Last week more than 150 engineers, product managers, product designers, and product marketing managers from our Work Collaboration Solutions business unit gathered in Raleigh, Prague, and Bangalore to collaborate for the first time in over two years. We called it Engage Week, and it had a simple purpose — to develop our roadmap and identify purposeful innovation our customers will love. But this was more than a week of alignment. It was an opportunity to rethink how we design our products and focus our teams to deliver software that delights our customers

In designing our Engage Week, we kept three key themes top of mind:

Know your customers and users. Earlier this year we identified four archetypes to drive our product focus — worker, client, admin, and creator. These archetypes are at the center of our process, and we continually work to understand their use cases and how we can remove friction from their document-centric processes. From client collaboration to security and even e-signature workflows, these personas lay the foundation for us to deliver immediate value to our current and future customers.

Think holistically. It’s easy in any organization to fall into functional silos. In fact, most organizations are designed this way, requiring each team hand-off responsibility to the next team in a linear fashion throughout the process. But we want to think differently in Work Collaboration Solutions. By developing a quarterly opportunity to collaborate and a process that requires cross-functional teams to work together through every stage of the product lifecycle — building a business case, discovery, design, execution, and adoption — we establish a deep sense of ownership for our use cases and personas. And it gives all functional groups the opportunity to contribute outside their area of responsibility, building leadership and knowledge skills for the next phase of their career.

Build relationships with each other. After two years of interacting through boxes on a screen, it’s not surprising we’ve all become a bit disconnected. Research shows tactical productivity might be up, but creativity and cross-functional collaboration have suffered. And that means opportunities to uncover innovation organically through team norming and storming are less frequent. When everyone in an organization is aligned to the same focus and has opportunities to work with various groups, you’re more likely to build features and functionality customers will love.

Engage Week served as a milestone in our transformation as an organization as we moved to a team of teams-based approach, where every role is involved in every step of the process. We are just beginning our transformation journey but look forward to continuing to delight our customers and meet their evolving needs with our Work Collaboration Solutions portfolio of products.

You can find out more about Engage Week by following our Work Collaboration Solutions LinkedIn page or Citrix ShareFile on Twitter.