How to align your teams

A well-defined Product Process increases your products time to market while providing value to users and improving product quality.

The concept of a cross-functional team is well known to almost everyone; however, for many people, it is more of a conceptual framework than a reality. We were introduced to the concept of "three in a box" while working at PayPal. It was revolutionary for me at the time. Writing 60-page-long, fully defined product requirements documents that ended up in my or some engineers' desk drawers and were rarely built in reality changed my relationship with product management.

Since then, I've worked in a broad range of environments that allowed me to see good and bad examples of great product processes that hindered or fostered great collaborations and thus had a direct impact on an organization’s alignment, speed, and success.

Step 1 - A mapped process.

Have you ever heard of the Double Diamond concept? The two diamonds represent the processes of delving deeper into an issue (divergent thinking) and then taking focused action (convergent thinking).Given that a designer rarely works alone, but…