9 Collaboration Best Practices for Better Digital Experiences

Designing great digital products is a team sport. It requires a collective effort across functions, with each team bringing a unique set of skills, data, and perspectives.

You can’t achieve success without each team’s contribution. Silos and conflicting priorities are your most ruthless opponents, but if you get all your teams working from the same playbook, you’re unbeatable.

No matter which team you’re on, these tactics will help you improve how you collaborate, share insights, and learn from teammates in other functions.

1. Make data your collaboration foundation

Data is the best sledgehammer for breaking down your organization’s walls. It provides the shared language that teams need to align and drive informed decisions. Once everyone is speaking the same language, you want them all reading from the same playbook—using shared platforms and data sources.

Using disparate analytics tools for marketing, product, engineering, data, and customer success teams only perpetuates finger-pointing and silos, and hinders your ability to create a collaborative culture.

“Oftentimes, each of these orgs have their own internal goals and acronyms for things,” says Amplitude’s Chief Engineering Officer Wade Chambers. “When that’s the case, it’s drastically easier to misspeak and miscommunicate—unless you have a shared language and tools that force you to speak that language.”

The more cross-functional teams use the same platform, the more it facilitates a common language around shared goals and KPIs. Each function also accesses data the same way, minimizing data silos and tool sprawl.

However, you can’t stop at creating the shared language—because with any shared language comes the concept of taxonomy.

“If you don’t have the same definitions and don’t look at the world the same way, challenges will arise,” says Amplitude Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Tifenn Dano-Kwan. “We’ve spent a lot of time aligning on and standardizing our language to have clarity on how we formulate our goals.”

This is critical because regardless of your product, company, or industry, there will inevitably be complexity, differences in opinion, and conflicts across functions—but data can be the greatest qualifier and unifier of all.

“Typically, when you have a centralized platform where all teams look at the same trusted, clean data, that data set unifies and equalizes decisions, conversations, and opinions,” says Tifenn. “Data drives consensus and compromise in a much more even way.”

2. Start small

To use data as your common language, you need to start tracking specific events across your digital experiences. This likely includes events in your product and mobile app and across marketing and other customer-facing channels.

Begin this initiative with caution: avoid a spray-and-pray approach. Don’t go crazy tracking everything, hoping you find something interesting. This creates unnecessary noise, overwhelming or disengaging your stakeholders—and yourself!

Instead, start small, show value, and build from there.

“Start with something concrete that you know matters, but don’t boil the ocean,” recommends Amplitude Chief Product Officer Francois Ajenstat. “Too many times, teams overcomplicate things. Just start small and get it going. Once you start pushing the snowball down the hill, it will start getting momentum, the next team will get on board, and then the next, etc.”

For example, take something new that you’re about to ship, add one line of code to it, and then prove that you made it successful. Francois shared a recent conversation with a chief analytics officer at an enterprise organization. They were discussing big challenges across their product lines and businesses and trying to figure out where to start using Amplitude to solve them.

“We said, ‘Let’s just put all that aside. This one strategic project has CEO visibility but a limited blast radius. Let’s go instrument this one project and get those teams crushing it. If we crush it, every team will want to get on board. If we fail, which is unlikely, then guess what? We failed on something fairly small.’”

3. Align on objectives and outcomes—not outputs

It’s one thing to align teams behind common outputs; it’s another to align behind common objectives and business outcomes. The difference is nuanced yet critical. Too often, organizations fall into the trap of measuring vanity metrics or outputs. Encourage your teams to ask “Why?” and “Who cares?” repeatedly until they get to the root that measures business impact.

Many companies use the North Star Framework to help determine a single key measure of success for teams. It defines the relationship between the customer problems your teams are trying to solve and the revenue you aim to generate by doing so.

“The most critical thing is to agree on core objectives at the onset,” says Tifenn. “Identify what’s most important, set very clear goals tied to what’s important, and track and hold ourselves accountable for how we do. Then every resource you deploy across product, marketing, sales, etc. should drive those goals.”

Once your target outcomes are defined, ensure teams review and showcase the same two to three metrics in every meeting and newsletter to continually connect work to impact. It forces employees to constantly consider, “How does the work I’m doing further one of these goals?” and refocus their efforts if it doesn’t.

4. Create shared action plans

Picture this: You’re in a meeting. One functional stakeholder shares an insight related to customer churn, and another person at the table says, “OK, well, what’s your plan?” Can you spot what’s wrong with this statement?

