Cross-Functional Teams. But Are They Really?
The generally-accepted value of cross-functional teams arises from the fact that they bring together the best people from different areas to work on a specific project. By leveraging the diverse expertise and perspectives of each team member, a cross-functional team can develop innovative solutions that would not have been possible with a more traditional, siloed approach.
However, cross-functional teams are about more than technically having the capability to deliver independently. They’re about actually delivering continuously and efficiently. Let’s have a look at a few factors that can bring our teams closer to continuous and efficient delivery.
- When leadership is volunteered. Team members pick up initiatives of various types, even outside of their area of expertise. For instance, trying out new technologies. Contributing to process design. Involvement in support and documentation of areas new to them. Mentorship and coaching. Metrics. Exploratory testing and running experiments.
- More ownership and collaboration. This flows from the above and it is the application of our leadership principles to day-to-day product engineering work by extended care beyond the team members’ area of direct expertise, upstream and downstream of delivery. This could include communication with stakeholders and general moderation. Direct participation in experiments and measurements. Extended support and indefinite feature ownership in production.
- Self-awareness and empathy in the team. Pursuing successful outcomes at a team level over individual outputs. This includes all the aspects related to solid engineering, from enabling new team members to onboard themselves effectively, to maximizing transparency, minimizing bottlenecks — and, when required, putting their team members first. A few examples that come to mind include avoiding delayed code reviews, consistently low test coverage, and actively repaying technical debt.
- Keenly aware of their dependencies and actively pushing to minimize their impact. When guided by team-level empathy, it could mean advocating for team APIs, mocking as much as possible, using feature flags and integration tests. When dependencies are broken such teams find out first. Building new, more efficient communication patterns. Frequent meetings moderated by managers are replaced by ad-hoc meetings that can happen without the required involvement of managers. Pursuing effective communication as the foundation of successful relationships — synchronous and asynchronous.
It’s important to note that cross-functional teams also come with their own set of challenges, such as the need to manage conflicts and differing priorities among team members, and the need to effectively coordinate and communicate with team members who may be located in different geographic locations or time zones.
While there may be challenges in managing and coordinating a cross-functional team, the benefits of increased diversity and expertise can make it a valuable approach for addressing complex business problems and achieving organizational goals.
Conclusion
It used to be that teams were cross-functional AND self-organizing. It used to be that some organizations found comfort in just being cross-functional. But now, in our faced-paced and performance-focused environments, self-organization is a must.
