There is no unique recipe for being success creating products, but despite that fact, collaboration and having a shared knowledge of the product you are building inside your squad are key to success.

So often, people get frustrated with all the articles related to startup success and how difficult the discovery of a product that succeeds is. Instead of focusing on it, I leave you 7 tips to foster collaboration and create shared knowledge in your product squad and establish the backbone for success.

• Promote a psychologically safe working space. This is basic to have all the people working together in a healthy way. You can see my previous article about how the lack of psychological safety at work can affect you.
• Establish a clear mission and OKRs.  Define a brief statement that describes a team’s reason for existing, often explained in the context of the larger organization. Take this mission in mind every time you need to take a decision while defining the OKRs of the team. It’s important that people buy into both, so make them part of the process.
• Revisit the user and customer journeys periodically. One of the goals as a team is to delight our users and customers with the product we build, so revisit the journeys with the team periodically to update and refresh the context and the desires, needs, and pain points of the customers.
• Establish your product trio. If your team doesn’t have a product trio (the 3 amigos), look for partners that participate in product decisions from different points of view: product, design, and technology.
• Create a user story map. A user story map captures the journey a customer takes with the product including activities and tasks they perform with the system. Creating a story map collaboratively ensures team members are on the same page, and also it’s a way to discover uncovered steps in the process and find assumptions made during the ideation of solutions that should be tested. The story map can help you plan the product and release roadmap.
• Use a Design System. A design system is a library where we store all the reusable components and building blocks, including their code and documentation, that allows the team to create a product faster. The modularity of the system permits the creation of basic components or more complex ones by reusing the required components of the library. The design system is established following clear principles and is part of the essence of the product and grows at the same time as the product. Part of the benefits that provides are:
  • Establish coherence to the product esthetic and homogeneous user experience.
  • Reduce the development time of prototypes and UI for front-end developers.
• Get fun together. You get an increased uptake of endorphins when you’ve been laughing and those are the body’s natural painkillers. Laughing reduces stress and reinforces the feeling of being part of the group.