Cross-discipline collaboration can be challenging. Especially if your team is remote or taking a hybrid approach to time in the office, it can be easy to fall into a rhythm of validation. Collaboration, in its truest form, happens when the whole team — including designers, developers, and product managers — all come to the table to understand the problems we are trying to solve and find potential solutions. Building more collaborative teams is a journey, but one way to start is by understanding what collaboration means and where your team is starting from.
More than ever it is important to be able to communicate with team members, regardless of their location. These skills aren’t just for remote or distributed teams; all day meetings, working from home, and other temporary interruptions can demand a change to your communication strategy. Increasing your confidence and comfort communicating digitally can feel like a burden to some. Luckily, there are tools and techniques you can use to keep up productivity and collaboration, no matter where you are.
There is a problem with design. In many cases, design still assumes collaboration with developers means showing them wireframes to get feedback. In some cases, a developer may be part of a sketching session or sit in on a usability test. How big of a role should developers play in our design work? Is there a benefit in sharing the practice of design with developers?
Agile has become a more widely adopted workflow for technology teams in recent years. This framework emphasizes the value of individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change as a basis of success. This sounds appealing to designers, but there can be friction in knowing how to participate, especially when most agile teams talk more about stories, ceremonies, and velocity than the four core ideas from the Agile Manifesto.