Engineering and Clients: How Cross-Functional Teams Helped Us Scale
Written by: Karan Khanna, CTO Mediaocean (Co-founder and CTO 4C)
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“Start from the customer and work backwards” — Jeff Bezos
“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves” — Steve Jobs
“The key is to set realistic customer expectations and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them — preferably in unexpected and helpful ways” — Richard Branson (Virgin Group)
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Everyone is telling you to get “closer” to the customer, understand their needs and then divine a solution that works for customers in unexpected and helpful ways! But how? As a developer, I am spending most of my time coding furiously to the spec written by my product manager.
This is the dilemma of every software engineer in a growing startup.
When the startup is small, the engineer, product manager, salesperson and CEO all sit together and have a good understanding of the customer problem they are solving while trying to get to a minimum viable product (MVP). But with success comes more engineers, salespeople, customer service people, middle managers — you get the idea. More and more layers come between the engineer and the customer and at some point the engineer loses the deep understanding of the customer’s problems.
During our growth phase at 4C (before the acquisition by Mediaocean) we encountered this when we grew from 10 people to over 250 people. At some point in our growth, the engineers lost touch with the customers, and were building features that were never used by customers — this was a problem. All engineers want their features used and the pride that goes with it.
As an exec team we recognized this problem and realized that we needed to solve it, in order to build what the customers need. So what did we do? We created “cross- functional” (XFN) teams around each customer- facing area or module. These teams comprised of Software Engineers, Product Managers, and representatives from marketing, finance, sales, and customer service. The cross- functional team’s goal was to set and prioritize the roadmap for their areas and help prioritize customer issues. The key to making this work was to choose the right personalities from each of the functional areas. You don’t want a “quiet” developer or a “shout the house down” salesperson. Each person should feel comfortable and desirous of voicing their opinion and learning from the other areas. They also need to take this back to their broader team and impart this knowledge. This should lead to a good infusion of knowledge across the functional siloes.
…But did it work?
Yes! It took a few months for the kinks to be ironed out and to determine the right approach to forming and running an XFN team. We learned that the efficacy of an XFN team was determined by the personalities and the depth of business, customer, and product knowledge of the team members. We encouraged the teams to self-organize which included identifying a team leader, establishing the process and cadence, and setting the goals. After a few months, the XFN teams were humming along driving the roadmaps and customer issues with each of the functional teams having ownership. This also encouraged team work across groups and identified non-team- players. As an exec team, we still had to ensure that the XFNs were aligned with the company’s strategic direction and priorities but the rest of the execution was driven by each XFN team.
In hindsight, the decision to create XFN teams led to more product success and adoption by our customers. It disseminated knowledge across the organization, leading Product/Engineering to a better understanding of both the customer and the business. It also helped our marketing, finance, and sales teams better appreciate the Product/Engineering challenges and process. Startups moving from early to growth or mature stage should look at processes like XFN teams to keep Product and Engineering connected to customers.
