Slow down, high performers! A guide to the art of co-creation

Do you remember that girl in class who prepared her homework to near perfection and had it ready way before it was due? Yup, that was me.

So when I became Head of Product for the first time in 2016, I took it upon myself to create the “perfect” product vision, mission, and strategy. I did my homework — I read the studies, talked to experts and customers, analyzed the competition, and understood the market trends. I was confident that no one knew our product, market, and target customer better than me. Cocky, indeed.

After investigating, drafting, iterating, and prettifying for months, I felt ready to present my work. I organized a six-hour “workshop” for upper management and the product/dev team. I presented my beautiful pitch deck with confidence and explained the “why” behind my decisions. The Q&A section was short, with maybe a handful of questions from the head of sales and marketing. The product and dev teams just nodded.

Operation success, I thought.

However, after only a few short weeks, complaints started piling in from all sides. I heard, “There’s a lack of strategy,” “The product team acts like a headless chicken,” and, “There’s no red thread in the roadmap.”

I didn’t understand! Had we not been over exactly this?

I learned the hard way that my overzealous preparation had led to a detrimental issue: a lack of buy-in. As a product advisor and coach, I see other heads of product making that same mistake over and over.

In this article, we’ll talk about co-creation and how to be a successful collaborator. It’s easy to want to do things yourself, but there is strength in numbers. Co-creating the right way will make a world of difference.

What is co-creation and why is it better than doing things on your own?

Co-creation is about inviting the right people in at the right time to work on something together in the right format. You do this by providing them with the right level of context to be able to contribute.

I’ll unpack each of these aspects in the FAQs, after diving into the co-creation fundamentals:

Over-preparing your work is a double-edged disaster:

• It becomes much harder for your colleagues to give honest feedback. Your document shouts “Please agree with me” instead of “Please work on this with me”
• It becomes much harder for you to take any feedback because you’ve invested too much time and have grown self-convinced

So why is co-creating the better option?

• Crates better ideas — No matter how amazing you are at your job, five people from diverse backgrounds are always better than one. You’ll simply create a better idea when you don’t go at it alone
• Identifies logical gaps — You’ll be put in the position to explain your thought process. A lot. By talking through the steps you took, you will surely identify gaps in your thinking or important steps that you missed
• It’s everybody’s baby — Because your colleagues co-created with you, they’ll feel invested in it, leading to buy-in

You’re in the position to act as a lighthouse to your colleagues. By openly showing your imperfect work and inviting the right people in early, you can create a culture of collaboration. Death to information-hogging!

Co-creation fundamentals

There are two fundamentals to co-creation: understanding your role and building self-confidence.

Understanding your role

Firstly, ownership does not mean you’re supposed to execute on your own. Creating the product vision, mission, and strategy is not your homework as the head of product. These are integral to your company’s strategy, and they need to be created in close alignment with the rest of the leadership team.

So, if you’re not supposed to lock yourself in a room and churn out a 20-page document, what should you be doing?

1. Facilitate a healthy setting for your stakeholders to collaborate and lead the conversation
2. Involve your product and development team on time, so they can make the strategy their own. The people executing the strategy need to believe in it, otherwise, it will fall flat
3. Own the outcome
4. Drive execution of your strategy, and adapt (with your stakeholders) when needed. Nothing is ever set in stone

Building self-confidence

Co-creation means being deeply curious about feedback. This doesn’t mean you need to incorporate everything that you’re told, but it does mean trying to understand your colleagues’ point of view, for example by asking open questions or multiple “why?”s.

Always remember: you aren’t your work or your ideas. Critical feedback to your work is not an attack on you. The more you get comfortable with sharing rough, early work, the less painful it will be to accept feedback:

Co-creation FAQs

Now, let’s answer a few questions about the co-creation process.

Who should be informed and who should participate?

There are three types of stakeholders here that should be informed and participate: directly and indirectly affected stakeholders.

Directly affected

Ask yourself, “What are the success criteria for what I’m working on?” Having a well-formulated product strategy neatly typed up on your company’s internal Wiki page does not equal success.

A product strategy is successful when it “works,” meaning its execution is driving the company’s broader strategy and goals. This requires lots of different stakeholders to play ball:

• Your product/dev team needs to focus on the right outcomes, and opportunities to deliver the right things (roles include CTO, head of engineering, and senior/principal PMs)
• The marketing and sales departments need to spread the word to the right target audience about the product you’re building (roles include head of marketing and head of sales)
• You’ll likely require the support of your growth/data teams (roles include head of data and head of growth)

Indirectly affected

Involving stakeholders who are likely to be indirectly affected could be key to avoiding nasty surprises. Examples are:

• Head of customer support or success
• Head of business development
• CEO

Simple rule of thumb: those who are directly affected and eager to participate will get a collaborative role (potentially at different stages of your project), and everyone else will be informed.

