Outperforming With Cross Functional Teams
Developing modern day line of business applications requires a number of specialized skills. Some of the common functions include product management (PM), development, user experience (UX), data analytics, data science, and quality assurance (QA). By putting all the people that are important to your process on the same team you can create better outcomes for your users and your business.
In creating a cross functional team it is first important to be honest about your company’s priorities. Do you value UX? You should put a UX person on any team that has a user experience. How do you know if your company values UX? Look at the time you spend with users obsessing over giving them a really great experience. If your last conversation with a customer was over a month ago then you probably aren’t focusing on UX.
QA is another example of a function that your company may or may not focus on. What is the consequence of bugs in your code? Are you testing in production and is that acceptable to you? If so you probably aren’t focusing on quality.
What are your team metrics? I don’t mean velocity or other vanity metrics. I mean what business metrics is your team trying to move? Are you working on a page where you are looking for greater conversions? What about stickiness? Does your team have a goal of having customers spend more time in your experience? Are you creating efficiencies in the business that you are measuring? If none of these things ring true then you may not be that data driven.
Forming a Team
After figuring out what your company values it is time to start assembling a team. The most important concept in a cross functional team is that it needs to function as a team and not as a bunch of people with disparate duties who have been put in the same box on an org chart.
On a well functioning team you think in terms of roles and not in terms of positions. If you choose to structure your team with a PM role, a developer role, a data analysis role, and a user experience role that does not mean that you need to hire an individual person devoted to each of those roles. It means that your team needs expertise and time to perform each of those roles.
I find the best cross functional teams intentionally blur the role lines. I watched a UX designer spend 90% of their time in Invision and other UX tasks and 10% of their time pair programming on front end tasks. That 10% made all the difference in the world. What about having a developer spend time with users in traditional PM type tasks? That developer’s empathy for the user and their ability to craft solutions for those users has shot through the roof. Testing will improve if developers and QA pair every once in a while. Testing will get proritized if QA and PMs work together occasionally. PMs will be more realistic about deadlines if they have short pair programming sessions from time to time.
This cross pollination will more likely to be successful if your cross functional team sits next to each other.
First Team
Patrick Lencioni talks about the concept of first teams. Your first team is the team that you owe primary allegiance to and when push comes to shove you are going to prioritize your first team above any other team you are on. Lencioni talks about this in terms of executives in that a CTO is a member of the executive team first and a technologist second. Same for all other CxOs. This concept translates perfectly to cross functional teams. If you see yourself as an engineer (part of the engineering organization) first and a member of your cross functional team second then your team is going to suffer for it. In successful cross functional teams every team member will think of the cross functional team as their first team and their membership in their trade organization (PM, developer, UX, QA, etc) second.
Cross pollination is further enhanced by a strong first team mentality.
On a strong first team you will experience a paradox where you will code less (10–20% less) but you will grow as a coder faster. A good first team should be able to increase the effectiveness of their communication and reduce the time they spend in meetings. So maybe you actually get to code the same by converting your meeting time into cross pollination time. Think of what happens to your coding abilities then!
Good first teams lead to good vacations because everyone knows what is going on and they have cross pollinated enough that they can easily thrive for a week when a team member is absent. You should be able to take a week off and not even think about work.
Matrix Management
The trickiest part of cross functional teams is the matrix management that ensues. If all of the people eventually roll up under a single person who is interested in cross functional teams then that person can issue a mandate and work with their management team to ensure it succeeds. If this isn’t the case then it helps if all the managers of the people in the cross functional team are aligned on the vision. Barring those two scenarios then members of the cross functional team will have to start at the grass roots level and manage up to keep their way of working intact.
Conclusion
Cross functional teams benefit from blending a lot of different disciplines into a cohesive team that amplifies the work that can be done. By sitting together, forming a strong first team mentality, and having support from matrixed managment the team is more likely to succeed.
