At Nashville Software School, we provide our students and graduates who are still on the search for their first job in tech with opportunities to dive deeper and continue their education while on the job hunt. These graduates are referred to as Seekers.

Collaboration is at the heart of Music City. Songwriters collaborate with each other to tell a story. Artists collaborate with songwriters to share that story with an audience. Companies like iHeartRadio collaborate with artists to bring those stories/songs to the masses. So it’s only fitting that Taka Hamada, UX Lead at iHeartRadio and graduate of our UI & UX for Digital Product Design course, stopped by a recent Seekers meeting to talk about collaborating across teams.

Collaboration takes many forms. Our students are able to practice collaborating among developers or data analysts during group projects, but there are a lot more people to collaborate with and ways to collaborate once they’re working in the field. “It’s very hard to have a one-size-fits-all [approach to collaboration],” shares Taka. “[So] I'm not gonna preach what the best way to collaborate is because I think it really varies across organizations. [It depends on] how many people you work with, who you work with, and how those people like to work. But I can give you an idea of how I do it and how I've done it with other teams from a UX designer lens.” 

The Benefits of Collaboration

Taka has collaborated with teams of all sizes and across many disciplines and has found several benefits to collaboration for both companies and the people collaborating.

• Team and relationship building - If you feel isolated on the job, collaboration can help you build relationships on your team and across the organization. This is especially true if you’re working remotely.
• Project Alignment - Starting a project all on the same page is great, but things can change mid project. Knowing what others are thinking will help you stay aligned with the team throughout the project.
• Transparency - Open and honest communication between teams and/or team members can provide benefits beyond a single project. 
• Sense of Ownership - “People like to create and contribute to meaningful work. That’s the one thing that motivates them. [You may be a developer, but] you have way more value than that. You have ideas,” says Taka.
• Different Perspectives - Everyone has a perspective. Their opinions and ideas matter. That’s why it’s important to try different approaches to collaboration so that even the most reserved person in the group feels comfortable providing input. (More on this below.)
• Innovation - Collaboration can speed up innovation as new ideas emerge and the team builds on those ideas.
• Personal Growth - Collaborating with others helps develop your soft skills. You can also learn other areas of the business from those you’re collaborating with.
• Successful Products - “You have to make a successful product or a better product than you had before. The best way, perhaps, to drive that is through collaboration,” shares Taka.

Keys to Successful Collaboration

Collaboration comes with challenges, but there are things you can do from the beginning to set your team up for success.

Set Clear Goals

When collaborating on any project, you should always have goals, requirements and/or expectations. The goals should be well defined so that there’s a clear pathway to success. Collaborating to build these goals can help you avoid blind spots and misalignment, and ensure that realistic expectations are set.

Strong Communication Promotes Alignment

A common phrase heard at iHeartRadio is, “Communication is great. Over communication is sometimes even better.” Just because a team was in the same meeting, doesn’t mean that everyone left with the same understanding. Strong communication and follow up will help reduce misalignment.

Default to Transparency to Avoid Blind Spots

Strong communication also creates transparency and helps teams avoid blind spots. “The absence of information is hard to sometimes grasp. Because you [don’t know what you] don't know. And there are other people in the organization that can help you with that,” explains Taka. On the flip side, make sure you’re sharing all the pertinent information you have when collaborating on a project.

Caution: Blind spots can occur even with collaboration.

Bring in the Non-experts

“I've worked with engineers that love contributing to design,” recalls Taka. “It's fantastic to have those minds come together and solve a design problem or a problem that UX was working on, because everybody has an idea, and sometimes the person that is ‘the expert’ for this, doesn’t have the best idea. Sometimes the people around you have even better ideas. And those are the things that you want to unlock [with collaboration].”

Provide Realistic Expectations

Collaborating will help you set realistic expectations on a project. One area where teams often get tripped up in over promising results is how fast a project can be completed. If a timeline is set without the experts in the room to answer how long it will take, the current capacity of the team, and other projects that may be pushed aside for something urgent, you can end up with unrealistic expectations.

What does collaboration typically look like?

Collaboration has many forms. It can happen synchronously or asynchronously. It can be ad hoc, in a meeting, or in documentation. Figma recently conducted a survey on collaboration. Here are a few ways respondents identified that they collaborate.

• Give feedback that supports iteration
• Troubleshoot issues in real time
• Generate divergent ideas through brainstorming
• Reflect on what’s working and make adjustment
• Respond to ad-hoc messages

As mentioned earlier, It’s important to remember that not everyone likes to collaborate in the same way. Some people enjoy workshopping ideas to collaborate. Others prefer the formality of meetings. Some prefer asynchronous ways to communicate a big idea, like email, or creating a list of all the things that need to be accomplished for a project through a messaging app like Slack.

“I’ve done a lot of hack week or design sprint projects and you can sense that not everyone is comfortable with that type of collaboration. So it’s important to try out other types of collaboration to see what works best for your team. It’s never going to be 100% the best way, but there’s always something that you can experiment with,” explains Taka.

Recommended Resource: Gamestorming. Try out different exercises or icebreakers to help your team work together to produce something in harmony, whether that is ideating or solving a problem.

Who should you collaborate with?

As a UX designer, Taka collaborates with product managers, developers, analysts, researchers, customer support, designer, marketing, subject matter experts, third-party vendors, and executive stakeholders. Collaborating with positions throughout the company helps prevent the siloing of information. Silos are one of the biggest things that hinder collaboration.

What if you’re a one person team? Taka has been the only designer in a company and shares that there are always others you can collaborate with: “You’ll always have a stakeholder. There is always someone that knows something you don’t know. Your collaborator doesn’t need a special title. It could even be a user of the product you’re working on. If they know something you don’t know and you know something they don’t know, that’s a valuable collaborator.”

Regardless of who you’re collaborating with, the most important thing is to listen to the perspectives of the other person or people. Don’t just listen to their perspectives on the project or problem you’re trying to solve, but also listen to their perspectives on how they collaborate best.

Paint points in collaboration

Not everything is rosy in collaboration. You may end up with too many opinions, thoughts or ideas that go different directions. It can be very hard to facilitate a collaborative meeting and end it with a solid direction. The opposite of that is low contribution which could be due to using the wrong form of collaboration for that group. “Sometimes the method in which you wanted to collaborate may have not been the best for the crowd,” cautions Taka.

If you have a team or company that promotes collaboration, you can run into meeting fatigue or information overload. If you’re a part of collaborative meetings back-to-back or context switching throughout the day, you may not bring your best ideas. Try mixing up the ways you collaborate so they are not all meetings.

Meetings can also be a challenge to schedule and facilitate, especially with a large group. Make sure that your collaboration sessions have all the needed parties, but not so many that you can’t facilitate a thoughtful discussion with an actionable end point.

Finally, anytime you get a group with different opinions together, there is room for conflict. Lean into the keys for successful collaboration we shared above and make sure everyone has a safe space to share their ideas.

Whether you're collaborating with classmates on a project, asking for input from your new colleagues as you build new relationships, or collaborating on a song down on Broadway, you can apply these keys to success and try out the different forms of collaboration. Tell us how it goes in the comments! Happy collaborating!

For more on collaboration, check out Figma’s recent research.