History is littered with iconic collaborators: Lennon & McCartney, Marie and Pierre Curie, Batman and Robin. What these duos share is a common goal, be it creating chart-topping music, making groundbreaking scientific discoveries or, simply, catching the bad guys. 🦸♀️
Product and Marketing teams have a shared goal too; to make their customers happy. It’s unfortunate, then, that these two teams still work in silos at times. At times driven by different metrics for success, these two teams may always not see the shared ground between them and, as a result, fail to coordinate enough during the development process.
Sharing internal knowledge and information can benefit both product and marketing teams, who are likely to learn valuable lessons from each other. Not only this, but product and marketing teams who work together more closely will better be able to ensure that the product meets their customer needs.
Think about it; by unifying your product and marketing teams, the marketing team can share its insights into the marketplace with the product team to align their efforts with the needs of the market. A winning combination for product releases. 🏅
Here we’ll look at a few ways that you can unite your product and marketing teams.
Find Common Goals
The first step to unifying your product and marketing teams is to find those common goals that both teams are working toward. Place “excellent customer experience” at the centre of this plan and work out what goals need to be met to satisfy this shared overarching target. 🎯
Not only will this identify the common ground between the two teams, but it will also carve out those niche areas where individual goals are necessary. In these cases, ensure that you have planned how you will each report the progress of these goals.
Determine which obstacles may impede your progress toward your goals and take the necessary precautions to minimise risk. Consider, for instance, arranging feedback and reporting sessions for each product release if you know that communication tends to break down after the first increment.
If both teams have shared goals, this will keep them motivated and facilitate effective collaboration throughout the project. Having a shared purpose also eliminates conflicts regarding time and resource distribution. ⏳
Transparency
Shared goals may set the foundations for collaboration, but there will still come a time where teams need to go away and work independently. This is where transparency is really important. 👁🗨
Transparency is essential when it comes to accessing relevant information; an area that is especially true for marketing and product teams, who don’t always interact consistently. Regular communication and reporting is a great start, but long-term transparency relies on a centralised workspace where data is readily available for teams.
Creating a shared calendar, for example, will give a space to plot deadlines and give a clear overview of team activity that can be drawn on as projects develop. 📅
Ultimately, it’s about analysing the roadblocks that prevent transparency and think about how you can remove these blockades. Lack of progress updates? Arrange update meetings as regularly as required. Issues with accessing market insights? Adopt a centralised workspace where research can be uploaded effortlessly.
The key to achieving this workflow is to equip these teams with the right tools for communication and data sharing. Product and Marketing teams require a solution that will allow them to collaborate in real-time and share valuable insights. 🤝
Using spreadsheets to manage shared resources and data between teams is like reusing a paper bag for your shopping; sure, it might work initially, but it’s an outdated tool that is likely to fail at the smallest challenge (be it rain or heavy groceries!)
In the same way, spreadsheets are fine for dealing with static data, but cannot support real-time decision-making because the data quickly becomes outdated and inaccurate. Then when it comes to getting the most recent information becomes an unnecessarily time-consuming task and stunts productivity. 📉
It’s no wonder that 39% of businesses are concerned about their critical data being corrupted with incorrect references over time. Alternatively, a platform that centralises data will streamline communication and collaboration across teams, whether they work remotely or in-person.
Visuals are also key here. Using a tool that translates project data to accessible visuals will allow other teams to get a snapshot overview of progress. Product development and marketing campaigns are equally driven by data, and any way to translate this data will optimise project visibility.
Unite Teams with Gridfox
At its most basic Gridfox provides a centralised workspace for documenting your shared goals or ideas. That’s not all, though; Gridfox is powerful enough to support all the key areas required to unite your product and marketing teams.
To ensure that you can get up-and-running with your teams’ efforts, Gridfox is equipped with a number of templates focused around product development and marketing.
For example, the concept research template gives you a structure for talking with contacts and noting any changes you wish to make to ideas, tasks, and projects based on the necessary stages of product development. Similarly, Gridfox’s campaign manager template encompasses all those necessary areas to get marketing teams set to share this excellent product with customers and clients. 📋
Both teams can ensure transparency by configuring permissions for users. These granular permissions allow admins to control access to data across projects and maintain accessibility where required. It’s a case of easily setting permissions at either the Table, Record, or Field level; ensuring that users see only what they need to see.
Say your marketing team has an initial planning session to build audience personas; chances are they’d benefit from any existing research on user types that the product team might have conducted. With Gridfox, teams can seamlessly exchange these ideas and insights via tables. Just configure users who have access to the project in-question via the Users tab at the top right of your project. No need for “urgent” emails or requests that halt proceedings. 🛑
Workflows also optimise transparency when it comes to inter-team relations by giving users real-time notifications on work updates. For example, if there’s a recurring event that requires the attention of both product and marketing teams, you can configure a workflow that notifies the relevant users about the progress of this event.
Gridfox can also handle any substantial changes that you need to make to a project. Cloud-based data storage allows you to make changes to your record anywhere, anytime, without the fear of multiple versions. Take that spreadsheets! 👊
Gridfox knows that the best work happens when teams collaborate. Teams that work in this way develop better products that satisfy customers. That’s why our platform is armoured with features that ensure a continuous feedback loop between the product in development and the market insights that drive it.
Whether it’s automating updates with workflows or facilitating real-time visibility with Cloud-hosted data, product and marketing teams can rest assured that they’re joint efforts won’t go astray.
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