Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Collaboration is powerful in any venue, but especially so in the business world.
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield created an ice cream juggernaut. Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger formed Berkshire Hathaway. Then, of course, we have Gates and Allen, Hewlett and Packard, and Jobs and Wozniak.
Some pairs were formed by lifelong friends while others happened after a chance encounter. All started when members realized not only their limits but also the potential in others. When done with purpose, strong collaboration can lead an entire organization to new levels of success.
The two featured workplaces serve as a testimony to what can happen when innovative leaders build a culture where cooperation is both encouraged and celebrated.
Built In Boston met with individuals from Anduril Industries and Sophia Genetics to discuss how they get the most out of their teams when members come together for a bigger purpose.
Anduril Industries is a defense product company that specializes in technology for border surveillance and military agencies.
Describe your approach to collaboration in product management. Who do you collaborate with at your company and how?
Driving collaboration amongst a cross-functional team is a core part of the product manager role at Anduril. We are an engineering-driven company, but most Anduril projects would not be successful if that engineering effort was not supported by key partners in product design, operations, BD, test and evaluation, legal and compliance. Each of these functional experts contributes their knowledge and experience to a project at various points in a project lifecycle. The project manager is the sole individual who follows a project from start to finish, looping in each partner at the right time to ensure success. Therefore, an Anduril PM's success or failure depends on how well they can bring these different functions together to work on one common vision.
When collaborating, we use any tool appropriate to the goal we are trying to accomplish, including in-person or virtual group meetings, shared documents to track work or edit plans and requirements, presentations that provide context and communicate decisions, and of course, the most frequently used tool of all, Slack messages. With so many tools available, it's critical to understand your goal and match it to the right communication method.
How can you tell when collaboration is becoming unproductive or inefficient? What are some key signs you look out for?
When collaboration is working, everyone involved in the process feels like they are both contributing and benefiting from the process and that the effort will result in real progress towards a solution. When a collaborative process starts to become unproductive, you often see the same topics rehashed over and over again with no resolution. Often, the number of people involved balloons, diminishing each individual's expected contribution. As the number of people involved grows, you begin including lower conviction opinions in the process. People may start sharing an opinion simply because they feel they are supposed to, which can make it difficult to generate an effective consensus.
When collaboration is working, everyone involved in the process feels like they are both contributing and benefiting from the process.”
Finally, if leaders in your organization are unlikely to trust the output of a collaborative process and are apt to change the plan last minute, this will often reduce the morale of the folks involved and lead to unproductive collaboration. This often manifests in collaboration partners asking if you already have buy-in from a key decision-maker before they'll even engage in problem-solving.
What are the best practices you've developed for keeping collaboration streamlined without tipping into collaboration overload? Be specific.
I have found that collaboration works best when small teams of high-trust partners share a common vision, understand their expected deliverables and feel a sense of urgency to align on a plan of action. As the product manager, I find it's usually my job to drive a process into this state by recruiting the right team members, ensuring everyone understands our objectives and timelines and building trust by clearly communicating the importance of the problem we are trying to solve.
Sophia Genetics is a healthcare technology company with a cloud-based SaaS platform built for life sciences research.
Describe your approach to collaboration in product management. Who do you collaborate with at your company and how?
I prefer intimate and often spur-of-the-moment collaborations. I get more genuine opinions when collaborators can share ideas without the risk of groupthink or consensus decision-making, which is rarely effective. I rely on one-on-ones with key opinion leaders, including leaders not typically involved with PD, which provides a valuable sanity check.
I focus collaborations on four questions. First, I want to know how much info we need to make a decision. What are our guardrails for risk or scope? When does too much data impede judgment? Lastly, what is enough data to make a confident decision?
When vetting the data, I use the 70 percent rule, which states that 70 percent of data is reliable enough to make informed decisions while avoiding diminishing returns.
Five data sources guide this process. They are historical finance and performance, CRM tools, forecast pipelines, R&D and key customer opinions.
How can you tell when collaboration is becoming unproductive or inefficient? What are some key signs you look out for?
One of the most noticeable signs of unproductivity among collaborators is when they become disengaged and keep restating the problem without reaching a solution. Disengagement often comes when the initial newness wears off or there is no clear set of expectations and finish lines. Disengagement can also result in delayed responses, deprioritizing meeting any supporting evidence or facts. While it's essential to trust your instincts, making unqualified assertions of "truth" without evidence or using vague language with collaborators can be counterproductive and risky. Collaborators’ time is precious, and it is essential to treat collaborators as opinion leaders who are being heard and not as unlimited resources.
Collaborators’ time is precious, and it is essential to treat collaborators as opinion leaders who are being heard and not as unlimited resources.”
What are the best practices you've developed for keeping collaboration streamlined without tipping into collaboration overload? Be specific.
To streamline collaborations, I rely on three strategies: One is to share simple, straightforward benefits. Then we look to define leading indicators as sources of truth, and we reduce low-value inputs and eliminate distracting data.
