Council Post: Why Collaboration Is The Cure To The Tech Dilemma

VP, Design Transformation at InVision, responsible for assessments, learning and leadership forum. Co-author of Product Leadership.

The tech industry has a poor record on ethics. Depending on whom you ask, today’s digital products and platforms promote misinformation and foreign interference in the U.S., perpetuate hate crimes and even genocide, enforce progressive “cancel culture,” drive income inequality and abuse our privacy rights. Oh, and they are a waste of time that can cause car crashes and destroy our posture. 

Yet the tech industry may also be the solution. Reform starts at home. As the vice president for design transformation at a company that works closely with thousands of organizations to help them improve their digital products, I see these challenges from the inside. 

Simply put, organizations ship products that reflect their values and principles.

Digital product design teams at large and small organizations are more powerful than they think. Moving our incentives away from sheer user engagement is beyond any product team’s control, but teams can and should design away some of our biggest failings. They need to truly collaborate, welcome diverse opinions and be nimble enough to change course when a sharp mind raises a concern. 

Diverse, collaborative teams make better decisions and do better work. The Wall Street Journal’s review of top-performing industries and companies found diverse companies got better results. According to McKinsey, companies in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity are 36% more likely to outperform those in the fourth one. Diverse teams make better business decisions than individuals up to 87% of the time. 

It’s clear why. Diverse teams rely on facts rather than assumptions. They can approach problems from different angles, making them more likely to produce innovative solutions and develop products and solutions that are “radically different” than the status quo. They work harder. Critically, they better anticipate problems. They are less likely to give in to “groupthink,” the tendency to ignore potential problems to maintain group cohesion — a dynamic that led to disasters from the Bay of Pigs Invasion to the 2008 Financial Crisis.

As Scientific American put it, “diversity makes us smarter.”

Businesses, then, could use a healthy dollop of groupthink-busting racial, gender and intellectual diversity if we’re going to become more socially responsible. Yet diverse teams do not just happen, and it’s not even as “simple” a fix as hiring more people from diverse backgrounds. That is particularly true of digital product design teams. 

Raising issues is critical. Product creators must ask hard questions at every meeting, like, “How can we make informed decisions about our diverse customer base if there is no diversity in this room?” High-performance teams embed collaboration into their questions, asking, “what assumptions are we each bringing to this conversation?” and “How might we surface our biases before we discuss a solution?”

The key for organizations is setting up a truly collaborative system, one where cross-functional teams are standard. One where teams start projects together, work together and finish together. One where teams invest time in understanding one another’s roles and domains, before diving headlong into the work, and where people have thought through the ethical considerations of a product before it’s too late to turn back. 

The simple inclusion of collaborators from other functional areas goes a long way to signal positive communication. Invite your engineering partner to your design meeting, invite your salespeople to your product conversation and invite yourself to their meetings. Cross-functional communication allows ideas to pollinate one another with new and innovative perspectives. 

Such a process requires a deliberate approach to collaboration, but many companies do not have that in place or even realize they need it. Every week, dozens of leaders tell me collaboration challenges are their biggest concern. 

The tech industry is particularly problematic. Companies believe that good collaborative processes are something they are already supposed to have in place, yet few organizations do. Accordingly, teams act as if they have solved the problem, even when they haven’t. C-suites, despite knowing the problem exists, do not address it. Explicitly addressing it would, perversely, put them at a competitive disadvantage for investment dollars and in the tight tech talent market. (At least, that’s their perception. I’d argue the ROI of fixing the problem is much higher than they think.)

The tech industry must stop pretending. We must admit that we’re all struggling with collaboration and thus with ethics. Choosing an ethical approach in what we design and engineer is an act of humanity. The right path will make our businesses sustainable and our brands enduring. If large and small companies alike admit to themselves, their investors and even the public that they don’t collaborate well and that they are instituting plans to collaborate better, they could begin to fix a problem that society desperately needs them to solve.

This is possible, as we’ve seen firsthand. Our client Motorola Solutions had a familiar problem. Having grown rapidly through an aggressive acquisition strategy, it had 18 product teams using different approaches, tool sets and underlying product principles. Things were messy. Motorola Solutions’s director of UX looked critically at the collaboration between the product teams, assessed their areas of opportunity and risk and was able to map the specific gaps that existed between them.

Motorola set KPIs to address the gaps and incentivized collaborative behavior. Ten months later, assessments showed significant improvements. With better systems in place, Motorola Solutions was better able to adapt to pandemic-driven demand for civil health and safety products. 

Design has always been about understanding the root problems from a consumer’s point of view. Sometimes solving root problems means discarding established ideas. If we are going to have more ethical products and services reach the consumer, we must design and collaborate better. We must encourage active, structured collaboration with a wider and more thoughtful team. 

Perhaps then, digital products can cease to be a haven for hate and can instead lead us to a greater good.

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