When Engineering Director Jeff Norton thinks about cross-functional collaboration at Arity, the television show Ted Lasso comes to mind.
A quote from the show — “Be curious, not judgmental” — reminds him of how much he learns from his team members every workday and how important it is to understand their diverse perspectives.
“Listening and trying to understand the challenges and constraints that my colleagues encounter helps me understand their decision-making and thought processes,” Norton said.
At Arity, team members work in tandem to overcome challenges as they develop data-driven solutions to make transportation smarter, safer and more useful, relying on each other’s unique expertise along the way. That means that despite differences in team objectives, everyone is united by the same purpose.
“As individual teams that are aiming to fulfill the company mission, we are all — at the core of what we’re doing — aiming to accomplish the same thing,” Product Director Kamron Clifford said. “It does take deliberate effort and sometimes trade-offs for us to get and stay on the same page, but the end result is a step forward.”
Clifford and the company’s other leaders lean on the right approaches and practices to ensure their teams stay aligned. For Sales Director Jeff Schlitt, this involves various steps, such as holding regular cross-functional go-to-market meetings with the product, sales, marketing and services teams.
Implementing measures such as this one takes time and effort. But Schlitt believes that doing so doesn’t just enable each department to thrive — it fuels the success of the business as a whole.
“We need to strive for greatness in working as a team,” he said.
About Arity
Arity’s data-driven solutions are designed to make transportation smarter, safer and more useful for everyone. For example, the company’s Arity Audiences solution enables marketers to reach consumers through digital marketing campaigns based on how, when and where they drive, while its crash detection solution enables mobile apps to detect accidents in real time.
The Secret to Strong Alignment
If there’s one thing that Clifford believes reflects the alignment between her team and other departments, it’s the quarterly planning process, through which they prioritize capabilities and outcomes that need to be accomplished in the upcoming quarter.
“It’s become an increasingly easy, straightforward exercise where we benefit from our day-to-day alignment internally and with other teams as well as our upfront investment in roadmapping, and we can test that alignment across the business as we share what our plans are,” she explained.
The benefits of strong alignment are clear: Clifford’s team encounters fewer challenges to their plans, less surprise requests from adjoining teams and an altogether smoother process for reaching agreement on their plans across all teams and with stakeholders.
To reap these benefits, her team relies on regular — and continuous — communication. This means ensuring that the teams developing the company’s products and capabilities know the “why” behind priorities and the “what” behind the problems they solve, while ensuring those selling or marketing these products and capabilities understand the details of a product, its value and the progress being made.
“At Arity, we have those communication channels established — share-outs, strategy updates, leadership collaboration calls, product prototype reviews and more — so the information loop between cross-functional teams remains continuous and we can maintain alignment,” Clifford said.
“At Arity, we have those communication channels established — share-outs, strategy updates, leadership collaboration calls, product prototype reviews and more — so the information loop between cross-functional teams remains continuous and we can maintain alignment.”
For Norton’s team, adhering to the Agile development process has been critical in maintaining alignment with other departments, such as analytics, product and operational excellence. This process is guided by three primary ceremonies — sprint planning, daily scrums and sprint reviews — which allow members of his team to collaborate and drive toward bi-weekly sprint goals.
Schlitt added that his team has implemented various processes to maintain — and, in some cases, increase — collaboration. This includes cross-functional go-to-market meetings with the product, sales, marketing and services teams to ensure customer needs match both their messaging and roadmap. Schlitt’s team also leverages a tool within Microsoft Teams that enables them to navigate other team hierarchies, deepening their understanding of the role everyone plays in achieving business goals.
‘Listen and Learn’
When it comes to understanding individuals on other teams, Clifford follows a simple leadership philosophy: “Listen and learn.”
She believes that a key part of her role is helping teams connect the dots, realizing that, while it can be easy to work in a silo, doing so hinders the road to success.
“I like to build awareness of the bigger picture — what’s happening upstream, what’s happening downstream with customers and how that could impact what we’re doing,” Clifford said.
“I like to build awareness of the bigger picture — what’s happening upstream, what’s happening downstream with customers and how that could impact what we’re doing.”
Norton noted that his leadership approach involves looking for blockers and dependencies that threaten his team’s progress.
“When these surface, the productivity of the team falls and business value does not get delivered,” he said. “It is my responsibility to eliminate these blockers to help teams continue to move forward.”
For Schlitt, the key to succeeding as a leader is to encourage attendance of and participation in the segment sprint review, which he considers critical to creating alignment and strong morale in teams.
“Active stakeholders impress upon the teams that their work matters and is important to the success of the organization,” he said. “Providing this transparency helps teams understand how their contributions help Arity.”
Schlitt and his fellow leaders at Arity are united by a desire to communicate clearly, keep everyone engaged and follow tried-and-true practices. Under the guidance of this universal vision, every team at the company gets to play its own part in writing a new narrative for the transportation industry.
“Our company goal of making transportation smarter, safer and more useful is pretty clear,” Schlitt said. “Our path of getting there may be different, but let’s start with that agreement and then strive to find a pathway we can pursue, measure and refine.”
