When I left my last in-house role, I realized how much I had missed the broad perspective that comes from working as a consultant. It can be so easy as an in-house leader to get caught up in in-house perspectives, in-house thinking, and even in-house language that frames both our problems and their potential solutions.
As a coach, I still see a big part of my value in providing the broad, external perspective on my clients’ organizations and leadership challenges. That same external perspective was what longtime consultant Audrey Crane brought to our conversation on the latest episode of design leadership podcast Finding Our Way—and she confirmed a lot of the patterns I’ve seen in my practice.
One pattern she noticed was a lack of a pattern: Designers and their product partners have almost no shared expectations for the value each side is there to provide.
“I reached out to [about] 40 designers and I said, tell me the best thing that you ever got from a product manager and why you liked it,” she says. “And what came back was total chaos, just all over the place.” There was no consensus among designers about what made their partners valuable contributors.
We theorize a bit in the episode about why that might be, including some important cultural drivers that may have set the tone for both sides of the cultural divide. But my big takeaway was that you can’t take anyone’s expectations for granted when you’re partnering cross-functionally.
Healthy cross-functional relationships require value to be recognized and delivered in both directions. But if you engage your partners with a bunch of unspoken assumptions about what they’re there to do, you might literally be talking past each other.
Clarifying expectations in both directions requires leaders to get curious about their partners’ needs, strengths, and values—and be ready to speak to the same on behalf of their own teams.
This is just one topic in a rich and wide-ranging conversation, which you can find linked below. Thanks Audrey and Peter!
Jesse James Garrett 