XFN Collaboration is indeed TRICKY!
“PM ought to be the glue that binds teams” but that could be hugely overwhelming for someone who's starting out. Here’s how you drop the jitters, transform & get to collaborate seamlessly with XFN.
Taken by surprise!
Over my mentoring sessions many aspirants have often asked me this question:
“I never see the product manager working from his desk, why is that? Most of the time they’re in meetings is what I come to hear. Is that what this job is about, just meetings and more and more of it? Also, is that common & idiosyncratic to the industry / role per se?”
In fact, it stands second to the most asked question as one is about to enroll for / enquires about a PM course or a couple of sessions into it, which is:
“do you think I can become a good product manager?”
It’s mostly true for almost every organization across the world. And, here’s another bit of an addendum input to it all.
Product leaders may sometimes trivially use this as a parameter / metric to gauge the time it would take for a fresh hire product manager to take full control and take things by the scruff of the neck and drive teams towards those goals.
FYI, I have done that as well.
The first week and a half is where a “fly on the wall” approach and lot of wait and watch is advised to any PM starting out his job, but incidentally that also happens to be the time the leaders and reporting managers observe every move and draw parallels towards the dynamism exhibited and estimating a TAT for one catch up pace and restoring order.
Here’s a write-up I came up with to explain the stickiness of a PM’s role and usually the tall order of collaboration it would take for one to get through it all:
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Gist of an XFN
Let’s get to an understanding of what a cross functional team is in the first place.
Talking in the parlance of the success of a given product there’s usually a collective effort of many teams that come into play, or for that matter the adoption of even the minutest of feature releases. But, the current era isn’t about the teams on the face of it as much as it is about the manner in which they tend to function / collaborate that takes the ulterior precedence.
This here is how a regular product team would work, each function / team contributing to the overall product working over their silos and across the phases of the PLC.
This could be thought of as typical of the waterfall model of software product development where the product takes its shape over each of those phases, but working as a coach / advisor I’ve witnessed & have been utterly surprised as to how this still seems to be the order of the day at a few orgs. even to date.
As opposed to a Cross Functional Team’s (XFN) overall success would totally hinge on seamless collaboration right from the word “go”.
Let’s go over the phases:
As the product manager kicks off with the Ideation phase he may involve Sales, Marketing, Engineering & Design to exactly understand what’s been done up until that point (if it were to be a new feature) and what ought to take center-stage now, the outcome of which would be a MRD providing a thorough understanding of the Markets, Segments, Users, Pain points overarching into the PRD which talks of product / feature related outcomes
That done, the PM would get down to the exact feature list they plan to build so as to help them meet those goals
A feature list would then need to be Prioritized sans which it’d all be a hodgepodge as every feature in there may look like it’s screaming “pick me, pick me” at you
The advent of LEAN has had an emphasis on MVP / MLP which ought to be designed & built by the respective teams and rightly so
Building an MVP is just half the game & not subjecting it to enough testing on the field to collect feedback & responses, getting down to altering / designing a few more experiments so as to gauge the fitment over multiple variables is an imperative which can’t be missed out on & mind you this could run into multiple cycles before it could turn into that “YaY!!”
Finally, the PM gets ready for the culmination / the judgement day which could be just as much important for every other internal stakeholder who have stood by supporting all activities & tirelessly contributed over the entire scheduled period – Woo-hoo! It’s product launch time
XFN - Deep-dive
When that information might suffice for someone who didn’t know what an XFN was, there’s certainly more to it which you ought to worry about if you are looking to take up a role in product soon or if you are interested in knowing how product teams function across the world over.
Collaborating with XFN
The nature of the PM job itself is very challenging and working with cross functional teams makes it all the more challenging. Nothing comes easy neat here and collaborating with teams could mean a lot of problems at various levels.
Here is a very interesting geography-wise split depicting challenges each of those teams face over collaborating on their regular workflow. Though this stat here is indicative of Covid time it still does largely fit in with the way teams continue to function as of today in a post-Covid world.
NOTE: Its only but natural that teams get off on the track and lose control and direction owing to the varying pace at which each of them function, with communication or responsibility being unclear.
Combating XFN Challenges
But all is not lost as there’s some good news.
It’s not the first time that the world is facing such a situation. When a majority of people working in the IT / Tech space were introduced to a concept like WFH (Work From Home) and they’ve got back to working from office / hybrid in some cases, these challenges were thrust upon a section of people and they have waded through it learning to fit in and function well with the so called “NEW NORMAL”.
And, here’s a list of things you ought to start with: