At Iteration X, we think a lot about what makes lean product teams successful, and in particular, how collaboration tools can help with communication between designers and developers, especially in the context of developing web-based products.
These two types of profiles - the developer and the designer - are central to the product building process, but we noticed that they’re the ones most likely to need help to work better together, and not just by using the right issue tracking or task management tools.
We created Iteration X on two foundational principles: staying within context, and communicating the right information to everyone on the team. Having a tool that’s built for purpose is key for lean tech teams trying to launch a world-class web app on a tight budget and short timelines. However, collaborating well is not only about the tools you use.
Why team collaboration is so hard in product teams
Here’s a common scenario in small product teams: Flora is a product design expert and Louis is a senior full-stack developer, and the two of them have decided to revamp one of the core features of their product. Flora is radically changing the experience flow to make it easier for users to onboard, and Louis wants to completely fix all the loading issues the old version used to have.
However, when the new feature is pushed to staging and is in the QA phase, Flora keeps seeing issues where her eye-catching flows are breaking on the page, and Louis can’t replicate half of them, and doesn't even see a problem with the other half.
Flora invites another team member to help with QA, but then Louis just sees duplicates piling up in his list of issues, which sucks his time away from actually working on fixes. When he asks Flora for the page path, or the browser version she’s using, she shares incomplete information, and when he tells her he can’t replicate, she gets frustrated that he’s not trying hard enough.
These are two competent and motivated individuals who’ve shipped a number of products and features in the past, and yet they’re having a hard time making progress now that they’re trying to iterate on something together.
Where product team collaboration issues come from
There are entire libraries of business management and behavioral science literature that explore the reasons why, as humans, we find it hard to collaborate. But we’re particularly interested in the ones that apply to product teams, like the scenario we were describing above.
This is where Mehdi, the product manager, comes in. Mehdi’s job title might not actually be in product, especially in a smaller team, but he’s the person who will be taking the lead on smoothing over these collaboration issues.
Mehdi can implement a few different team collaboration tools and processes to make this happen, depending on the core reason behind the issues he’s addressing.
Communication Breakdowns caused by incomplete information
An easy place to start is to check that all collaborators in the product team have access to the right amount of information for their part of the work. Most experienced product team members know that they need to do this, but it doesn’t hurt to check.
Mehdi can establish a template for the information needed in each captured issue, and make sure the template works for the engineers who will consume that information. Good issue management tools will enforce that on the users, so this is a good place to leverage issue tracking tools. We’ll share some suggestions on that further down.
The issue capture flow in Iteration X, for example, automatically captures the exact URL, the browser version, the viewport size and the page title along with a screenshot highlighting the exact captured element, technical informations that designers might forget to add to an issue, and that are necessary for developers to replicate it.
A lack of alignment on priorities for the product vision
One of the most common issues is the lack of clarity on what matters most for each product or feature.
It could be that Flora, the designer, envisions a minimalist, sophisticated interface, and creates a product flow that matches her vision. However, Louis perceives it as a complicated framework that adds unnecessary complexity to the back-end, and thinks that what Flora sees as bugs or issues, are simply a matter of interpretation, and should be built the way he built them.
The result? A battle between aesthetic creativity and technical feasibility. The lack of a shared understanding can lead to frustration, setbacks, and a product that falls short of its potential.
The crucial role of Mehdi, the product manager, here is to set crystal clear, straightforward goals for each feature that Flora and Louis are going to work on, ensuring that every functionality is well scoped and that every scenario is covered, once this is done, they can discuss the priority of each part of each feature and decide which are the most important things to do based on the goals set in the beginning always keeping in mind the end users benefits.
Wasted back-and-forth to understand context
Another recurring problem that often happens in small product teams and start ups, is when it comes to reporting issues, everyone will do it in his way, there is no clear place where to find all the captured issues or to effectively track who’s the reporter and in which context the issues were captured, it happens that sometimes the engineers ends up with the same issue being reported multiple times, which often cause the team wasting time and effort.
It’s the duty of the product manager to put in place a culture of having a clear process when reporting issues, this way all the collaborators know exactly where to find all the issues related to a specific project or a feature.
Product managers can leverage the use of team collaboration tools like Iteration X where you can navigate the captured issues directly in the live product in a seamless way using visual pins that you can hover to see the issue in context and where you can see more technical details that developers need to fix the issues. This is also a great way to avoid duplicates of issues and to track progress on fixing them.
Product management and team collaboration: the basic checklist
The type of communication challenges we mentioned above inevitably impact project timelines and outcomes. Missed delivery dates become the norm, milestones linger just out of reach, and your carefully crafted roadmap faces delay after delay. In this kind of atmosphere, teammates can begin to feel undervalued, their time and input seemingly lost in translation.
