Working with Cross-Functional Teams: Design and Others

Designers

Designers can have strong opinion and are going to want to exercise their creativity
and so it is important to let go of your personal bias.  Prior to kicking off a meeting
and to ensure that designers don’t feel slighted about designs they make not being
implemented make sure you research your users, their needs, and what their core
problems are.  Once you’ve prioritized which needs need to be worked on during the
kick off meeting you’d show the design brief and here is the full context of the user
need/problem we’re trying to solve right now. This will give the designer a great
starting point and result in more relevant design coming to the forefront.

Sales/Customer or Tech Support/Marketing, etc

When giving an update/general report to other teams or upper management you
really want to summarize and be concise with the information you’re providing them.
 Say during a weekly update, summarize everything in bullet points for what
happened in the past week, what the team is working on, and perhaps a quick metrics
update and what is coming up in the work pipeline.  Also be sure to have regularly
scheduled meetings with the key stakeholders within the cross functional teams.
This allows a quick check in for both ends and can just be verbal too if needed.