It seems obvious that in-house collaboration would improve outcomes and increase productivity, yet it remains one of the biggest hurdles web development teams face. We recently caught up with Jace Wade, Product Marketing Manager at Webflow, to hear his insights on how web teams can collaborate better. 

Websites have more eyeballs and stakeholders than ever before

Websites are the front door to businesses. Potential customers may never interact with a human, and their sole interactions with a brand may happen digitally through your website. With increased eyeballs on the website, more teams within an organization have opinions and requests for website changes.

“Ten years ago, only a few folks worked on the website,” Wade says. “You’d have a web developer and a few content folks to update the copy and messaging. Nowadays, the website is the engine of your brand and more teams have a stake in the website’s success.” 

On average, 67 people contribute to a website, according to our 2024 State of the Website report. And 77% of non-technical individuals say they need support to build custom experiences for their organization’s website. 

The design team is responsible for the structure and build, content owns blog posts and messaging, and product marketing relies on landing pages to fuel the success of product releases. If you have a traditional way of building and updating your website, all of those teams submit requests to one or two people who make the updates. This results in a massive bottleneck. 

“The ability to give all stakeholders and user types the ability to play their own part and fulfill their own requests on the website in a safe way is huge for speed to market,” Wade says.  

The top two challenges for website collaboration: speed and safety

Many teams have projects waiting in a backlog for the website team to deploy. The first challenge that collaboration solves is slow speed to market for web projects: 48% of web projects aren’t completed on-time or on-budget, according to our State of the Website report.

The second challenge is building safely with quality control guardrails, so teams don’t break the website. Over half (55%) of the marketing leaders we surveyed say they think their current website is both fragile and susceptible to breakage.

Wade shares: “A lot of teams tell us that they want more people to help with the site, but they’re scared to invite them in because they think they’re going to break something.” 

Step one of building websites collaboratively is setting the right roles and permissions. This will unblock team members to contribute and work efficiently.

“Roles and permissions are foundational and will determine the success of everything that follows,” Wade says. Webflow has robust roles and permissions based on the level of access needed. 

Adopting a “build better together” mindset

Building together starts with giving different stakeholders the capabilities and autonomy to create websites that convert visitors into customers. 

For example, a marketing leader says they want to get a new idea into market in less than two weeks. If the request has to be logged with the engineering or web team, they likely will come back and say there’s no bandwidth and that they need at least a month to execute. 

“Being able to work with agility, get ideas to market, push campaigns and products, and do so consistently and quickly gives you a competitive edge,” Wade says. “At some point, you have to let other ancillary teams in to build alongside you if you want to grow successfully.” 

Leaders often are looking for ways to empower their teams, rather than a solution for collaboration. “Most leaders come to us saying they want to set up their team for success with tools that help them execute quickly with the right guardrails. They’re using legacy solutions that promote bottlenecks, when really, they want to unlock collaboration for their team and empower everyone to do their best work.”

Siloed tools are the root of communication barriers

Typically when teams find collaboration or communication difficult, the real problem is that they’re using different tools for the same project. Take a common example: the marketing team fills out a brief in Notion and sends it to the web team who requires that it be uploaded in Jira. Then the web team opens Webflow, but key information is missing so they ping the stakeholder in Slack to get the response, which isn’t updated in Notion or Jira. 

“What’s most effective is helping everyone speak the same language. That means allowing them to work side by side in the same platform and add comments in real time for other stakeholders to see.” 

When people from different teams can see the steps and status updates for a project to be live, they have visibility and can work together, rather than having a cumbersome handoff between teams. With Webflow’s collaboration features, teams can work in parallel and they can see where another teammate is editing the site, reducing barriers to collaboration.  

Measuring collaboration through speed and conversion

Collaboration isn’t typically a KPI leaders aim for; rather, successful collaboration helps a business achieve its goals. When aligning business goals with collaboration, the two primary metrics to look at are speed to market and conversion rate. If web projects can’t launch quickly enough and development timelines are slow, business growth and innovation stall. As a result, conversion rates decrease. 

When more teams contribute to the website and bottlenecks decrease, the company is able to get projects out the door faster. With more teams having insight into changes to the website, they have more brains working on it and can identify what’s working sooner, so you learn from experiments and A/B tests faster. “A product marketer might see that messaging on a landing page converts better. Then, they can suggest the team spin out more similar content or update other landing pages,” Wade illustrates.

Collaboration never stops

Website collaboration is an ongoing process, and it doesn’t stop once you’ve launched your website. You continually need to work together with other teams to analyze website performance, experiment, and identify efforts that achieve business results. 

“Typically, teams are trying to improve the process of building and launching, but they also need to track how the site is performing once it is live” Wade says. “The website requires teams to regularly analyze performance and then improve the site based on tests and experiments.”