Parth Prafulbhai Sonara is a Product Manager at BlackRock with a background in Aerospace Engineering and experience across three continents. He transitioned from drone manufacturing to finance and has passed Level 1 of the CFA exam. Currently based in London, Parthspecializes in the post-trade investment lifecycle, custodian integration, and middle office outsourcing. His work involves streamlining operations, automating processes, and driving product development to improve efficiencies and enhance BlackRock’s flagship product, Aladdin.
In many medium to large organisations people often work in separate groups without much interaction. They focus on meeting their own job requirements, which usually works well for roles like development. Even though for product managers this approach might bring short-term success, in the long run, not thinking across different departments can harm the organisation.
Product managers must think critically about how their product will interact with and affect other functions. There have been numerous cases across businesses where two different teams investigate and resolve similar problems for clients in their own way, only to find out that the two solutions are incompatible. This primarily happens due to the lack of intercommunication between the teams.
I have experienced this first-hand when a stakeholder requested to view the official book of records on the platform without consulting other stakeholders. As a result, two separate tools had to be built to cater for the requests of all parties. One tool completed half the task, and the other tool completed the other half, but there was no way to link the two systematically.
My example clearly shows that we must prevent such a disconnect from happening. The way to ensure this would be through communication and a unified strategy. These steps should go some way toward allowing a product manager to think cross-functionally and build more scalable products.
Documenting data source and usage
It is crucial to understand the intricacies of incoming data, especially when working with cross-functional teams. Firstly, you must ask yourself where the data is coming from. Is it validated and trustworthy? Once transformed and displayed, you must determine which sets of users are leveraging it and for what purpose.
Answering these questions will help product managers determine the overall functions their build may interact with. At that point, it is important to ensure all functions are aware. It takes little time and brings a lot of benefits later. If you don’t do this, you will see that you have wasted a lot of extra time over a long distance. Therefore, it is better to update all documentation on time.
A basic set of documentation for any project must include:
- Project passport—a document that describes who the client is, what we are doing, when it needs to be done, the goal, etc. There are companies where the project passport is mandatory, but sometimes you can do without it. For example, if the company has good onboarding, then the team and the customer are aware of how exactly we work, what we want to achieve.
- Feature list—it is a document that is created at the very beginning of the project. PM evaluates the feature list, confirms it with the customer, and creates a project plan based on it.
- Work structure—a document where the parts and stages of the project are distributed among the roles in the teams. It gives a better understanding of the project components and helps tackle tasks in a cross-functional environment.
- Project plan—choose a suitable tool in which you will keep the plan: it can be Excel, Project, Miro, or others. Make sure you track the progress and revise the plan regularly in accordance with your business goals and shareholders’ requirements.
- Project evaluation—this document helps prioritise the right features and tasks and have a schedule to maintain.
Besides these basic documents, properly organised knowledge management and communication are crucial for developing cross-functional products. Documentation should be synchronous and, if possible, online, and have a proper set of access permissions.
Each team member needs access to relevant documentation on the features to have a better understanding of interdependence and relation between different parts of the product. Actions of each team member should be well orchestrated so that everyone has a big picture and mind and no feature conflict is overlooked.
Implementing a unified strategy
All departments or teams within an organisation should have a unified strategy as product roadmaps are built for each year. This ensures coherence in achieving the business goals. Having a unified strategy gives the teams involved in the project a common goal and therefore improves collaboration.
Aligning strategies between the teams helps allocate resources more efficiently, avoiding duplication of efforts and provides a clear framework for making decisions, helping to prioritise tasks and initiatives that align with the overall strategic goals. All features to be built should be communicated to all users within and across functions before the build begins, so that the builds can be cross-examined and challenged.
Additionally, a unified approach ensures that all stakeholders, both internal and external, receive a consistent message about the product’s direction, features, and benefits. This enhances clarity and improves coordination.
Continuous learning and improvement
Despite the best efforts of teams, competing or duplicate products may be built to accomplish user requirements. It is crucial to identify which checkpoints were missed and implement effective guardrails to prevent such issues from occurring again.
Further action must also be taken to pause future developments until the duplicate products are adjusted or decommissioned.
