Summary
Teams Work How People Work You’re part of a cross-functional team dedicated to creating an amazing product experience. You’re an essential piece of a larger puzzle. But how does your piece mesh with all the others? This first-of-its-kind interactive session will blend improvisation, audience participation, panel-style discussion, and more to explore the inner dynamics of cross-functional enterprise teams. We’ll illustrate a few best (and probably a few worst) practices, and you’ll walk away with a new found understanding for your colleagues and a renewed sense of ways to make the fit between your different roles clearer and more effective. Participating in this session: - Christian Crumlish, Head of Product, 7 Cups - Jacqui Frey, Director of Design Operations, MailChimp - Kristina Halvorson, Founder, CEO, Brain Traffic - Jamie Janssen, Research Manager for Shared Rides, Uber Technologies, Inc - Ramya Mahalingam, Associate Design Director, McKinsey & Company - Adam Penly, Lead Frontend Architect, Capital One
Key Insights
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Christian Krumbles highlights that product management often leans heavily on business expertise but must balance with design and engineering.
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Ramya Mahalindam explains that design teams are frequently understaffed, limiting time for prototyping and final polish.
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Jackie describes project management as an interdependent ecosystem connecting vision and execution, often spread across functions.
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Adam notes engineers excel at execution but often lack deep connection to user experience, creating a gap to bridge.
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Jamie Jansen shares the importance of specialized researchers (e.g., dog behaviorists) to authentically understand unique users.
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Christina Halverson reveals that content is often decentralized and inconsistent across teams, requiring leadership to empower better practice.
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Workshop sessions are valuable to align assumptions and give partners a voice, improving collaboration and product outcomes.
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Product, design, and engineering often experience tension between quick feature delivery and the need for research- and user-driven iteration.
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Directors struggle with balancing centralized and distributed teams, causing ambiguity in leadership and goals across products.
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The Invocation improv game helps cross-disciplinary teams discover deeper shared meaning and empathy beyond daily work tasks.
Notable Quotes
"Product management can lean into the business comfort zone, but great product balances design, tech, and business - Christian Krumbles."
"Designers want to prototype more but just don’t have the time or team capacity - Ramya Mahalindam."
"Project management is about connecting everyone around a shared vision and delivering branded tech with creative constraints - Jackie."
"Engineers are good at executing strategy but need better connectivity to UX to be fully part of the process - Adam."
"Some people misunderstand or misrepresent our end user—the dog—and we have to bridge that gap carefully - Jamie Jansen."
"Content is being produced all over the place with no cohesion; leadership needs to recognize content as the fuel of experience - Christina Halverson."
"Sometimes product managers want research to just check boxes, but to evolve, we need to learn, not just validate - Angelica Moreno."
"Designers are creative, but product managers help ground decisions with constraints and requirements - Peter Burstner."
"Everything is about compromise and sometimes disagreeing to disagree, building half one idea and half the other - Christian Krumbles."
"Our invocation game helps us see the product as community, connection, and a voice for the unspoken - panel consensus."
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