If you guessed that “your” should be “our,” then you’re correct.

Moreover, it shouldn’t be a question at all! Instead, the best teams see that insight as an opening for a collaborative brainstorm. Develop shared action plans—What metrics are you going to look at? What bets will you make? What tactics will you take?

The action plan will undoubtedly have a combination of high-level business outcomes and functional metrics, but the important thing is that they all come together toward a bigger theme.

5. Enable self-service data access

Access to user data elevates every team’s work. Empower individuals with systems and processes to access data without relying on analyst teams. Meaningful collaboration occurs when each team brings relevant data to the table to fuel discussions and decisions.

According to a Harvard Business Review Analytics Services report related to digital experience maturity, 51% of leaders use tools that enable employees to access and gather data-driven insights, compared to 42% of followers and 29% of laggards. There’s room for improvement across the board on this front—even among leaders.

Interestingly enough, some enterprise organizations with highly mature digital experiences actually have low self-service maturity. They have sophisticated data analysis capabilities, but they’re locked behind a team of advanced data scientists. While these experts are indispensable, relying on them too much can cause serious bottlenecks and limit teams’ decision-making capabilities.

6. Humanize data and communicate metrics in context

Whether you’re communicating data up or down the organization, never assume the audience knows the context. When collaborating, remind stakeholders of the goals, why they were set, and how the current data compares to past performance. This context establishes trust and opens the door to more meaningful conversations and impactful action plans.

Data can be cold and abstract. But when you humanize it, it changes the relationship dramatically. When collaborating with teams, use data storytelling to make it more compelling and relatable, spurring more timely and impactful stakeholder actions.

“They say business runs at the speed of trust. Using credible data to build trust between teams enables you to accelerate action and work on higher-level constructs. Then, the questions are less about the data and the fiefdoms involved and more about tackling the business challenges at hand.” —Wade Chambers, Chief of Engineering, Amplitude [END]

7. Use the right collaboration channels for the scenario

There are so many ways to communicate today, and all those mechanisms are tools in your collaboration toolkit.

Key collaboration channels include:

• Synchronous: Project-specific cross-functional syncs (i.e., product launch meetings), ongoing cross-functional update meetings, company all-hands
• Asynchronous: Project and function-specific Slack and Teams channels, newsletters, project and task management tools, digital analytics platform, CRM, Loom videos

For example, Amplitude customer Quillbot uses a wide array of communication, project management, task management, and document management tools to disseminate information about product design changes among its employees, many of whom work in separate time zones worldwide.

“At an organizational level, it’s necessary that all teams work together toward a shared goal,” says Nikhil Agrawal, former Product and Engineering Lead at Quillbot and 2025 Product 50 Award finalist. “The product or experience we want to build will not be of high quality if we don’t work in a collaborative way.”

8. Set clear expectations

Regardless of the collaboration channel, you don’t want anyone to think, “What am I supposed to do with this information?” Ensure that as teams share data and insights with stakeholders, they understand the corresponding action they should take. The action might just be awareness, but unless explicitly communicated, it’s easy for them to think, “This doesn’t apply to us” or “Someone else’s data, someone else’s problem.”

Stakeholders also need clear expectations for every meeting. What information should they be prepared to discuss? What data points should they have on hand? This ensures that your synchronous meetings are productive conversations rather than rote readouts of status updates or action items.

9. Be consistent—yet flexible

Like with all tools and processes, consistency is key. Teams should reliably depend on specific channels to get and share information that keeps them updated and engaged.

Set and adjust meeting cadences based on timing and what you’re trying to achieve. For example, three months out from launch, your cross-functional team can meet monthly or biweekly. However, on launch week, daily standups are more appropriate. This flexibility ensures that teams aren’t overwhelmed when they don’t need to be but can act quickly when needed.

Collaborate to fuel better digital experiences with Amplitude

Your teams need to collaborate, share insights, and learn from peers across functions. These tips contribute to a winning collaboration formula, but technology is another big piece of the equation.

Your digital analytics technology can help or hinder those efforts. Some digital analytics platforms take a single-player approach to analytics, enabling individuals to get insights but making it difficult to collaborate. Amplitude specifically designs features with collaboration in mind. We unite product and marketing insights in the same platform—creating one view of the truth for all functions.

Learn more about how your team can successfully collaborate with our Create Campaigns That Convert and Aligning Teams to Accelerate Product Adoption guides.