How to be effective in Cross Team Collaboration

You should focus on what you're assigned by your team and not think about the broader cross-collaboration of the team. You don't have the experience to know how to use the knowledge of how the other team operates, so getting it will yield 0 value of your time.

Start by repeating this scenario.

1. You are writing some code for task X
2. You need to touch Y code/service owned by the other team
3. You are unsure how this integration works
4. You ask Y team how to do the intregration
5. They tell you
6. You do it

As you repeat this scenario with the same team, you should look to get more effective at this pattern by doing some of the following:

• When you go to Y team, you will provide them with your best guess on what you think you need to do
• You reference a past task that you or someone else has done that you looked at & mention what information you got from it
• You narrow down the scope of your question ("How does this API work" => "What does Z field in the API request do" => "I set use Z field in this specific way, will the API behave in <blah>")?
• You ask your questions in more public mediums (like a public project Slack channel) so that others can reference your question in the future

A collaboration means someone else needs to spend time with you to get something done. Your first step to getting good at this is spending your time to make sure the other party will spend the least amount of time and effort to work with you. The asking great questions course establishes a pretty good framework that also works for thinking about collaborations.