Collaborating towards Shared Goals
Overview
Teams don’t work on products in a vacuum. One small-balanced team is typically charged with solving a specific, related set of problems for a specific persona. However, their work often interweaves with other teams, which requires coordinated product releases.
OPPORTUNITY
Opportunity: Help streamline work when multiple teams are working towards the same objective. Why? So teams can avoid becoming blocked and get reach their objectives faster.
“If there’s a bottleneck, I need to know that.”
Solution: Create an experience in which teams can share groups of related work (epics). Help them visualize dependencies and receive alerts when they are blocking one another’s progress.
Creating a dependency
Designing a solution took several iterations, because there was a lot of variance in:
how “integrated” teams prefer their backlogs to be,
what level/scope of information they want, and
how they want to visualize shared work and dependencies.
Several iterations of shared work & dependencies designs
“If there’s an epic that is blocking other teams, I need to know how I can help the team to be successful.”
After several rounds of iterations and user testing, we discovered the following:
PMs don’t want other PMs to have control over their backlogs, so they should be loosely coupled, rather than integrated. They want the tool to notify them when there’s a problem, and then they want to have a conversation with the other team.
Different personas want different levels/scope of information, so we need to provide two different experiences: one for the portfolio-level and another for the team-level. Portfolio-level users want to understand what’s happening across many teams, how work is feeding up to org-level outcomes, and which teams need help from leadership. Team-level users want to ensure that developers are not blocked by dependencies on another team.
Dependencies can get complicated, and diagrams make it harder for users to know “now what?”. Instead, users gravitated towards the simplicity of “epic cards” with mission-critical information and clear alerts.
Final design