Moving from “Us Vs Them” to “We’re All in the Same Boat”
One of the most underrated factors of success in achieving agility in your software development efforts is the cohesion and alignment between your “product people”, your “usability people”, and your “development people”. A product , UX, and development team working together as a single unit with shared goals, mutual respect, and honest, two-way communication is more than half the battle and unleashes the potential for great outcomes across your software development efforts.
Unfortunately, this is more often the exception rather than the rule. Often times, you will hear product folks saying, “If only the development team would deliver the features faster/better, we’d be successful.” Likewise, you might hear development folks stating, “The product team is asking us to implement things that don’t make any sense,” or, “they have no clue how the product actually works.” You may even have the UX folks chiming in with “The product team doesn’t really understand the customer,” or “The development team is not implementing our designs correctly.” When this happens, you are unlikely to achieve continuous delivery of value to customers because there is not enough cross-functional communication and collaboration to optimize the delivery of value. Everyone is likely stressed out, territorial, and suspicious.
The sad part is that there is no possible way that one party can be successful without the others You are all serving the same customers - you are all in the same boat crossing the river (or ocean if you like to think bigger!) meaning that either you all make it safely to the other side or you all drown together with suboptimal products and suboptimal outcomes. The development team could be the best in the world but if they are working on the wrong stuff, they aren’t going to be successful. Likewise, the product team or the UX team can come up with the best product plans or usability designs, but if they aren’t implemented properly, there is no inherent value in the effort. Everyone needs each other to be successful.
This is one of the reasons that we want to see cross-functional team structures that drive a strong identity with the scrum or value stream team you belong to, at least as strong as your identity to your functional role. Everyone is dependent on each other, whether they realize it or not.
Beyond that, there are significant benefits to working together as a cross-functional unit. Honest, open communication and information sharing across these functional roles allows for fuller transparency and better quality data which leads to timelier and improved decision making. The inclusion of different perspectives at all points in the product life cycle makes it more likely that the decisions that are made regarding the product hit the mark and that the solution space considered is as wide as possible.
As a product owner on a cross-functional team, imagine how much you’ll enjoy richer conversations with the UX and development team members about different options for implementing the solutions you want and the flexibility of optimizing when the team delivers value to your customers. As a UX or development person, imagine how much you’ll cherish the fact that the product owner is soliciting your ideas and your help through all stages of the product lifecycle and your increased empowerment in the development of the product. Everyone on the team shares in the joint responsibility and the joint satisfaction of ownership throughout the whole life cycle, and when everyone thinks like owners, everyone wins, including your customers!