How to nurture your PM-designer partnership with collaboration contracts

This is the second article of a series of 3 on the topic of how we in Pipedrive start, build and grow partnerships between product designers and product managers.

At the start of a new exciting project, you and your PM partner come together, ready to rock. You might have even done the Dream Team exercise, as described in the first article of this series. You know what to expect from each other and how you prefer to work together, it’s a done deal, right? Now’s the time to get to work.

Well, hold your horses — the foundation has been laid, but the house is yet to be built.

🎬 Off to a good start … or not?

In Pipedrive, each PM and designer pair builds their houses (and products) together across multiple projects, over a longer period of time. This leaves ample time for trust to develop between the two and for all the rituals to settle in, but it also leaves time for frustrations to spark and grow. As usual, over time, some projects don’t work out as good as others, and this will put relationships to the test.

Let’s look at an example. In 2021, I teamed up with a new-to-the-company PM in my product area. We did the Dream Team exercise, ended up with a few team agreements and ways of working with each other. Now it was time for our first project together. Yay!

It started out great as both of us were very excited to tackle a big business-critical revamp of our product’s most used page. However, pretty soon we became increasingly frustrated with each other, as we felt constantly let down by the other not delivering on responsibilities, focusing on the wrong things and not communicating enough with each other and major stakeholders. In our case, the situation was exacerbated by the PM being new to the company, not familiar with our ways and thus working in a way that I did not expect.

Feeling high on our drive to deliver big impact, we neglected to think about how we, in practical terms, would tackle this big project — what our goals, responsibilities and rituals in context of this specific project were — and this put a lot of stress and strain on our relationship.

How can you prevent this situation? Well, you have to continuously take care of your collaboration.

🧘 Nurturing your relationship

At Pipedrive, we’ve found that to nurture your relationship, you need to revisit your agreements and expectations at the beginning of each project. You’ve laid groundwork for this before, now it’s time to look at your collaboration in the context of one project. During the project kickoff (read more about Pipedrive’s agile process here), make time for the signing of a collaboration contract. In the contract:

• Set a goal for your project and your collaboration. Think of how your collaboration can contribute to the project’s success.
• Map out who is doing what and who is responsible for which decisions and deliverables. Make sure you’re letting each person’s strengths shine through, but don’t discount the opportunity to grow by working on areas of weaknesses together.
• Agree on ways of working together. Examples of things to agree on include which rituals you’ll have, how you’ll communicate with each other and how you’ll give and receive feedback.

Back to the example above — our partnership unfortunately ended due to both of us changing product areas before we got around to tackling our frustrating situation properly. However, had we gotten around to writing our collaboration contract, we could’ve avoided quite a few headaches. For example, we didn’t really need to discuss the layouts of features owned by other teams as many times as we did if we had agreed that one of us takes the topic up with respective stakeholders and comes back with a decision.

This situation was a catalyst for Pipedrive PMs and designers to agree to do this exercise at the start of new projects. While we didn’t quite practice what I’m preaching here, in other projects with new PMs it has proven immensely helpful in enabling us to start off on the right foot. In practical terms, the collaboration contract doesn’t need to be written down (although it helps to keep it accessible for reference), it could just as well be a discussion. Whatever medium you use to conduct the exercise, make sure you talk about how you work in the context of this project, with all its constraints and opportunities taken into account.

By kicking off the project like this, you’ll have a healthy framework in place for collaboration. It will allow you to show your strengths and take ownership, while clear areas of responsibility give room to challenge each other safely, without feeling like you’re overstepping. Knowing each other’s weaknesses allows you to give support and share the burden during difficult times.

⚠️ Learn from our mistakes

A few words of caution though, there are some common pitfalls we’ve seen in our experience with these contracts.

1. You might have mapped out the responsibilities, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for collaborating. Don’t let the division of work place you in silos.
2. On the other end of the spectrum, there might be a situation where you’re doing so much together that you forget who is the decision maker, especially when you happen to be in disagreement over something. Exercise your rights to make decisions as defined in the contract.
3. Don’t sit in silence if you feel the agreements are being broken or they simply don’t work for you anymore. Have an honest conversation about it and don’t be afraid to reconsider and iterate on the contract (more on this in the next part of this series).

Finally, remember that the collaboration works best if it truly is a collaboration.