The release includes AI Companion, which will summarize meetings and chat threads to help you stay updated, help you brainstorm ideas on whiteboards for stronger team collaboration, and compose chats and email drafts in a few seconds. It remains to be seen if these new features will reduce or increase Zoom fatigue.

Kids can no longer get hooked in Florida. The Florida State Legislature passed a bill banning social media for children under 14. While the bill does not name specific companies, it targets social media platforms that rely on notification alerts and auto-play videos that encourage compulsive viewing. The criteria for the ban may be a sign that building your product’s income off the content produced by your users may no longer be a viable business model.

The trades are where it’s at. Not only are high school students more interested in getting into trades such as electrical, plumbing, and HVAC, but so are startups. PipeDreams is a startup that acquires mom and pop HVAC and plumbing companies and scales them using its software, which helps with scheduling and marketing. If they want, PipeDreams allows business owners to retire without losing their employees, name, or brand or just be part of a larger company with more resources, Laufer told TechCrunch.

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When product teams should collaborate in real-time vs. asynchronously. How often does your team collaborate in real-time vs. asynchronously? Finding the appropriate balance is especially important for remote teams who want to move fast and achieve together. Yet many teams are rarely intentional about how they choose a particular approach. Claire George shares some questions you can consider when trying to determine whether something should happen live or asynchronously.

Working with sales and executives. Rich Mironov joined Product Tank Des Moines/Ames to answer questions about working with sales and executives and ensuring they have the appropriate input without undue influence over your product decisions. Look at the video to see what he had to say.