Four principles for successful cross-team collaboration

Cultivating alignment in the “white space” between product teams

Illustration by Karan Singh

As a company grows, new teams (and new divisions) form that run differently or have different ways of working. They eventually grow into a neighborhood of divisions with different purposes, resource needs, and dependencies. As a result, people get more and more subdivided and that introduces a problem called bureaucracy. According to Chesky, one of the problems of a bureaucracy is that it becomes difficult to know who's doing what—especially when everyone is moving in different directions.

To truly serve customers, neighborhoods must be connected. People need to be able to travel back and forth and their infrastructures must work together (imagine if stoplights didn’t work the same in every neighborhood). The same is true for products that are part of a shared ecosystem. Although some people will use a single app, others will frequent several, and they all need common ways to do things—like collaborating or accessing files. Similar ways of doing things occur when product teams (consisting of design, research, engineering, product managers, etc.) from different business units work together in what is known as the white space, or as Adobe principal designer Bradee Evans refers to it, “the organizations of brains” between business silos.

The white space can be a difficult place to work. You don't always own the surface or have a specific reason to be in it. You're asking to take up real estate in someone else’s neighborhood or needing their help to build a common infrastructure. It requires managing by influence, not control. And that's where collaboration comes in: Collaboration is the antidote to bureaucracy. It builds partnerships and connections across teams and, in its best form, it can unlock creative solutions to wicked problems.

I've made a career of operating in the white space. In my current role, as design director for Assets, Collaboration & Teams, I lead a platform team helping to ensure that Adobe’s products and services work together. From that experience, I’ve developed four principles for designers collaborating across teams—best practices for trying to find alignment across business silos.

Principle 1: Establish credibility

Do your homework. If you want to be seen as a thought leader, know your domain. Gather evidence to shift your thinking from what you think you know to what you know you know. Presenting ideas to other teams can elicit any number of reactions: You're aiming for excited (or at least engaged) and you get what can best be described as mild interest. So how do you establish credibility? By having an informed opinion and showing how you arrived at it. No one's going to believe what you say just because you operate in a designated space. Your work must stand on its own.

Data is an influential tool behind your ideas and there are all sorts of ways to weave it into your narrative to express an informed opinion: Do audits of current experiences (of your product and others) to create baseline information for yourself and others to work with. Use analytical storytelling and infographics to bring in qualitative and quantitative data to support your key points in a visually engaging way.

Establishing credibility is what gets you a seat at the table. You might do a great job with your homework and understanding the domain, but if you don't show that work, you're not going to get credit for it. Your goal is engagement: people leaning in with intrigue, not boredom, disdain, or indifference, so think about how you can use your storytelling to establish credibility.

Principle 2: Build trust

It's one thing for people to see you as credible. It’s another to build and maintain trust with another team. Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, talks about how trust is critical for a team to work cohesively. He defines trust as the confidence that our peers’ intentions are good. And when it exists, there’s no reason for people to be protective or careful with their ideas. How you build trust is fairly obvious: be honest, be reliable, share things openly and regularly because nothing degrades trust faster than the feeling that you've been left out of a critical discussion or decision. What does that look like in a partnership between teams?

Let’s imagine two web experiences developed and owned by two separate teams. Although connected by navigation elements and a strong design system they each have unique URLs and different long-term objectives. The goal is to join these discrete experiences under a single URL. Originally two teams, not knowing what the other was doing (bureaucracy), are now partnering to align on and solve common problems, and actively make space to share ideas and incorporate them into new concepts. Success, in the spirit of no surprises, requires not only keeping each other in the loop about what's happening (it doesn't do a partnership any good if experiments are run but insights aren't shared), it requires having a clear operating model of how to work together to build new experiences or change existing ones.

It might seem easier for this type of project to be handled by a single team. However, the reality is that within complex and expansive companies, it’s a fallacy to think that a single team can understand or solve the issues of an entire business. In a forest, an underground network of root systems helps the forest survive by sending distress signals and nutrients between trees. Teams are like trees in a forest: Building trust requires a similar continued effort and when they tap into their network, they can create a connected system that spurs growth.

Principle 3: Make space for others

If you're meant to be collaborating with a partner, you must give them the space to participate. They need to be able to contribute and offer opinions and feel safe doing so. What's the right amount of space? On one hand you have what I term passive collaboration—an open shrug of an action like dropping a design document over the fence with no context. For someone to collaborate with the document, they must have a high amount of motivation and some ideas about how to engage. It’s akin to leaving a bunch of ingredients on a counter with no recipe. Even if someone feels inspired by the ingredients, they must still figure out how to make a meal out of them. It's vague, and almost too much space for most collaborators. But, on the opposite end of the spectrum is leaving no space for someone to pitch in because you've already prepared the entire meal.

What this might look like is someone entering a discussion with strong opinions strongly held. If you leave no space for another team's ideas and feedback, it becomes easier not to work together at all and just develop solutions in your silos. A concept that Priya Parker writes about in The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, is good controversy, which is having hard conversations out in the open that end with progress. Bad controversy stalls decisions and can break down trust between teams. She writes that the best host, or in this case the designer driving the conversation, knows how to make gatherings fruitfully controversial.

It’s normal for teams to have different opinions about how to solve a particular problem. But having private group conversations with different audiences, each trying to solve the problem on their own, isn’t productive—even when intentions are good. Instead, lean in, facilitate good controversy, and have these conversations in the open.

This happened recently, when two teams had differing opinions on how best to handle a particular workflow. What began as several (too many) private messages in Slack, ended when the design team facilitated a workshop for everyone to air their opinions and create a shared understanding of goals and definitions across the teams. Out of that discussion came documentation (an artifact that could be easily shared) with clear visuals that articulated where and why there were differences in the experience.

If you want to influence and drive work forward, you must facilitate open conversation, actively collaborate, give structure to the feedback you give and ask for, and cause, controversy. Making space for others means allowing the inputs from different teams to evolve your thinking and your perspective. Facilitating this out in the open keeps people operating in the white space instead of retreating into their more comfortable silos.

Principle 4: Reinforce the humanity of your colleagues

Collaboration is fundamentally human. It can feel vulnerable to share early ideas or to have fruitfully controversial conversations. To fully engage, people need to feel a sense of connection and that their opinions are valued. That's especially necessary when you can’t rely on the same motivations to propel you in the same direction. When fundamental needs like belonging and value are met, diverse collaboration can lead to incredible solutions. If they aren't met, collaboration is just performative or worse, leads to butting heads and stalled progress that ultimately affects the customer experience.

Centralized organizations, like Adobe Design, can do this particularly well, because they’re incentivized to create the best customer experience in and across all products, and accustomed to working with people all over the world with unique wiring and experiences that have shaped who they are. All designers have superpowers here: The nature of our work is highly collaborative, and we're bonded by our responsibility to create the best customer (or user) experience—whether that's through imagining the future or designing for alignment.

Since we as designers care so deeply about reinforcing the humanity of our users, my question is this: What does it look like to apply the humanity that we assign to the users of our products, to the people with whom we collaborate? While it might be obvious to say, let's remind ourselves to assume best intentions, give each other some grace, and understand that we're not always going to show up as our best. Despite clear operating models, surprises will still happen, and no matter how many communication channels are created, someone might still, inadvertently, be left off a meeting invite.

How these principles are put into action is up to the individual. The next time you find yourself collaborating across teams, think about how you show up: How are you establishing credibility and building trust? Are you making the right space for others to collaborate? And most importantly, how are you reinforcing the humanity of the people that you work with? If we can't tap into the unique differentiated value that only cultivating alignment in the white space can bring, our customers will suffer.