How do you build and maintain relationship with Cross Functional team members

Original prepared answer

Relationship with product

• Our team works the closest with product as most of our services are UI integration and customer facing.

• I work a lot with PMs on problem discovery and solution creation. I help them to validate their hypothesis by identifying that right data and providing them from our system

• I interact with them during the project scrum calls where we discuss blockers, cross-team dependencies and prioritization problems or feature prioritization

• Also I have regular 1:1s with most of the product leads. Here we discuss future problem statements that they are working on and catch up on ongoing projects and discuss progress on them

Within my area of Wallet and Customer Payout, we have more than 20 stakeholders. The

• Product vertical teams

• Their marketing teams

• The payment systems

• Strategic partnership

• Accounting team

• Risk and control teams

• Fraud team

And every now and then we engage with them and I personally try to build a culture in the team where we try to consider our stakeholders as our customers and try to apply the company's value of "Always focus on the customer" while engaging with the stakeholders.

The nature of engagement varies among these stakeholders.

• One pattern of relationship is that we engage whenever there is some active work that needs to be done or if there is an incident that affects both of our teams. Let's say if we want some work done from the stakeholder's team.

• We would first try to create a case document which would have the details of the requirements

• The impact on the KPIs that we are targeting

And then reach out to them as early as possible to discuss the solutioning and try to get a commitment from them in terms of timeline. And eventually when a commitment is shared, I try to document it in an email and share it between the teams and also our leadership so that there is a paper trail.

And we also expect a similar structure when a stakeholder approaches us with a requirement.

And when the implementation is in action, we try to have project sync ups either weekly or bi-weekly based on the situation. And I also try to maintain an async channel like slack channel.

• Another pattern of relationship is continuing recurring engagement for critical stakeholders. One example is Accounting. Since Wallet acts as a financial institution, accounting rely on our reports to close the books every month. And we have multiple reporting workloads for them which undergoes frequent modifications and evolutions as per the change in the business.

• After I joined Booking, I noticed that this is a challenging area for us and it consumed a lot of ad-hoc bandwidth for us. So I worked on establishing a process

• First of all I started a bi-weekly cadence call with them where I intended to cover the changes happening in wallet area and also address the ongoing pain-points of Accounting

• And also discuss any requirements from them.

• Another engagement pattern is ad-hoc support requests. For which we have a public support channel where all our stakeholders are added and they are welcome to post queries of our doubts. And one of our product people addresses their queries.

• They also often broadcast type of communications as well. For example when we launched our wallet events, we add posts public forums and tag ur stakeholders