Collaboration

Finding the right balance of maintaining ownership, promoting creativity, and inviting healthy discussion and debate and constructive criticism is hard.

Most of us want to build the right thing for our customers, but sometimes we have different opinions on approach as we naturally have different perspectives and experiences. Try to find a way of working together that is inclusive and also keeps your team productive and producing good work.

Working together

For teams to succeed and work together well, a few points:

1. Teams decide together and can self-organize, with the best decisions balancing the different perspectives. While many teams have a designated Delivery Executive or Project Manager, this role is not a manager of the team and therefore can not impose or veto decisions, decide schedule or priority, or who works on what.
2. It takes time to learn to work well with a new team. Actively work towards improving this throughout your project and be conscious of it in retrospectives.
3. No one person or role can be responsible for all the good ideas. The best designs, architectures, and solutions will come from collaboration and contributions from a diversity of roles and backgrounds. Collaborate and brainstorm together regularly and specialize when you have a good direction.
4. Collaboration over handoffs. Role handoffs inevitably result in a loss of knowledge, so having cross-functional groups working together effectively throughout is very important. Break work up small enough that you can work more in parallel rather than in ways that create bottlenecks and idle wait times waiting for another role to finish their piece.
5. Collaboration doesn't mean every person involved in everything. Cross-functional collaboration should include multiple perspectives, but does not need to include every team member all the time. Larger teams may have a technical lead, a design lead, and a product manager that bring multiple perspectives together for collaboration, for example.
6. Sometimes the best ideas come out of debate and listening to others' perspectives. Don’t shy away from debate, but recognize when you’re at an impass too. Decide on something together and move forward.
7. Recognize which decisions are reversible and which aren't. Most decisions are reversible and in those instances it's usually better to try something and learn than wait until you have perfect information. But some decisions are hard to change later -- these require more careful thought. Try to identify whether you're dealing with something that is a one-way door or a two-way doors and one-way door.

Resolving disagreements

Whenever you have a disagreement, try to focus on material differences between perspectives over personal preference. Many things do not have a single best approach, but try to recognize pros and cons and the tradeoffs of each approach.

Are you long-term aligned but differ on approach, or do you fundamentally disagree on the desired outcomes? Understanding exactly what you are disagreeing on is essential in building a foundation for a healthy debate.

If you simply "feel" that you don't like an approach someone else is suggesting, but don't have any evidence or can't clearly articulate why, give their idea a shot.

Try not to get too attached to your ideas. If someone doesn't agree with you, it's not personal. Our goal should always be open and frank conversation where the best ideas win, not the loudest, most insistent, or most senior people.