Healthy conflict: fuel for collaboration

As we all know, R&D teams need to have good collaboration. As an executive that has been an engineering manager, a product manager and a design manager, I have been in all three main stakeholder positions within R&D teams. Along the way, I've learned a few things about how collaboration works.

TLDR; Great collaboration requires a lot of conflict. Hear me out.

A lot of organizations visualize teams as "3 in a box". I prefer a triangle metaphor. To maintain the shape of a triangle, each position must provide good tension against the other two.

The 3 primary positions of R&D teams

The best R&D teams have cross-functional product teams that have focus areas. While the groups may have different titles, most have 3 distinct areas of Engineering, Product Management, and Product Design. Each focus area/stakeholder provides a fundamental requirement to delivering a product. And each stakeholder needs to collaborate with each other to deliver a product.

The question is: What does healthy collaboration look like? Well, it looks a lot like conflict.

Visualize healthy conflict as a triangle

The 3 cross-functional stakeholders have different names: the trifecta, the product trio, 3 in a box, EPD. I like to think of the three focus areas/stakeholders (PM, Eng and Design) as points on an equilateral triangle. In order to maintain the shape of an (equilateral) triangle, each point of the triangle needs to provide tension against the other two points. If you don't have tension against the others, the triangle collapses or takes a weird shape. The tension here is created by healthy conflict that occurs between the stakeholders.

Healthy Conflict between PM, Engineering and Design While each stakeholder has it's strengths, each must also need to be cross-checked by others to ensure that their strengths are tested and maximized. Here are some concrete examples:

• Engineers make things happen. They create code to make things work. Without them, everything is only an idea. But engineers can sometimes want to cut corners to get something out the door. Designers must provide feedback to say "this is not a good experience", or "xyz is confusing to the user in the following ways". Product managers can indicate when a solution doesn't provide enough value to the user, or indicate market needs that impact a timeline, like trying to get items out before a big release or for an externally-driven timeframe.

• Designers excel at bringing a user's perspective to the organization. Designers can provide good perspective information through user research and represent how it might possibly work through user flows. But if the user needs are unchecked, designers can also advocate for details or aesthetics that don't really matter. Product Managers can to help designers keep in mind the essential requirements (and timelines) that need to be met to maximize value to the business. And engineers can help designers understand when their designs cannot be implemented technically, or if it can be implemented faster in another way.

• Product managers bring the organization perspective - what are the business goals and market demands? Because product managers have to deal with customer-specific issues, designers can push back if a product manager is over-representing one single voice/loud customer as a "market driver", and bring perspective back to the entire user problem. And because Product Managers are incentivized to get products into the hands of the customer as quickly as possible, engineers can help identify if a timeline is unrealistic or if the product has not undergone enough QA testing before it is released.

Healthy conflict requires: Equality

In order for a triangle to maintain its shape, each point must provide the same amount of tension against the other two points. Product Managers, Engineers and Designers must all have the same amount of clout in order for this to happen. This means that discovery, decision-making, and reviews must have representatives from all three focus areas to be valid.

Healthy conflict requires: Trust

In order for conflict to be "healthy", a large amount of trust is required: trust that people will do what they say they will do, trust that people have everyone's best interest at heart, trust in others to give you difficult feedback. When trust exists, people on the team are enabled to put their craziest ideas out (because sometimes the craziest ideas are the most innovative. But they also have the ability to admit when they are wrong, so that an alternate route can be taken.

Healthy conflict requires: Training

Because many people don't often don't feel comfortable engaging in healthy conflict, I often teach this skill to my team members. But that's a different post...