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At Ocado Technology, our overarching product is the Ocado Smart Platform - the most advanced ecommerce, logistics and fulfilment platform for groceries in the world. Many of our product managers are responsible for the cross-platform change and initiatives that touch several platform products and require involvement across the company.

Strong cross-functional initiatives which run across product areas and teams are central to developing and building innovative solutions at pace. When teams and individuals are connected and communicating well, they can harness talent, tools, and expertise towards a greater goal.

Leading these challenging initiatives requires a few ingredients: focus, skills and discipline. I believe there are a few things you need to get right to be successful:

Four critical steps for cross-functional success

1. It starts with successful change management

A cross-functional initiative isn't just a project - it's change management. Your work has an impact on others, so effective communication is essential. Good communication means proactively engaging, supporting and informing your key players throughout.

Your key players need to understand what the change is about and their role in it. Regular 1:1 meetings with each key player should address their questions, worries, and risks to onboard them.

It requires extra effort to make sure your key players adopt change, but taking the time to engage them shows them you demonstrate and value their input. You might even find you create allies who will help you roll out the change and turn it into reality.

As a single initiative owner, you are not able to execute change. Just be yourself. Be mindful of the human side of your work.

Thoughts:

Read "ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and our Community" by Jeffrey Hiatt
Identify initiative key players, enablers and helpers
Set up 1:1 meetings with key players, listen to them
Ask enablers for support. Give thanks to helpers.

2. Data gives product management an edge

“Living in information” isn’t a weekly status meeting or nice-looking report. It should be a fully populated, up to date record on your tracking tool (e.g. a Jira ticket), so other stakeholders can pull the data they need. After all, each stakeholder is interested in different kinds of data.

A fully populated and up to date record (i.e. Jira initiative ticket, a single source of truth in a given moment in our organisation) is an excellent source of data for automation and automated reports for your peers, supervisors and partners. You can avoid misunderstandings and frustrations by using one reliable source of data.

What’s more, having a meaningful debate without capturing minutes and action points means that all valuable thoughts disappear into the air of the meeting room, and nobody will remember them the next day.

Agile isn’t holding hands and singing “Kumbaya” at the meeting, hoping for a good end. And working in an agile way doesn’t justify a lack of formal discipline, either.

Coordination requires some formal procedures. After all, even dancing a sensual tango requires learning steps.

Thoughts:

Identify stakeholders matrix (Roman Pichler: Strategize, page 51 - Stakeholders Power-Interest grid)
Consider the creation of RACI model for communication
Update information, status, etc., in the tracking tool.

3. Share your vision and boost transparency

Cross-functional initiatives often involve many different stakeholders, and sometimes they can have conflicting ideas or perspectives. Success requires everyone to be on the same page - with a clear, aligned vision of success and a mutual understanding of who will contribute what.

As a participant in many initiatives in my career, I’ve realised that it's difficult for teams to collaborate or cooperate without clear alignment on vision, leading to an “initiative hierarchy”. Initiative without a “direction” can drain energy from participants and lead to poor results.

Fortunately, overcoming this challenge is simple: determine the objectives you want to achieve from the start. When the team understands the overall goals and can see the progress, it will be easier for them to play their part.

Thoughts:

Organise initiatives on unified communications tools and channels such as Slack, and make sure communication is there
Combine 1:1s with key stakeholders with formal documentation and standard workflows
Combine good meeting structure with clear roles, responsibilities and goals
Set up a cross-team Jira board to track all items in the team’s backlog and list risks, issues, and owners.

4. A collaborative culture is a springboard to success

Lastly, an initiative leader can't be successful from an ivory tower - success needs close collaboration with stakeholders and teams.

For me, there is no better way to increase innovation than a culture that actively brings different perspectives, skills and expertise to the table. Learning from teams with different strengths broadens understanding and boosts opportunities to solve issues.

At Ocado Technology, we have a great atmosphere of cohesiveness and collaboration. Our product managers are embedded within cross-functional development teams, setting a clear product vision and strategy to decide what gets built. Ultimately this approach is one of the ways we can achieve more value for the customer and make life easier for our peers.

So what are your thoughts on what makes cross-functional initiatives a success? What tips would you recommend for good practice in the discovery or delivery phase? And from your experience, which steps deliver results?

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Leading cross-functional product management initiatives