Hello and welcome to the Bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance, and we're going to do one final deep dive on our trends report. We talked about four really significant trends. Those that really touched upon this notion of collaboration. And for the first time we really went deep in our annual trends report on this idea of collaboration.

What's interesting is we actually. We usually only touch on emerging technology and issues with very specific to technology or usability kind of hardcore product stuff. But this time we went broader because we feel like after 2020, and that whole work from home thing, like collaboration is back on the table, it's ready to be [00:01:00] discussed.

And so what I want to do is a special edition. Of the show for you today. I want to go deep into how we can think about collaboration. Let's take a moment to capture all of those ideas, reflect on them and see how perfecting collaboration is essential for creating an agile mindset in the digital age.

All right. I'm going to do a quick little context here before we look at the actions that we can take on collaboration. Don't forget. Here we are. 2021. We now have customers demanding Omni channel direct to customer experiences, but also on the other side, employees want to be able to work from home and have entertainer hybrid way of working.

So what happens is technology teams plug together all sorts of platforms from CRM, CMS, payments, ERP, you name it, everything's getting pointed together. And it's a little bit of house of cards that leads to complexity. And it's not only complexity from a platform. [00:02:00] Point of view. There's also complexity on the people's side because Hey, who's the systems architect who knows how this whole thing works together.

So what we have is this obligation to get technology into all the different touch points, to be everywhere for everyone. And it's hard, right? That's the pressure that product teams are under right now because they're serving more stakeholders than ever serving more platforms than ever. Stuff just got complex and it's changing real fast.

And that's why the agility mindset is the essential thing to have. If you want to survive in the digital age, in that knowledge worker age, otherwise you're going to get snowed down by all that complexity. So I want to now take a moment now that we kind of set the scene. We've got the complexity conundrum.

We know we have to be agile. We're going to get that tech under control, but equally, if, if you know another word for tech is all the platforms [00:03:00] need to be under control. Then it's also on the other side of things. It's the people who run that. Have to be under control, have to have clarity, have to have a lot of different things.

And one of the biggest secret ingredients for getting your technology and your products under control is to have people working well. And to have people collaborating, you know, for me, collaboration is when one plus one equals three. When two people get together, you get an unexpectedly good result. Like, wow.

Because two heads are better than one. So for me, that's, that's my pitch for collaboration, but let's look at like four key segments. It's almost a little architecture of collaboration. Let's look at what they are and let's look at what we can do in each of them to get our teams collaborating well. So they can be more agile so they can solve complex problems.

And Hey, in the end of the day, they can go out into the world and put a product that's worth building that [00:04:00] social problems for its users. Okay. So there's four things that I mentioned. Here's what they are. So if you want to collaborate, here's the magic four things that make up collaboration, alignment, learning, engagement, and connection.

So I'm going to dig into each of those and give you a quick recap on what you can do to get your team collaborating better. Number one, alignment. Well, for me, the saying here is to get the band singing the same song because actually one of the interesting things is every team, every business has a discreet unique way of working and thinking.

But actually I challenge you. Where is that written down? Just pause for a moment. I want you to think where have we written down in our company? How we think, what models do we use and how do we work? And what you're going to find is invariably, it's never written down. It's [00:05:00] not written down, it's just done.

It's just the culture of the organization. So this is particularly challenging. If you want to get aligned with new people on a team, There's no textbook to read. There's no playbook to pick up that says, this is how we think we use these to three different models and here's how we work. So if it's not written down, if it's through the doing, what are the things we can actually do to help people get aligned?

Well, what we discovered in our trends report is there's two big things you should connect and be with. Your fellow band members, your team members daily, do not enter the estimate, the power of daily connection. It's something that came up a lot in the report, but in surveys and interviews with all these great product experts from around the world, definitely industries daily get together.

So you might think about a standup or a scrum, or even just a sink. This is essential. The frequency [00:06:00] needs to be daily. If you want to particularly help new people. Understand how you think of work, or if you really want to kind of bring people back in the tent, as they say, you need to reconnect with them and to remind them of how we think and work.

Now, the other big thing that we learned is it needs to be guided. And what I mean by that is you need to do a bit of show and tell. But then you need to start transferring. So don't make the mistake of, Oh, I'll just do it. Cause it's quickest. Maybe you do it once or twice. Maybe you do it once or twice and then give a voice over to your colleague.

And then you might say, Hey, why don't you give it a go, I'll be right here. So if you want people to truly get it, how you think and how you work as a product team, then it should be daily rituals. With a lot of guided practice. There's no shortcuts here. I'm afraid. If you want to have people aligned, if you want to have them connected, there's no magic pill.

They can take it's daily [00:07:00] rituals with guided practice. That's how you get people singing. The same song. Okay. So that's alignment. That was number one, number two, the second part of the world of collaboration. So first of all, you're aligned now you need to engage. That's. The second piece engagement starts with putting your teammates before yourself serve your teammates.

And the first thing you can do there is welcome everyone. And every single idea that they want to bring to the table. Because if you want people to be engaged, this is actually where it starts and I'll show you how it works. So you need to drag, kicking and screaming people into the room and give them a voice, let them share their ideas.

Welcome them. Don't criticize don't judge celebrate the contribution, all people and all ideas are welcome. This is really fundamental. [00:08:00] Then once that has happened. And all the ideas are up on the wall, invite everyone to challenge those ideas, improve those ideas, own those ideas, because here's, here's the real secret with engagement.

If I've had a chance to challenge and improve the ideas about what we're do...