In addition to having a solid product strategy, effective team collaboration tools and processes are what helps teams avoid these situations, and makes developers and designers able to ship polished products fast. Here are a few that we have noticed are always present in effective product teams.
Clear communication:
- Even in a startup or small tech team, it can be hard to keep information flowing effectively. Everyone needs a process in place to keep track of feedback, ideas, and progress.
Robust goal setting:
- Like every other type of managers, Product managers need to set clearly defined goals, ideally measured with metrics, to provide teams with alignment over what needs to be prioritized.
- This applies to every product, feature, or update that the team starts working on; if the ultimate goal of what you are building is not clear, team members will tend to prioritize what they think is important.
Amplitude has a great summary of classic product adoption metrics for teams that are launching a new feature or iterating on their product, and Quantive has an even more exhaustive list of product-related OKRs if you want something even more robust.
Systematic task assignment:
- This should go without saying, but every task needs an owner, even if multiple people collaborate on it. The product lead or product manager’s job is to make sure this is always the case.
Templates for Issue Capture:
Product leads or project managers should establish a clear way to capture and share issues to prevent losing important information in messages and discussions. Consistency in following this method helps reduce communication challenges, minimizing misunderstandings and frustration between the design and development teams.
Every captured issue should come with a certain amount of information such as the browser the reporter was using while stumbling upon the issue, whether it was on desktop or mobile, the exact feature concerned and of course there should be rules regarding the screenshots or the videos taken to report the issues.
Group Ownership Instead of Blame Attribution
Product managers need to foster a culture of group ownership, moving away from blaming individuals to solving problems together. This can seem contradictory with the philosophy of assigning tasks to individual owners, but there is a difference between asking one person to be responsible for the delivery of a specific task, and blaming that person openly if the task is not delivered, instead of working as a group to understand why it wasn’t delivered, and how to make progress.
What to look for in a team collaboration tool for lean product teams
For a small team, such as an early-stage startup launching a new product, or a lean product team iterating on existing features, it’s important to identify tools that can be effective without increasing complexity and adding unnecessary processes.
The right issue tracking tool will be built to make the whole process easy, from capturing issues and their context to managing their resolution. Additionally, it should empower product managers and product leaders to accomplish the core tasks of project management, such as assigning tasks, setting priorities, filtering and tracking progress and resolution.
Here’s a short list of basic requirements that can help you quickly narrow down the list when doing your research.
- Issue management dashboard, with the views that work best for you (list, kanban, timeline, Gantt…)
- Task content features such as titles, descriptions, attachments, and data points necessary to replicate and resolve
- Task management features, like due dates, filtering, labels, and progress statuses
- Issue capture functionalities that are easy to use for developers and non-developers alike
- Integrations with the appropriate tech stacks to help with every step of the process
And of course
- Team collaboration features, such as assignee, mentions, comments or threads, as well in-context views of issues to avoid duplicated work and loss of context
A deep dive into Iteration X for team collaboration between developers and designers
Quick Capture feature for fully contextual issue capture
- Teams using Iteration X can create an issue with attached context in 1 click with the 'Quick Capture' feature, instantly sharing visuals, video, and browser info, in a template that developers will love. This means that non-technical users, such as designers or product owners, can instantly capture and share fully documented issues in a way that works well for software developers.
In-UI view of issues to eliminate duplicate effort and back-and-forth
- With Iteration X, users can see all issues captured on a project in a ‘in-UI’ view within the project itself on a web browser, where a pin shows what the issue is, and who captured it, so no one needs to capture the same issue twice or ask for more information to locate it, be they designers, QA engineers, engineers, or product owners collaborating on the same web project.
Uncluttered team collaboration, task management and issue tracking
- Designers, engineers, and product people can collaborate on Iteration X with robust issue management features such as assignees, due dates, priorities, statuses, labels, filters, and the ability to share, comment, and attach files on issues. It makes it possible for lean product teams to deliver polished, world-class products on time,
every time.
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For the success of any lean product team or small start up, the design and the development teams must be on the same page at every step of the development process. Product managers play a crucial role in this collaboration between product team members. They keep everyone accountable, and make sure goals are clear, tasks are assigned thoughtfully, and communication flows smoothly.
In order to achieve that synergy within the team, product managers can leverage team collaboration tools such as Iteration X to ensure that issues are being reported and addressed properly, and that everything is well structured and organized.
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Like what you saw with Iteration X’s team collaboration features? Get the Iteration X Chrome extension and start using it for free now. Click here to begin with Iteration X today.
