I’ve had an assortment of industries throughout my career that I really value: medical technology, fashion retail and performance based apparel. Each required a different way of thinking and communicating.

In medical, I had to work with compliance (POPIA in South Africa and GDPR in the US), where a tiny mistake could have huge ramifications for a life-saving device.

In fashion retail my priorities were about aesthetics and the branding of the product. I collaborated with designers to assure the visual identity and e-commerce flows felt as a cohesive element in the eyes of the customer.

In performance based apparel, scalability became an issue – making sure we had appropriate servers and caching mechanisms to account for the spikes in traffic when products launched.

The common thread across all of these projects was collaboration. I learnt how to talk the marketer, designer and executive talk – translating the technical beliefs into simple insights.

According to McKinsey (2020), companies with strong cross-functional collaboration are 1.5 times more likely to report revenue growth of 10% or more, which aligned with my experience that technology only succeeds in harmony to human needs.

References:

McKinsey & Company. (2020). Evidence of the importance of cross-functional collaboration on growth.

Nielsen Norman Group. (2018). Communicating Complex Design to Non-experts.