Building Trust: Collaboration in Product Teams

Trust is the invisible infrastructure of every product organisation. When it is present, decisions flow quickly, disagreements are productive, and teams take risks together. When it is absent, every interaction becomes a negotiation, information is hoarded rather than shared, and the product suffers because nobody is willing to make bold bets without certainty.

At PR_D_CT DAY 2025 in Louvain-la-Neuve, Cyrille Dejemeppe, CPTO of N-SIDE Lifesciences, delivered a talk about what happens when trust breaks down in a product organisation and how to rebuild it. N-SIDE, a Louvain-la-Neuve-based company that builds optimisation software for the life sciences industry, went through a period where the relationship between product, engineering, and commercial teams had deteriorated to the point where alignment meetings were adversarial rather than collaborative.

For the audience at Martin's Agora, many of whom have experienced similar dynamics in their own organisations, Cyrille's talk was a rare moment of vulnerability from a senior leader willing to share not just the recovery but the failure that preceded it.