Collaboration Handbook

Elijah Woolery and Aarron Walter

The Collaboration Handbook is a practical guide to working better together, whether you’re building products, leading teams, or scaling a company. It offers a clear framework for raising your team’s collaborative intelligence through real-world lessons from creative leaders at top organizations like Airbnb, Netflix, Google, Meta, and Nike. Drawing from interviews on the Design Better Podcast, this book explores the habits, mindsets, and tools that drive effective collaboration across disciplines—even in distributed and hybrid environments.

You’ll learn how to lead with empathy, understand your colleagues and customers more deeply, and align around mission, vision, and purpose. Through actionable insights and engaging stories, you’ll discover how companies like Eileen Fisher, VMWare, and Astra use storytelling, principles, and trust-building to fuel innovation. With contributions from guests like Seth Godin, Julie Zhuo, Brian Chesky, John Cleese, and Marty Cagan, this book is essential reading for anyone looking to foster creativity, reduce friction, and build a collaborative culture.

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A look inside

What’s inside

Raising Your Collaborative Intelligence
This chapter introduces the concept of collaborative intelligence and why it’s essential in today’s distributed work environment. You’ll learn how design thinking and cross-disciplinary inspiration can strengthen team dynamics and drive innovation.
Collaborative Leadership
Great leadership isn’t about authority—it’s about service, storytelling, and shared vision. Learn from leaders at companies like Meta, Nike, Airbnb, and Astra how to lead from behind, build trust, and multiply your team’s impact.
Understanding Your Colleagues
Collaboration starts with empathy. This chapter explores how to build rapport, align goals, and navigate different perspectives to create healthier, more creative team dynamics—drawing insights from leaders at Google, Netflix, and VMWare.
Understanding Your Customers
To build the right product, you need to deeply understand who it’s for. Learn how companies like Airbnb and Google collaborate with customer to avoid product design.
Mission, Vision, and Purpose
Alignment doesn’t happen by accident. Discover how purpose-driven companies like Eileen Fisher and Airbnb use clear mission, vision, and values to guide decision-making, empower teams, and create meaningful work.
Creativity, Innovation, and Divergent Thinking
Creativity is a team sport. This chapter explores how to create the right conditions for innovation through psychological safety, structured tension, and diverse viewpoints—with stories from John Cleese, David Kelley, and Irene Au.
Building Together
Learn how teams at places like IDEO and Google build shared understanding and momentum by co-creating early and often—turning ideas into tangible experiences faster, with less friction.

About the authors

Eli Woolery
Elijah trained in the Product Design program at Stanford University, where he now teaches as a lecturer. He has a background in photography and filmmaking, as well as product and industrial design. He is formerly the Director of Design Education at InVision, a software design and collaboration platform. After working as a lead design engineer with Light & Motion, a vertically integrated manufacturer of consumer underwater video and photography equipment, he pursued graduate studies in marine biology at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, and co-founded the print magazine Wetpixel Quarterly in 2007. He was a founder in the second class of Innovation Endeavor's Runway Program, a venture-backed startup accelerator backed by Eric Schmidt's fund. He also founded Out of the Deep Blue, a design consultancy, where he worked on web and mobile applications for clients like Genentech and Kaiser Permanente. As a life-long worshiper of the ocean, he loves to surf, dive, and kayak.
Aarron Walter
Aarron Walter is a design and technology leader, and co-host of the Webby-nominated Design Better Podcast. He founded the user experience practice at Mailchimp, helping the company grow from a few thousand users to tens of millions. At InVision, he led research into the inner workings of top design teams at companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Google to uncover what drives their success. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Aarron joined former CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden at Resolve to Save Lives, applying design and technology to support emergency response efforts at the WHO, Africa CDC, and U.S. public health departments. Aarron has advised the White House, the U.S. Department of State, and dozens of leading companies, startups, and venture capital firms.

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