Values and cross-collaboration fights are opposites

Every company says the same thing. "We need better cross-team collaboration."

Then they try to fix it with the same tools. More syncs. More alignment meetings. More process docs. More RACI charts.

And the fights continue.

In my opinion, we keep fixing the wrong layer.

Where the fights actually come from

Think about the last cross-team fight you saw. Design vs product. Product vs engineering. Growth vs brand.

On the surface it looks like a disagreement about the work:

• "This flow adds friction"
• "This will delay the release"
• "This banner will hurt the experience"
• "This experiment will hurt the metric"

But go one layer down. The real disagreement is almost never about the work. It is about what each team believes is more important. Speed vs polish. Growth vs trust. This quarter vs next year.

That is not a collaboration problem. That is a values problem.

The opposite is also true, and this is the interesting part

When values are truly common and shared across teams, something beautiful happens.

You don't need everyone to follow one process. Each team can play by its own rules, and things still align.

• Engineering can have its own way of scoping and shipping
• Design can have its own way of exploring and critiquing
• Growth can run its experiments its own way

And nobody clashes. Because every rule each team made for itself was derived from the same shared values.

Put simply: shared values give teams the freedom to be different, and still move in one direction.

That is why I say values and cross-collaboration fights are opposites. Where one is strong, the other almost disappears.

The test I use

Want to know if your company has shared values or just a values poster on the wall? Watch what happens in a conflict:

• Poster values: the fight is settled by hierarchy. Whoever is senior, or louder, or closer to the founder wins
• Shared values: the fight is settled by reference. Someone says "we agreed trust comes before conversion" and the room actually reorders itself

If every disagreement needs an escalation, values are not shared. They are just written.

What this means for you as a designer

You cannot install company values from your seat. But you can do smaller versions of the same thing:

• Before a project, agree on the trade-off order. Ask the PM and the tech lead: if speed, quality and scope collide, which one do we sacrifice first? Get it in writing. Half your future fights just dissolved
• Argue from the shared value, not from your discipline. "As a designer, I feel..." invites a turf war. "We all agreed trust is first, and this breaks trust" invites agreement
• When a fight repeats, stop resolving the instance. Resolve the value underneath. The third time you fight about the same banner, the banner was never the issue

Alignment meetings sync calendars.

Shared values sync decisions.

And decisions are where the fights were happening all along.