Shared Understanding
Shared understanding is when cross-functional team members have a common knowledge base and collective perspective about their business, customers, and potential solutions—enabling them to make collaborative product decisions from the same starting point.
Why does shared understanding matter?
Too often, product teams disagree or resort to hand-offs because they don't do the work to reconcile their different perspectives. Each person brings unique expertise: product managers often represent the business voice, designers the customer perspective, and engineers what's feasible with technology. When teams argue over which voice gets precedence instead of integrating these perspectives, they fall into opinion battles that stall progress.
Shared understanding requires that teams integrate this knowledge and combine these voices. When teams work from shared understanding, it becomes much easier to agree on the best path forward. Disagreements shift from being based on personal preferences to being based on different interpretations of customer needs—and those differences can be quickly resolved through testing.
How do teams build and maintain shared understanding?
Language is vague. It's easy to think teams are aligned when really each person is thinking something slightly different. This is where visual synthesis becomes critical.
Teams can build and maintain shared understanding by developing skills as visual synthesizers. Maps force teams to get more concrete and specific. They help make implicit knowledge explicit and visible to everyone.
Different types of maps serve different purposes:
- Experience maps help teams align around customer context
- Opportunity solution trees help teams align around the best path to the desired outcome
- Story maps help teams align around specific solutions
These are living documents. The maintenance work is just as important as the creation work. Teams that invest in building and maintaining a shared understanding find that their decisions go more smoothly and they become truly collaborative teams.
Learn more:
- The Best Continuous Discovery Teams Cultivate These Mindsets
- Core Concept: Collaborative Decision-Making in a Product Trio
Related terms:
- Alignment
- Collaboration
- Product Trio
- Experience Map
- Opportunity Solution Tree
Last Updated: October 25, 2025