Vertical collaboration is defined by Rick Defour as a team of people working interdependently toward a common goal for which they are all mutually accountable.

Now that everyone is clear on the importance of collaboration and the different types, it’s time to delve into the importance of one type of collaboration in particular: vertical. Vertical collaboration is defined by Rick Defour as a team of people working interdependently toward a common goal for which they are all mutually accountable. You can find examples of vertical collaboration in educational settings where teachers of different levels work together to insure student success and in manufacturing settings where the supplier & retailer can better leverage themselves to enhance the bottom line for both.

When you think of vertical collaboration in the tech space, the example of a dev team pushing out code is a good one. Each dev has a different area of specialty but they must work together in order to implement the new feature. Taking this into consideration then, it’s easy to see why a vertical collaboration tool has to be easy to use and not create any new boundaries. The more vertical a collaborative tool is built, the more useful it is to real people.

The problem, of course, is that many companies view all collaboration tools as vertical. They only want to spend money on one tool so they pick the horizontal one (thinking that it’s the one more people will use) and it turns out to not actually be helpful to anyone. So that’s when companies start adding to their toolbox and then end up with a hodgepodge of tools. Instead of making their collaboration process more effective, they have made it more convoluted.

I created VictorOps because there was no existing vertical collaboration platform for DevOps. Going into it, I knew I was solving a problem I’d had at a number of previous companies and therefore already knew the exact requirements needed. The collaborative platform would have to be mobile first, would have to allow for synchronous engagement while enabling asynchronous problem solving and would have to give all participants symmetric access to information from their enterprise monitoring platform.

What I realized after creating VictorOps and using it to solve our own internal issues is that vertical collaboration gives team members the opportunity for scalable “leaning in” while also providing the freedom to lean out to reflect. What’s not to love about that?