Collaborative Teams Are More Productive Teams w/ Marcel Weekes & Arquay Harris #192

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

One of the most important aspects of success is a team’s ability to collaborate – but it can also be one of the most challenging parts. In this episode, we’re highlighting a popular session ELC Annual 2024 on how to encourage collaboration, ultimately increasing productivity and creating more likely outcomes of success. This conversation features Marcel Weekes, VP of Product Engineering @ Figma, and Arquay Harris, former VP of Engineering @ Webflow. This conversation also features a robust Q&A session from ELC Annual attendees on their most pressing collaboration questions – including diagnosing teams that are struggling to collaborate, how to measure the success of collaborative tools, strategies for building rituals / processes around collaboration, and much more.

ABOUT MARCEL WEEKES

Marcel Weekes is VP of Product Engineering at Figma, where he oversees product and growth engineering efforts across Figma's entire platform. Marcel brings decades of experience and previously served as the VP of Engineering at Slack where he led the teams building Messaging features and Slack Connect.

"A trait of product engineers that I have found to be successful in predicting positive outcomes is they view code as a tool to get something done. Engineers on the other end of the spectrum who might be more elite code engineers or more like, ‘I got this algorithm to go like .005 percent faster,’ frankly that's not what's going to get your product to product market fit. If you're not focused on the end goal here, you're going to make suboptimal decisions the whole way.”

- Marcel Weekes

ABOUT ARQUAY HARRIS

Arquay has held Engineering leadership positions at Slack, Google and CBS Interactive. A developer who also has a Masters in Design, Arquay loves the marriage of form and function. Following her most recent role as VP of Engineering at Webflow, Arquay is currently enjoying retirement. She fills her days with occasional mentoring and speaking engagements as well as pursuing her many hobbies.

SHOW NOTES:

• Marcel’s definition of effective team collaboration (2:36)
• How Figma’s dev mode is reducing collaborative tension (5:42)
• Processes & rituals that increase productivity early on (7:12)
• Marcel & Arquay’s collaboration example: success with Slack Connect (9:44)
• Why collaborative teams are ultimately more productive teams (13:21)
• Audience Q&A: Frameworks for diagnosing teams that are struggling to collaborate (14:25)
• How to avoid over collaboration / communication (17:09)
• Strategies for creating collaboration standards early on in a project (19:33)
• Navigating the balance between collaboration & preserving autonomous teams (22:23)
• Encouraging engineers to care about broader outcomes & collaboration (26:54)
• Tips for measuring the success & productivity of collaborative tools (29:11)
• How to foster cross-collaborative respect between design & engineering (32:19)
• Building relationships across teams / functions to promote smooth operation (34:27)
• Recommendations to help developers & design to share more work in progress (36:52)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/