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If you want to be successful with products in 2025, internal communication is key. For effective revenue growth and customer satisfaction, foster strong strategic planning and a culture of collaboration amongst your teams.
“Great companies set goals for the whole company, not for specific teams,” says Rafael Oliveira, group product manager at PartnerStack. “It’s important that business leadership communicates priorities and how each area can work together toward those goals.”
In this article, we will:
- Share learnings for more effective cross-functional team collaboration with product teams
- Explain how it leads to better business and company growth.
Why collaboration is crucial in product management
Customers have diverse needs and SaaS products require frequent updates and improvements. Product management is expected to collaborate and involve all teams in a shared vision to stay on top of those customer — and partner — needs. Not only does this streamline processes, improve brand collaboration and encourage better conflict resolution, but working together also leads to more successful launches and updates and creates happier customers who are less likely to churn.
When Oliveira evaluates products, he looks at how his concerns align with company priorities and how other teams like customer success, partnerships and sale, can engage with what he’s working on to enhance overall impact.
“The key component of cross-collaboration is that it’s not product-goal, partnership-goal and sales-goal. There’s a company goal above all and everyone is part of it,” he says.
Related: Your guide to setting effective SaaS OKR strategies.
What does effective collaboration look like?
Effective collaboration starts at the top, with leadership communicating company priorities and shared values. From there, Oliveira says a good practice is to have a weekly or bi-weekly check-in meeting to evaluate progress against specific metrics.
“It’s not always about celebrating the wins,” he adds. “It’s also learning about things that are not going well and taking action to make the needed changes to achieve those goals.”
While it’s important to rely on synchronous communication, Oliveira believes asynchronous communication through tools like team Slack channels or recording and posting meetings for other teams to engage with can also be beneficial.
Related: Fostering better cross-team collaboration between sales and partnerships.
Understanding the role of product in cross-functional collaboration
Product managers play an important role in bringing teams together because they’re responsible for collecting data and feedback across all departments. Interacting with the customer and soliciting customer feedback is just the beginning if you want a broad view of the ecosystem, product and market.
Who do product managers collaborate with?
Product managers interact with various stakeholders, including customer support, customer success, sales, marketing, engineering and design. They should have conversations that solicit feedback, gather different perspectives surrounding product usage and engagement — and lean on those conversations when rationalizing prioritization.
“A lot of departments don’t understand how things are prioritized for product,” says Oliveira. “This provides an opportunity for product teams to explain and rationalize how things are prioritized and what influences a road map so everyone is on the same page about what is being delivered — but also what is not being delivered.”
Best practices for collaborating with product teams
There are several strategies for developing effective collaboration with product teams and driving streamlined product development, cross-functional alignment and effective go-to-market strategies.
Keep communication consistent and transparent
Develop a blend of synchronous and asynchronous communication opportunities to encourage regular feedback between departments. Use scheduled meetings to measure key performance metrics and improve on weak areas, but also prioritize tools that allow stakeholders to ask questions or learn more about what other departments are working on.
Use project management tools for visibility
Oliveira likes collaborative tools like Gong to collect feedback and check the transcriptions of customer calls. A combination of Slack and product boards like Trello or Jira are also beneficial to keep tasks and updates visible for all teams to track. Making the path shorter or easier for people to submit product feedback will always solicit more communication.
Involve product teams early in the process
Product managers typically work on something that will be delivered soon, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need to know what will happen in the next quarter or two. Involving teams earlier in the process allows everyone to work in sync and plan. It also helps teams to pivot faster when roadmaps change.
Focus on the customer journey
Oliveira says customers are at the centre of everything and need to feel heard and valued. To do that it’s key to prioritize the customer journey, listen to their feedback, understand their challenges. “Direct collaboration with customers is super important,” says Oliveira. “While we collect a lot of feedback from internal teams, it doesn’t replace having a chat with customers.”
How to measure the success of product collaborations
There are qualitative and quantitative ways to measure successful product collaborations before, during and after a product launch.
Using KPIs to track collaboration
Several KPIs can measure the effectiveness of collaboration, including time-to-market, revenue and production adoption rates. Product managers can also track certain customer behaviours that indicate performance metrics like churn or revenue. Oliveira suggests reverse engineering those behaviours to see the earliest indications of successful collaboration.
Gathering regular feedback from teams
Internal feedback is equally important in gauging success so set meetings, establish feedback tools and then communicate that information back to the team. “Having that feedback loop about what’s going on encourages people to provide more feedback,” says Oliveira. “If I’m sharing feedback and don’t know if it’s being used, I get discouraged to share more.”
You might also like: Why testing and learning is an effective tactic for B2B SaaS.
Building long-term collaboration with product teams
To implement long-term collaboration in your business, fostering trust, alignment and communication should be a priority. Make all team members feel valued and as though they’re contributing to company goals through consistent feedback loops, educational opportunities and overall transparency.
Encourage continuous learning and development
Oliveira believes company culture plays a factor in learning and development. But to be agile with a product, it’s essential to release quickly, learn from it and iterate. He says that research is important — but warns against falling into analysis paralysis in which you never gather real-world data or learning experience.
“The first version will never be perfect, but that’s part of the whole process,” he says. “Have that expectation management with customers and internal teams and learn from it.”
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