Teamwork is the most important element to building excellent products.

Written by: Herman Leybovich

Excellence isn’t just about performance or aesthetics, it’s about usability. Excellence solves a problem and solving a problem isn’t something that’s done in an engineering vacuum. There are various teams working together to identify the problem and brainstorm solutions. Then the design, delivery and sustainment for the solution begins.

Agile methodology has shown how teamwork allows us to achieve velocity and excellence in product design. This isn’t intended to be an audit of Agile but with Voyager, our success has been due to our collective team effort. Here’s how we do it:

1. Listen and Share

Our teams are interfacing with our users regularly. Our customer facing teams are listening for the problems our users have today and the problems they expect to face in the future. They work hard to distribute this information across the organization. This helps us determine how prevalent the problem is, what we’ve done before to solve it and what we can do in the future. This is essential teamwork because these steps allow us to develop relevant products quickly.

2. Iterate Together

Our teams are awesome at getting a solution prototype into the hands of our users quickly so they can test against the problem. The teams interfacing with the user capture feedback and work with their colleagues to discern how close we are to a perfect fit. We understand there is no perfect product, but we want to get as close as possible and continuously improve. This requires multiple disciplines working together continuously.

3. Quiet Heroes

Building excellent products is only half the battle. Delivering them on time, especially in challenging environments like COVID-19 is the other half. Our Operations and Logistics teams do a wonderful job of delivering on our commitment to our users and supporting their experience with the product. These teams are integral to the product development process as well! It’s their insight into the experience of the product that informs how we can improve Voyager in future iterations.

Collaboration across our Engineering, Sales, Operations and Finance teams allow us to engineer excellent products that work in extreme environments. Our people enable us to go further and do more with Voyager, they are our product\’s best feature and the beauty and excellence of Voyager is a testament to their ability and desire to work together to do more than they could do alone.