Cross-team and Cross-functional Collaborations

Engineering teams require a high degree of collaboration to deliver most projects. The level of collaboration needed in a team can differ, but no team works in isolation. Engineering managers are the face of their team. They are usually the owners of most of the collaborations of their team.

Collaborations can be with other engineering teams, product teams, or design teams. They can be your customers (they receive a product or service from you) or your team can be their customers (you receive their product or service). They can also be your partners working together towards shared goals. This communication is called cross-functional or XFN collaboration.

There will be upward or downward dependencies while working with other partners. Upward dependencies are the ones on which your team is dependent and downward dependencies are the ones where your partners are dependent on your team. Managing complex XFN collaborations is a skill that all managers must possess.

During the interview process, you are expected to demonstrate that you can handle and lead complex collaborations.

The interviewer will focus on one or a few of the following areas:

Communication with stakeholders

As a manager, you should communicate effectively with all stakeholders. The format of your communication is also important. For major partners and stakeholders, you should be conducting meetings on a regular cadence. With some partners, you may need to wait on a weekly basis, and with some partners, every quarter or every half is fine too. You should know how to set up these communication channels effectively.

You can make use of asynchronous communication either by sharing status updates, making announcements, or sending emails via communication channels used by the company. Communication channels can be email, Facebook Workplace, Slack, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, or any other technology used in your company.

Another important aspect of communication is sharing dependencies with the right folks at the right time. Whenever there is a change in plans that might affect upstream or downstream dependencies, it is important to let the other teams know as soon as possible.

Suppose you estimated a project would be completed in the first quarter, but it got apparent in the middle of the first quarter that it is very unlikely for the team to meet the deadline. You have to communicate this to the teams dependent on the project’s completion so you can work with them and find some workaround. Similarly, an upstream team might be working on a feature just for your team, and the project that depends on the feature gets dropped. In this case, timely communication can save the upstream team from the wasted effort and help them reprioritize.

Managing conflicting priorities

It is not uncommon for engineering managers to manage conflicting priorities. Suppose that Team A has an upstream dependency on Team B. Team A might think their work is the most important in the company and expect to be prioritized without knowing Team B’s other projects. Team A’s project might not seem as important to Team B, or it might be the case that Team B simply does not have the context to understand why Team A’s work is so important. An EM must navigate these conflicting priorities and direct their efforts to the right tasks at the right ...