I worked with my team and we adopted some simple rules that really helped. We started every product change or feature request with a statement of the goal. Before any work was done, we got to agreement on the goal.This put everyone on the same side, trying to find a solution leveraging their expertise/knowledge We moved from a culture of “no” (engineering saying no to requests and design saying no to new ideas for product coming out of engineering) to a culture of “why?” that focused the whole team on understanding an approach and collaborating to remove blocks in the process and to understand the trade offs that have to be made as resources are allocated and deadlines approach.

From @PhineasB (aka SneakerheadVC) http://www.sneakerheadVC.com/2012/01/17/cto-dr-no/trackback/