If you’re not sure whether you’ve considered the right people, you can mention the project during an all-hands meeting and invite people to speak to you if they feel they should have been involved.

How big is too big for a co-creation process?

When selecting your co-creation group, you’ll need to strike the balance between efficiency and making sure all the right people are invited. The bigger your group becomes, the less efficient decision-making will be. It’s up to you, considering your organizational culture, to decide which side you should err on.

It helps to remember and communicate that most decisions are two-way door decisions, meaning they’re reversible. If you failed to include someone important early on, that’s a shame, but not a cardinal sin:

What does a good co-creation process look like?

There’s no silver bullet to co-creation, but there are a few things that worked well for me in the past:

• Start with a synced kick-off for collaborators to explain the context and ensure that we’re all on the same page. You can invite the first round of ideas through brainwriting, mind mapping, the nominal group technique, or any other technique (including just having a conversation, if the group is relatively small and there’s little risk of someone getting overshadowed)
• Make sure to adequately capture all the ideas and feedback provided
• Create a central place for all project documentation
• Make things as easy to understand as possible — no jargon or short sentences. Clear writing is a muscle you can train
• Establish how you’ll communicate updates to those directly and indirectly affected
• Define the rules for collaboration. Will you work mostly during recurring meetings or async? For me, mixing async with semi-regular catch-ups usually works well. I expect all participants to submit and review the work of others ahead of our catch-ups
• Communicate regularly and concisely, rather than saving up 100 bullets for a monthly town hall

How can I provide the right level of context (without overloading my colleagues?)

As the owner of a topic, you’ll likely have a lot more knowledge or context than anyone else, which makes it much harder to accept anyone’s feedback. Jumping back to my first Head of Product role in 2016, I was confident that I knew most about our competitive landscape and customers. So why listen to the feedback of anyone else?

People usually do one of two things:

1. Disregard the feedback of others, since they don’t have enough context
2. Throw over all the information they have in dense Google Sheets, multiple pages in the knowledge base, or a 100-page document with customer interview results. No one will sit down and comb through all of it

Don’t be either of those people. It’s your job to:

• Understand what background information is needed for others to be able to contribute to this topic
• Present this information in a way that is easy to digest
• Be available for follow-up questions

This might feel like extra work on your plate. One of the most important skills to learn is to trim the fat, to be able to distinguish what’s important from what’s not. You can easily tell the difference between a junior person from a senior by how well they can focus on what matters and communicate clearly. So consider this an exercise:

Remember, visual aids make it much easier to digest information quickly, and a nice narrative makes things resonate and stick (a big hurray for good storytellers!).

There are plenty of tools that can help make your work visible, e.g., ClickUp, Miro, and Notion. Most teams I encounter are using Slack (good for you, Slack), so you can even simply send a weekly update in a (dedicated) Slack channel:

My colleagues aren’t motivated or smart enough to co-create with me

“It’s not me, it’s you.”

Let’s be honest, many of us have had this thought. But before you point the finger, check yourself critically. Are you truly giving others an honest chance to participate by doing all the things outlined above? Is there anything you could improve on?

If nothing comes to mind, is there anyone within your organization you can talk to who will honestly tell you what’s going wrong?

If you truly find yourself in a desperate situation, you might need to start looking for a better environment. In most cases though, there’s something you can do to improve.

Common mistakes of co-creation

In my experience, there are a few big mistakes I’ve seen with co-creation. Keep them in mind so you don’t fall into the same trap:

• Fake co-creation/workshops — If your session isn’t interactive and doesn’t create space for feedback that you will listen to, don’t call it a workshop. A presentation of what you believe with a five-minute Q&A at the end is not a workshop
• Long, dense information packages — These aren’t helpful, nobody will want to go through and read all of this! Instead send regular, short bursts of communication
• Starting too many things at once — It’s good to be ambitious, but bad to do this without giving your co-creators any sense of progress or updates on the previous things you worked on together. It’s de-motivating to be asked to collaborate on step 10 if you never heard back about steps 1–9

Conclusion

The bad news? Effective co-creation requires breaking down some tricky internal barriers, such as a lack of self-confidence or trust in your colleagues, or a misunderstanding of your role. The good news: it’s a muscle you can train.

With every project, ask yourself:

• Who is directly and indirectly affected? Who do I need to involve to bring this project to a successful end? Who needs to collaborate and who needs to be informed?
• How much context or detail do they need to be able to contribute?
• How can I bring this context to them in the right format at the right regularity (considering both synced and asynchroneous collaboration)?
• Am I inviting them into my process (i.e., sharing work in progress), or presenting finished work without much space for feedback?

Happy co-creating!

Featured image source: IconScout