Katie Bauer!

In the same way that your ICs won’t get far by demanding their partners listen, you will also need to be gentler. If the IC is tightly partnered with another team, they will likely have more context in a project or area, and will know better than you what they need to do next

This can be an intimidating position to be in, but again: your IC's aren't your subordinates. They're your team mates, and you need to understand their situation to be able to offer something useful to them

A technique I’ve found effective for this is trying to learn from the IC. Talk about what they’re working on, then dig into the project’s origin, who cares about it, what will happen when it’s done. Listen and really try to understand. THEY the expert here, not you

Once they’ve gotten a chance to demonstrate their expertise, you know what they know and you’re on much better ground to add your own perspective. But be prepared for them to have already thought about what you say or have a reason why it doesn't make sense here

What have you found to be effective wrt staying aware of teams' work in weak concept teams?

In my experience, it partly depends on the scope of the weak concept team since there's naturally a breadth/depth tradeoff there. But in any kind of scenario, I try to make sure I understand the context IC is working in and how they're investing their time.

For each IC's partner group, I try to understand what outcomes the group wants to drive, its level of quantitative maturity, and what existing data infra/assets are relevant to them.

Since the DS responsible for the area is usually trying to help the partner figure out how to measure/meet their goals, uplevel their data maturity, or build new data resources, that usually gives me enough of a framework that I can see how (well) they're contributing