This is why you won’t build high-performing cross-functional feature teams

5 questions that will stop you

Don’t do it! “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” And in the end, it will be bad for you.

We all know the pros and cons:

Single function (design, UX, testing, etc.) and component teams (platform, GUI, backend, services, etc.) are commonly used in the software industry, especially in large companies. According to Craig Larman, however, in organizations that rely on component teams “work is often selected based on specialty rather than customer value”, they optimize for the maximization of the amount of code written by the teams, and not the value delivered to their customers. Also, component teams are efficient only if they have to develop features that do not impact other teams, otherwise the integration costs degrade the efficiency of the organization significantly.

So if you are a manager of component or single function teams, you most probably are aware of the above drawbacks and already contemplate forming cross-functional feature teams. Cross-functional teams build on the synergy of people with different competence areas to maximize customer value and minimize lead-times. High-performing cross-functional teams are accountable for delivering value to the customer, build on consensus, and members are empowered to have control in their area. There is no question that you want these benefits to come true and become the organizational culture! The sooner, the better!

Transforming your teams, however, will be terribly hard: you will have to convince your people and bosses, you will have to plan the whole change process, and execute it with enthusiasm while you keep your people motivated. Despite all of your efforts, there is a great chance that the transformation will fail. So before you’d even start planning it, there is a couple of things you may want to make clear for yourself. First of all:

Can you sell it to your teams?

The benefits are obvious for you. Now you are solely responsible for everything: your teams turn to you whenever they need a piece of information from another team, when a technical decision is needed, when their workflow has to be improved. “We need a manager for this”, they keep saying.

If you achieve your goal, among others, they will learn to make decisions for themselves, they will communicate with other teams and stakeholders without your involvement, and they will continuously improve their workflows. Wonderful, isn’t it!? Well, they will see that the burden of responsibility and ownership will be heavier on their shoulders.

You need to shake them up, you need to convince them that this is for their own benefit as well. You need to make them understand that if they don’t take control and if they always rely on you, they won’t be able to grow professionally. Their experience will be limited, their problem solving capabilities will be restricted, they won’t be able to live out their full potential.

You will need to explain them why you do what you do, that you have greatcommon goals, that you face a huge challenge and you won’t be able to face it unless you make this change. Your organization does not scale and inefficient, and in the meantime your customers are losing their patience: they get a faulty product, weeks later than they expected, and they have to wait for months for the features they requested today.

Don’t even start the change, if you cannot sell it to your people!

Do you trust them at all?

Okay, so you can sell it to your teams. Up until now they relied on your decisions, but in the future, they will be self-organizing, empowered, high-performing teams, and you won’t need to control them.

But if you are honest to yourself, you have to admit something: you retained control for a reason. In order to give control, you need to trust them, and you must be confident that they are competent enough on their areas.

Do you trust them? Do you hold them competent enough? If the answer is no to any of these questions, don’t even think about giving them control!

If answer is yes, however, you can think about how you will convince your bosses (and explain to yourself, why didn’t you give control to your competent, trustworthy people before).

Can you sell it to your bosses?

Yes, to that guy who started to work in the 80s as a COBOL programmer and lost track of the latest technological and methodological advances around 2003. Yes, to that guy who is a micromanagement champion, and wants you to keep a firm grip on your teams. And don’t forget his boss, who was in sales in his whole career, and who has little or no experience about software development.

Until the formation of efficient feature teams, your success was measured with the number of features your teams delivered on time. Meeting the deadline was especially important, and for that, you were directly or indirectly forced to sacrifice quality: whenever you felt that the deadline was endangered, due to the pressure from your bosses, you did not hesitate to cut from the testing activities.

You did not like what you had to do, but you gradually got used to it. Years ago your boss explained that the product people are your closest customers, and you have to do what they ask for, on time. And over the years, you became good at it.

After you transformed your teams, you will optimize for the value delivered to the customers, and by customers I mean those people who will actually buy and use your product. In many cases this requires more analysis and asking more question, leads to early failures, lots of experimentation, and changes in the plan and requirements. Most probably your teams will write less code and do more testing, at least, in the beginning. The consequence: based on the current performance indicators of your organization, your productivity will drop, and your bosses will notice it.

You are doomed to fail, if you cannot gain the support of your bosses, and in order to do that you need to have the necessary status. In her paper, The power of powerless speech: The effects of speech style and task interdependence on status conferral, professor Alison Fragale defines status as “the extent to which an individual in a group is seen as prominent, respected, and influential by other group members”, and according to her experimental results with power but without status you will be perceived as coercive and malevolent.

If you feel that you are respected or even admired by your people and your bosses, you “just” need to keep up their morale during the transition.

Are you able to let your teams fail and keep up their morale?

You trust your teams, and you hold them competent in their areas, you have their enthusiasm and you bosses’ support, but since you did a bunch of things for you teams, their experience is inherently limited in those areas. To have real ownership and control your people will have to fill the gaps in their knowledge and experience.

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm” said Winston Churchill, but failure comes with a price, and that price is usually theloss of enthusiasm. The enthusiasm of your teams, your bosses, and your own enthusiasm.

You will feel irresistible desire to solve their problems, fix the issues, and offer a remedy. You will feel that they are lost while you know all the answers, and it takes ages for them to do things you can do in minutes, and there are things they simply forget. You will be patient for a while, but after some time your bosses will become frustrated about the mistakes your teams committed, and/or your teams will feel lost.

But if you continue your old routines, you will inevitably fail and your people will lose their enthusiasm. The good news is that according to a recent research conducted at University of Southern California, when the brain has given the opportunity to learn from its mistakes, failure can feel a rewarding experience.

Keeping up the morale in the whole organization is essential for the success of the transformation. Celebrating small wins and large accomplishments will motivate the teams and your bosses to keep on going. Make your progress towards your goal transparent, and communicate any achievements you made.

If you feel that you can meet all the challenges above, there is only one question left, that you have to answer for yourself:

Can you still learn new things?

Sooner or later, if you do a good job, your highly empowered, self-organizing teams won’t need you any more. You was the manager, who got the things done, who was indispensable in the office when a technical decision had to be made, when teams had to coordinate their activities, when progress had to be reported. You will no longer be the most important single cog in the machine. What you knew, in what you was the best, will no longer be your privilege, your duty to do, your teams will do those things easily.

You will have to reinvent yourself, because your teams, although in another role, will need your help. You must learn to coach them. You must be open and curious, and against all your instincts and experiences, you will have to learn to ask the right questions, and listen to the answers, not judging them.

Ask them what is in their mind, what do they think about a problem and what solutions would they recommend, what is the real challenge for them, and, how can you help. And after you get an answer, instead of rushing to give an advice or as another — sometimes rhetorical — question, you should wait for a few seconds and let the information sink in.

In the end it may turn out that you will have to change the most.

Conclusions

As I started this post, even if you are confident that you can overcome the above difficulties, it will be hard; and if you were unsure that you can give a positive answer to all of the 5 questions, it would be unreasonable to have a go at the transformation. But, as George Bernard Shaw stated it in one of his maxims for revolutionaries:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”