Talk: Let's build sustainable and empathetic cross-functional teams

Talk description

Title:	Let's build sustainable and empathetic cross-functional teams
Short synopsis:	Product Management Twitter has been buzzing over the "Balanced Team" pattern lately. Balanced teams, or cross-functional teams, blur the lines between product manager, designer, engineer, and tester, so that everyone can contribute more organically. But how do you get there, when you're starting with traditionally-defined roles? In this talk, I'll cover how we nurture cross-functional teams, what philosophies and rituals support this outcome, and how to measure your success. Max size: 500 chars
Long synopsis (optional):	In the product management world, over the last few years people like John Cutler and Janice Fraser have been talking a lot about cross-functional teams, or the "Balanced Team" pattern. Cross-functional teams blur the lines between product manager, designer, engineer, and tester, so that all individuals can contribute more organically to the success of the team. At Pivotal R&D, it's been a gradual, challenging journey to build individual buy-in for this new way of working, but the rewards have been tremendous for the teams that have driven towards this vision. Specific talking points that I'd like to cover: 1. Psychological safety is really important. This is a baseline for functional participation, and you can't build a healthy organization without establishing space to talk and give feedback around psychological safety. 2. Feedback mechanisms are more than just a recurring calendar event telling everyone to email each other. It requires example-setting at the leadership level, clearly endorsed processes, and concrete definitions of what constitutes actionable, specific, and kind feedback. 3. Ownership and responsibility are not the same thing. Individuals can and should still own their expertise, but it is acceptable and in fact beneficial to decouple ownership for an outcome from execution of discrete activities. 4. Context pushing vs. pulling. How does leadership fit into the picture? When your team is high-functioning, a pleasant side effect is that they'll be more autonomous to act on customer feedback, and you'll find yourself spending significantly less on managerial overhead. 5. Behaviours I've observed that tend to inhibit cross-functional culture development, including the "Expert Consultant" team lead, who wants to have information pulled from them, rather than participating fully. 6. What heuristics can you use to measure the health and maturity of the team? One of them is, "Can the PM go on vacation for 2 weeks and come back to a healthy, active backlog?" I also create a lot of art related to tech concepts, and will be putting lots of original illustrations and doodles in this talk! More information about where my brain is here: http://www.deniseyu.io/images/balanced-team.png Max size: 5000 chars
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