Happiness, Productivity and Sense of Purpose

By JON NYLANDER

If you want to build a successful product development organisation, consider using cross functional teams as the main building blocks. If you are prepared to negotiate compelling goals and to support those teams, you’re in for a ride!

First of all, lets define a cross functional team.

A cross functional team is a group of closely collaborating people who among themselves share all the competences and personality traits needed to produce and maintain value, from idea to finished result.

Cross functional teams make a lot of sense sense in product development. Their focus is more easily aligned towards product success — i.e doing just enough of the right things in the right order to succeed. Their minds will be naturally inclined to think of the bigger picture and they will have an easier time building alliances with other parts of your organisation.

Since a cross functional team contains all competences and personalities needed to drag a product from A-Z, their internal feedback loops will be short, in some cases almost instantaneous. Why do wireframes if you can pair with the front end developer to hack out in-product prototypes? Why sit on your hands while you wait for another team to deliver APIs? Help the dude next to you who is developing them right now instead!

The possibilities for horisontal collaborations within such a team are endless and should be actively nurtured, even at the cost of velocity. The understanding and learning that comes out of cross competence pairing is worth it in the long run.

If you set about creating cross functional teams, your organisation’s processes will have to consciously move towards continuous prioritisation and corrections over iterations (i.e agile) and away from high profile waterfall projects.

Good cross functional teams iterate toward product success using outward facing methods and values. But this can only happen with support and mandate from the right stakeholders.

A mature cross functional team will develop its own processes and values aimed towards a successful product. This will only work so far as that team understands product success. And this understanding is what you will need to constantly coach and talk about. As much for your own benefit as for theirs.

If you are prepared to continuously negotiate and coach — you can establish well oiled cross functional teams with the muscles to design, develop, test, deploy and maintain a product. They are simply superior speaking partners for product owners and product managers.

This does not mean that you should relinquish your prerogative to have the final deciding power. The point is rather that if you embrace negotiation and constant feedback as a way of coaching the teams into understanding, you will yourself reach new heights of understanding, and you can form a real partnership with the team.

What about functional teams?

On the opposite side of the spectrum are functionally aligned teams, where all members have the same competence profile. They have a tendency to focus on throughput and quality, i.e doing good things at pace . Though these are important characteristics of any type of team, a functionally aligned team will have a harder time understanding the challenges that other parts of an organisation are facing, and therefore they wont be as good at building alliances and dealing with the constant flux that is reality outside of their guild. Functional teams will always incline toward guild matters. And your organisation’s processes will incline toward waterfall projects.

Functional teams may be very productive and robust. But they will necessarily struggle with understanding of requirements and will often find themselves at the mercy of decisions they have not been able to influence. Other teams may well be perceived as a nuisance. To tame the “game of whispers”; authoritarian project management often seems like the only way forward.

In some scenarios functionally aligned teams actually make sense! Say for example that you need a group of back end developers and architects to conduct efforts in an area that does not require visual design or functional testers. But that team should also contain all the competences and persons needed to start, drive and complete product accomplishments — it all comes down to what you understand to be a “product” or a unit of value.

So, given that cross functional teams are a good idea. What do you need in place to help them along? Here’s my list:

1. Goals
2. Trust and solid mandate
3. Sophisticated testing culture
4. Support
5. Celebration
6. Slack

Short and sweet, but not to be underestimated.

Once in a blue moon; a trinity of emotional states manifest in a team; and compels them to get loads of stuff done. These three emotions are simply happiness, productivity and sense of purpose. The impact of this state is potentially enormous. I believe that this trinity state can be reached consciously reached when working with the points above.

I’ll go through them in more details in the coming weeks. Stay tuned if you liked this post.

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