In my 18-year career I have had different roles on various product teams: application product manager, program manager for product marketing, and PMO director for a marketing team for a midsized software company.
The best-run teams work with certain professional standards. For instance, I was part of a 10 person mobile application product management team and we adopted the Pragmatic framework from Pragmatic Institute. When I was wrangling programs for a distributed product marketing team, we again used the Pragmatic framework to create a cohesive approach to marketing 5 different software products. Corresponding development teams used Scrum or SAFe, and one marketing team started to roll out campaign standards from Sirius Decisions.
However, it soon became apparent that teams were working to streamline their operations within the team but not outside of the team. Each team was a silo, and there was little cross-team interaction. Bottlenecks formed and gaps caused work to be lost or stop altogether. Frequently, information was not shared until the last moment, when one team needed to scramble to meet deadlines. To break down silos at one company we instituted a biweekly meeting between Inside Sales (IS) and Product Marketing to share ideas being heard by IS reps. The two teams met to share what was being said by prospective customers (IS Rep) and what was on the product roadmap (from product marketing).
There are two attributes required to reach cross-team alignment:
Flow of work: how does work flow from team to team?
· Aligning product roadmap with marketing planning
· How quickly can your company respond to market changes?
· What happens when DevOps uses agile and product management or marketing don’t?
· Is the product “done” if it is completed, or is it done once accepted and used by the customer?
Flow of information: how and when is information shared across teams?
· Tools for engaging and aligning the organization with product planning (i.e. if DevOps uses Jira and Marketing uses something else)
· Sharing product information in a timely manner with product marketing for input into white papers, product launches, campaigns, and social postings
· Is there one process for each type of product line across teams that create, design, promote and sell the product? How to solve delays and roadblocks in communication?
· Do product managers cull requirements from customer service, sales and consulting? With anyone who speaks to customers? (I remember a time where a salesman surprised product management that they wouldn’t land a major national railroad account without a feature only needed by that small user segment)
· Using a tool like Kapta to build connections to other teams when reaching your goal has a dependency on another group
We can map out processes and integration tools, but it is in the execution details where cross-team alignment succeeds or fails. Let’s explore some of these alignment points in this blog series.
