Our Engineering and Product teams have grown significantly in last 1 year. One challenge that we are facing now is that the teams are losing context and have low awareness about what is happening in other teams.
Have you faced similar challenges and how have you tackled it?
This happens in just about every org and this is a PM responsibility and Product leadership to set context across teams. It’s also a FOMO problem - you’ll have to have conversations with people to say “Sorry, we’re bigger now and you can’t always be in the loop on what every team is working on. If it impacts your team then you’ll definitely know about it.”
A few ways we tackle context and awareness:
Each PM pushes a slack message at the end of the week that summarizes the week, what’s being worked on and what’s on deck. With a link to their backlog.
Regular PM collaboration time - PMs tear down each others opportunity assessments and product briefs.
Document everything.
1x/month strategic summaries from Product and Eng Leadership.
Guild-style meetings for engineers across the same discipline to help each other with hard problems, etc. We have FE engineers across multiple teams. They would meet a few times a month or monthly to talk through the interesting challenges they’re working through so they can all stay in the loop with each other. So a team meeting organized around discipline / part of the stack vs. product team.