7 Ways To Drive Cross-Functional Consensus at Tech Companies
I attended a meetup organized by Product School in New York a few weeks back. The speaker was Aditya Subramaniam, a Product Leader at Ro and he spoke on driving cross-functional consensus at tech companies. I wrote down some of the things I learnt from this brilliant talk. Huge shout-out to Aditya for this presentation and for patiently answering my questions post the talk.Here are my notes:
1. Align Your Goals with Theirs
because Your Goals Aren’t Necessarily Their Goals
Rephrase the conversation so that you’re speaking in their context back to them. Example: “hey I know we want to reduce tech debt – this is how we can accomplish that by doing X”
2. Be transparent about your operational process
Prioritize problems or user needs, not solutions
Ask stakeholders- “How are you prioritizing work for your team?”
As a PM, prioritization is typically based on value added to user vs cost to build it
3. Get to the root of a conflict or problem
It’s important to get to the root cause – companies typically do RCA – root cause analysis for this purpose.
An effective way to do this is Asking why 5 times. The idea is that the answer to the first why will be very surface level, you have to keep asking why a few more times to get the bottom of the problem.
4. Use Facts, and Hit On Emotions
Different people are persuaded in different ways. For some (perhaps most engineers), it may be purely facts and data, for others it could be more of emotion – such as showing empathy for user needs and user experience (think UX designers). The idea here is to have both factual, data-driven arguments as well as the emotional arguments ready to use depending on the individual and the context.
5. Show Empathy
Not just for users, but also for teammates and stakeholders
“If you have to drive consensus among individuals, try to understand what’s driving each of them.”
Sometimes, you have to probe further :
Again, the Five Whys approach can be useful.
6. Influence The Influencer
In every group/org/team, there is one individual or a few key individuals who tend to hold influence over the entire group, and more often than not, if they make a decision or hold a certain view, the group is likely to support it. This could be the engineer manager for a team of engineers, or a very senior engineer who has established a reputation for himself that gives him that influence, or it could even be the guy who organizes events for the team who everyone loves.
The idea here is to figure out who that person or those few people are in the group that you’re targeting and influence them towards your viewpoint. Then they will do the talking for you in the group meeting.
The other important thing here is to do the talking (to this influencer) one on one. Often easier to influence someone in a one on one setting than a group setting.
7. Formalize the group’s decision
Always point out how you came to that decision
“it’s not your decision, not my decision, but the group’s decision”