I have partnered closely with engineering, design, marketing, and other domain leaders to understand needs across the product development life cycle for over 10 years. I have been a designer and engineer in the past. Effective collaboration enables us to build shared understanding and work cohesively towards our objectives.

I am well-versed in agile methods like design sprints, user story mapping, iterative prototyping, and frequent retrospectives. I believe in flexible, collaborative processes that focus on continuous learning and adapting.

With startups, I embrace agile methods like rapid prototyping and iteration based on user feedback. With enterprises, I leverage their existing processes while advising how to incorporate validation cycles. The key is aligning with their stage of maturity.

Alignment requires early involvement from relevant stakeholders, clear and ongoing communication, and transparency into the process. I solicit perspectives, set expectations, and get buy-in at key milestones through workshops and reviews on a specified cadence.

Healthy debate is expected - I promote bringing rationales into the open to evaluate tradeoffs transparently. By focusing the team on our users and shared goals, as well as any data we can leverage, I can reach consensus or agree on further experiments to resolve unknowns.

I establish team working agreements early on and set norms around collaboration. Building psychological safety enables open communication and constructive feedback. I also look to balance voices and strengthen connections between team members.