How does your team foster effective collaboration between product and design teams throughout the product development lifecycle to ensure cohesive and user-centric outcomes?

We include design in all stages of PDLC, including product research, ideation, definition review, stand-ups, and backlog meetings throughout the project. This has significantly helped with collaboration, communication, consistency, and alignment across cross-teams. 

We invite UX designers to our regular backlog grooming meetings for product development projects, and schedule regular design review sessions with product, engineers, and designers for new feature designs. That allows product to share user feedback and designers to share best practices to collaborate on user-centric designs.