The Best vs The Rest (3/4) - Work Collaboratively, not Sequentially

How does your team solve problems?

Most teams still use Waterfall, even if it's disguised as something Agile. How? Just look at how the team solves problems. Most of the time, an executive or the product manager will decide what should be built next. They create specs and user stories, and then the designer will create wireframes and then take them to the sprint planning to the engineers to say, "let's build this!". It’s everything but agile! It's a pure waterfall; this is not how the best tech teams work.

Is it a secret? The single source of ideas is the engineers. Not because they have superior intelligence but because they work with technology daily and are the best to know what's possible. In great teams, the product manager, the designer, and the developers are all given a problem to solve at the same, and they work together to identify what to build and then build it in a robust and scalable way.