Requests that lost their urgency on the way up
I was working at a global company with sales and support teams in nearly every region of the world. We had been struggling to grow in some low-traffic regions and badly needed local knowledge to understand the gaps and close them.
Our process was broken from the start. Most changes came from random requests that filtered up from regional reps to managers to executives, then got passed to our leadership team and trickled down to our product teams. By the time we received these requests, we had often lost the sense of urgency and the scale of the opportunity. We'd have to dig into things ourselves to understand what was being asked for.
It was slow and error-prone. More frustrating was knowing that the solutions to many problems already existed somewhere in our organization, and we had no reliable way to find them and pass them around.
So we set up a series of cross-organizational product councils with representatives from all these regions. They could bring us insights, suggestions, and pitches, and review our product features and content strategies.
The councils became a two-way channel. We shared new features and product updates, and the field told us in real time what they thought. Even though participating in these councils wasn't part of their official job responsibilities, regional reps scrambled to join them. They enjoyed having a voice in the future of the product and could see direct benefits both in increasing local competitiveness and building stronger organizational connections. Within six months, our regional innovation cycle had accelerated dramatically, and we were solving problems we didn't even know existed.
Why reps kept showing up
Before the councils, a regional rep in Southeast Asia had no way to know that a rep in Brazil had already solved a similar growth problem. The councils gave people from very different markets a regular place to see each other's work, spot patterns, and find ways to work together. Showing up meant having real influence on the product. That's the difference between a forum like this and a Slack channel people ignore.
The old process ran in one direction: the field sent requests up, and product sent features down. In the councils, learning went both ways. Regional teams taught us things about local markets that no amount of data analysis could have shown us, and we shared upcoming features and roadmap thinking in return. Over time the councils became where our institutional knowledge lived. It sat in the relationships between people who worked together regularly, and not in documents that nobody read.
What surprised me most was that the councils came up with entirely new ideas on top of helping us prioritize the existing ones. When reps from different regions started comparing notes, they spotted opportunities no single team could see. Features got designed with field input from the start, where before that input had been bolted on after launch.
The expertise was already in the building
We set out to close gaps in specific markets, and we did. The bigger win was finding out that the expertise to solve most of our problems already existed inside the organization. It just couldn't get to the right people, and the councils gave it a path.
If your teams keep reinventing solutions that exist elsewhere, or good ideas keep dying somewhere between departments, I'd try building a community before buying a new tool or writing a new process. Pick one specific problem that needs cross-functional input, bring together the people closest to it, and give them a regular forum where what they say changes the product.