Cross functional collaboration: Better Together

The challenge:

Gone are the days after emerging from weeks of planning, preparing, and conducting customer research, the research team’s readout took place in an hour long meeting and extensive multi-page document and slide deck. Often, these meetings bring up surprises and insights that could have been more useful if delivered much earlier to the team rather than later.

And the truth is, for teams that are crunched for time and remote or distributed (that’s most of us, at this point):

a) There is little appetite for team members to read a long research document or absorb a lengthy slide deck from research in a formal readout

b) Too much time goes by between starting and finishing a research study

c) There are already too many meetings that eat into production time

Some solutions:

Here are two fun and engaging rituals we established to help our team gain a greater sense of the user/customer problem we are solving as a cross-functional team.

Ritual 1: Continuous Sharing

One ritual or habit we started internally is continuous sharing using different types of media. This allows different kinds of learners to consume information when they want to and how they want to. The primary value for your cross-functional team here is convenience.

1a) Continuous Sharing: Short text debriefs

After each interview, share top-line debriefs post-interviews to make it easier for the team to access research. These simple debriefs can be shared on Slack (the virtual office), enabling any channel member to remember bits of research and stay engaged with research.

Just a quick:

Hello! Today we learned X…Main highlights from the sessions are below:
“A good headline quote from the participant”
• [Finding]
• [Finding]
• [Finding]

The conversations and follow up questions as well as interest is immediate!

1b) Continuous Sharing: Visual/Audio artifacts

Recording tools like Loom and remote white boarding tools like FigJamor Miro, or Mural, help visualize and share insight, findings, or thoughts that are more complex and need visual or narrative support. Using tools like Loom to record a virtual walk through of a visual artifacts or whiteboard diagrams that can be shared and consumed asynchronously.

What continuous sharing can look like over time. Lots of easy lift, micro-touch points that add up to more than the sum of its parts.

Ritual 2: Watch Party FTW

Who wants to watch 10 hours+ of interview recordings and take copious notes 🥱?

Instead, curated watch parties collect the most salient moments across all interviews and condense them into one hour of watching and discussion. Think of them as a series of short, topical highlight reels followed by lightning-quick discussions. The primary values here for your cross-functional team are speed and engagement. And because watch parties balance both passive and active forms of participation and don’t require any preparation from the attendees, they can be a fun, laid back way of socializing customer findings and helping bring issues to life.

Pro-tip: For creating highlight reels, we recommend using UserTesting.com, as they have great ‘clipping’ and ‘highlight reel editor’ tools. As you collect clippings, create a hashtag so your collection of clips are easily retrievable by relevant topics and groups. This will make creating the highlight reel easy and convenient.

Bonus: User Researchers get a bit of a lift in synthesis by crowdsourcing it via the watch party 🎉

A typical watch party could break down into the following agenda outline:

I. Introduction, purpose, and overview ✨

a) Talk about the study, its interviewees, etc. 👥

b) Sticky note rules 📝 (One color for an idea, another for a pain point, another for a question)

II. Introduce a theme and supportive sub-topics

a)Play a highlight reel while attendees watch and contribute sticky notes as reactions 📺

a) Short discussion of sticky notes and reels 💬

[repeat step 2 if there are more themes]

III. Break 🏝️

IV. Introduce a theme and supportive sub-topics

a) Play a highlight reel while attendees watch and contribute sticky notes as reactions 📺

b) Short discussion of sticky notes and reels 💬

[repeat step 4 if there are more themes]

V. Wrap up 🎬

a) General Discussion and finalize next steps

Note: We received feedback about the discussion section being the most crucial part of the party, so don’t skimp on time spent on this area!

Another bonus: It’s also a way to get to know your remote teammates through a shared activity and is a low-stakes environment to let quieter / more introverted team members to speak.

Reactions to Watch Parties we’ve had:

“Incredible, incredible job to all of you. That was beyond energizing and I can’t wait for all the innovation to come thanks to y’alls research!”

Or

“I learned a lot- I had no idea about [X, Y, Z] issues”

Or

“Great job! Really enjoyed the format and gave so much more in-depth understanding”

And the general Slack messages we received about how excited and empowered our team members felt 💪

Try it out and let us know how it went!

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