How Our Product Team Uses Cross-Functional Collaboration to Make a Better Product

When our product team is considering a new feature, we do everything we can to make sure it solves the user’s problems in a way they’ll find valuable. Though, no matter how much thought we put into product ideation, validation, and development, we’re not the people responsible for selling it, supporting it, or helping customers be successful with it. Those functions come from other UserVoice team members: marketing, sales, customer success, and tech support.

Cross-functional collaboration ensures we get the perspectives of everyone in our company who interacts with our product, so we can build the right feature the right way. If you’re currently working on a siloed team and are struggling to deliver product features your users find valuable, try adapting your approach to include diverse viewpoints from people across your organization. We handle our projects this way, and it hasn’t let us down yet.
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We Believe That Cross-Functional Collaboration Leads to a More Closely Aligned Company

Whenever we launch a new feature, we want to create something every person in our organization can feel proud of. That’s why we collaborate throughout the development cycle: on the product team, we want to understand how other departments will interact with each feature. We also want them to understand what we’re building, why we’re building it, and who we’re building it for, so they can flag potential problems early on in the development process. Sharing that context across departments gets us all aligned on the same goals—which, ultimately, leads to a more valuable product for our users.

However, getting companywide alignment isn’t easy to do, especially in a remote workplace. According to Buffer, 20% of remote workers said that collaboration and communication represent the biggest challenges to remote work. Interestingly, another 20% said that loneliness is the biggest struggle—and, because building a cross-collaborative structure improves cohesion and alignment across the company, it helps solve both problems.

Cross-functional collaboration also gives the product team a chance to check our assumptions about how well we’ve communicated the details of a new feature or product change. When we talk with sales and marketing, we check whether we’ve explained:

• The value that the feature delivers clearly enough so that they can sell it effectively
• Why this feature is a priority for us to develop at this time

When we meet with our customer success and tech support departments, we’re looking for their insight on whether:

• The proposed feature will solve users’ problems
• We’ve provided enough information for them to drive user adoption and help customers succeed with our product

We Encourage Cross-Collaboration

On the product team, encouraging cross-functional collaboration is one of our responsibilities. That’s because the product team owns the product and the strategy behind each update—we hold the knowledge about why we want to prioritize this feature over another, so it falls on us to share that information. I always look for chances to check in with other departments and explain more about what we’re working on. Those opportunities can look like:

• Sales or marketing staff who don’t understand who the intended audience is for a proposed feature
• Customer success or tech support team members who aren’t clear on which problem the feature is intended to solve

For me, collaboration starts within our product team. I take inspiration from my product manager counterparts at UserVoice all the time—they have skills and knowledge in some areas I don’t, like marketing, for instance. I often use that collaborative relationship as a guide when I’m working across departments.

We also use a handful of tools to help us collaborate in real-time. Most of our shared documents and presentations live in Google Workspace, which makes them easy to share and update, and we use whiteboarding tools like Miro and FigJam (from Figma) to capture people’s comments and suggestions during cross-functional meetings. Figma itself is also a great tool for collaborating on design projects.

We Collaborate With the Teams That Have the Deepest Understanding of Our Customers

We involve many teams that play important roles in our product’s success, but we put a lot of emphasis on marketing, sales, customer success, and tech support. These specific departments have multiple touchpoints with customers, which is why it's so important to include them in the conversation. They need to understand the product well enough to be able to drive growth and maintain retention.

We meet regularly with our sales and customer success departments early on in the feature development process. We want to get their insight on specific problems that are impacting growth and customer satisfaction.

From our sales team members, we’re looking for information that will help us support business growth, like:

• What’s currently blocking the top of funnel progress for our product
• Features and functionality our competitors are producing

From our success department, we’re interested in learning:

• What’s causing problems for customers
• What’s missing from our product that our customers would like to have
• Reasons for low user retention, downgrading, or churn

Later in development, we work closely with our tech support team. They provide a real-world point of view on how users will likely interact with our product features, so they can spot potential problems quickly—after all, they know from experience what problems our users typically experience. That makes them invaluable during quality assurance testing.

We may also turn to our internal team to act as stand-ins for our customers. For instance, our customer success department has similar needs to the users of our customer feedback tool—they understand better than anyone which functions would best serve them in their work.