This is a great article for people who involve in creating products. Sasha Verhage, a Senior Design Manager, wrote about his experiences on software design – his idea on having collaboration session from the beginning of the process, by inviting different representatives from teams like Sales, Marketing, Product Management, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Web Development, and Engineering to discuss product’s designs and resolve design problems. This process will create buy-in from different teams, encourage early collaborations and identify design flaws at eariler development process.
… Collaboration Sessions are most effective when attendees understand the project goals, the design problem to be solved, the roles and responsibilities of individual team members, and the business context. The facilitator starts the meeting by explaining the purpose of the meeting, the type of contributions encouraged, the ground rules for the session, and the desired outcome. The facilitator also assigns roles: time keepers, notetakers, final arbiters, and scope police (who call attention to scope creep). It might be helpful to assign these roles before the meeting. The product manager (or participant with the most domain knowledge) should provide the team with the historical, business, and competitive context…
Collaboration Sessions: How to Lead Multidisciplinary Teams, Generate Buy-In, and Create Unified Design Views in Compressed Timeframes – [boxes and arrows]
