LeadDev Together

Session 4 : Collaborating cross functionally

Session summary

To deliver awesome products, engineers in your team must work very closely with other functions of your company. Collaboration can spark innovation, and little communication will lead to frustrated teams and missed dependencies. But how do you get teams working together, even when they don’t have the exact same purpose and mission?

As an engineering leader, your role is to navigate these dependencies to build alignment across multiple teams. This session looked into concrete tools you can use to improve and scale collaboration, communication, and leadership while driving complex projects.

In this session you've learnt:

  • Effective cross-functional collaboration is all about people, about achieving a shared understanding of the world we are operating in and a clear understanding of our goals.
  • To be successful at cross-functional collaboration we need to be intentional in our approach.
  • To get there, you will likely have to spend a bit more time learning about the business goals and how other functions operate and are organised.

You've discussed how to be more intentional in the way you form these relationships and collaborate with your partners.

You should be able to identify where there are opportunities for you and your team to work with other parts of the business more successfully.

Homework

Now that we learnt what delivering successful results looks like, why not take some time to make this a reality? This week's homework has been designed with this in mind to encourage you to explore other parts of the business and spend some time with them to understand how they operate. 

Using the worksheet, identify the Go To Market (GTM) teams in your company - get to know them by setting up learning sessions or doing a coffee chat with them. 

You can take 2 or 3 each and meet again to share what you have learned as a group or complete the worksheet as a group, the choice is yours.

 

Talks

Product engineering cross-team collaboration - from idea to MVP
Talk Video

Product engineering cross-team collaboration - from idea to MVP

Ellen Wong
Ellen Wong
15 mins
How to collaborate cross-functionally with Go To Market teams
Talk Video

How to collaborate cross-functionally with Go To Market teams

Rich Archbold
Richard Archbold
15 mins
Harmonizing across cross-functional teams
Video

Harmonizing across cross-functional teams

Rukmini Reddy
Rukmini Reddy
15 mins