Collaboration
Collaboration is when cross-functional team members come together to make product decisions based on a shared understanding, rather than working in silos or through hand-offs.
What does true collaboration mean in product discovery?
True collaboration means exploring everyone's points of view and using disparate perspectives to create a new combined point of view—not advocating for your own perspective or having opinion battles.
Working on a cross-functional team is genuinely hard. The product trio (product manager, design lead, and tech lead) should collaborate on key product decisions. This doesn't mean the product manager decides, the designer designs, and the engineers code. Instead, these three roles come together to decide the best path to their desired outcome.
Collaboration is not consensus. Teams should get the right people in the room for each decision to move quickly while leveraging the right expertise. You can't include everyone in every decision—you'll move too slowly.
Teams should use visual synthesizers like opportunity solution trees and experience maps to build and maintain shared understanding. Language is vague, and it's easy to think teams are aligned when they're actually thinking different things. Visual tools help teams collaborate more effectively.
Learn more:
- The Best Continuous Discovery Teams Cultivate These Mindsets
- Product Trios: What They Are, Why They Matter, and How to Get Started
Related terms:
- Product Trio
- Shared Understanding
- Opportunity Solution Tree
- Cross-Functional Team
Last Updated: October 25, 2025