Product discovery team vs delivery team. Same goals, different tools. Achieve more effective collaboration, and save an extra workday.
A company, either small or big one, is more or less like an engine. Many parts relay on each other, but the goal is the same — to move forward, as fast and as safe as possible.
Agile software companies, that want to stay ahead of their competition often invest in establishing Product Discovery Teams.
What are product discovery teams?
Product discovery teams are different from product delivery teams, but this distinction is still not clear for most companies. Product delivery teams execute. They leverage know-how and best practices to build, sustain, and maximize on a known solution.
Product discovery teams — explore. They don’t pretend to know the solution. One of the foundations of a strong product discovery team (that usually consists of the Product Strategist, the Designer, the Engineer, and The Product Owner) is a beginner’s mindset. They need to stay open-minded. In most cases, when people are trained for product delivery, they struggle to perform in the discovery capacity. Yet this is what happens in most organizations.
How those two (Discovery and delivery team) cooperate, while both are using different software?
When the product discovery team has a tested idea, they need the development team to jump in and deliver an MVP. In many cases, this is the point when problems occur. The case is that handing over projects isn’t easy. Especially, when two teamwork in different tools — in this case, Asana and Jira.
In our case, the Product development team use Asana on the project management side because it’s lightweight and anybody in the department can jump in and create a task without much technical knowledge. The development team requires something more powerful — so they have chosen Jira (in some companies, the development team uses Azure DevOps instead). Both work very well for those teams if we would treat them individually. But the fact that two departments use different tools harms the company. Discovery Team had to select one person, Tom, to act as a bridge between teams and apps. Tom started with manually copying and pasting tasks, issues, descriptions, statuses and so on. He needed to monitors to constantly check the updates. If one task was created in Asana, he immediately was creating an identical one in Jira. He needed almost 30 minutes to double-check everything, to make sure all fields, attachments, and crucial data were copied in both tools. Imagine what would happen, if Tom will make a simple human error — plenty of manhours will be lost. As you can imagine, taking care of two tools wasn’t the only job that Tom had — so there were lags in communication, resulting in wasting even more hours.
A better way
Fortunately, a friend told Tom about getint.io, a platform that can do the annoying job off Tom’s plate. The platform, that simply integrate Asana and Jira, copy tasks for Tom. Now, getint.io is doing all the work — with no fuss. No friction. Just like that. No errors, no lags. Two teams can comfortably use their daily tools — the tasks that had to be synced are. Results? Sure! Efficiency is way better, same with morale. Projects are hitting the deadlines with much better accuracy, no time lost on waiting for tasks and updates to be propagated. Tom can focus on his job, and teams can do what they do best. The stakeholders are happy, cause the engine is working like it should — perfectly.
