“The best innovations happen when you put people with different backgrounds and skills together in the same room.”
Thomas Friedman, author of “That Used to Be Us.”
The last couple of decades have seen companies that innovate relentlessly to be at the forefront of growth and success. The innovations have been product innovations, like what Apple did, or process innovations like Uber and AirBnB. Cross-functional teams are a powerful way to foster such creativity and innovation. This article discusses how cross-functional teams can bring value to your digital products and build and leverage such cross-functional teams.
Table of Contents
How Do We Have Ideas?
While we generally associate valuable ideas with sudden insights from a person, it is rarely so. What is much more common is for creative ideas to come from informal interactions with people. In his book “Where Good Ideas Come From,” Steven Johnson equates such a creative breakthrough with “slow hunches.” The ideas evolve through thoughts and interactions before they take a concrete shape. For example, Henry Poincare, whose work on chaotic deterministic systems laid the foundations for the Theory of Chaos, wrote that his ideas arose in crowds rather than isolation. The focus of his work is primarily on the core idea rather than its optimal implementation. However, the inferences imply that an idea is effectively developed when freed from the limitations of the mind. In her book “A Mind for Numbers,” Dr. Barbara Oakley describes this state of the brain as diffused mode.
The ability to free an idea from constraints defines the effectiveness of assembling a cross-functional team to develop that core idea further. The example of Bell Labs is well known and apt to illustrate this phenomenon. It used to get physicists and engineers into a single corridor where their daily conversations led to multiple innovations. They include radio astronomy, the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, and inventions including the transistor, photovoltaic cell, laser and CCD, and many other breakthroughs.
The research and the examples above suggest that when an idea is examined on a larger canvas, it takes a more wholesome shape. A cross-functional team structure is an effective way to achieve this.
What Is A Cross-functional Team?
When we talk about a cross-functional team, what we mean is a heterogeneous team. In general, businesses operate in silos, or departments, each focusing on its specialized activities. For example, designers concentrate on defining the product or service while engineering builds the product. The marketing department focuses on how to get the product or service message across. The seeds of such compartmentalization were that bringing specialized expertise together and making them responsible for the corresponding dimension of product development and delivery would make operations efficient.
Such an arrangement usually brings people with similar training and mindset together. Unfortunately, these similarities create an invisible boundary for ideas. As a result, there is homogeneity, which leads to additional focus on a few aspects of the product while excluding the others.
In that sense, a cross-functional team is not just a team with members from different organizational functions or departments. Instead, they bring people with diverse backgrounds, thought processes, training, and skills together. Thus, when people refer to cross-functional teams, they usually refer to this larger context of heterogeneous groups.
Why Is A Cross-functional Team Valuable?
While specialization and efficiency were practical in the earlier century and most physical products, digital products are different. Unlike physical products, their success depends on a variable perception based on intangibles. Even physical products benefit from cross-functional interactions. For example, while designing a car, engineering knowledge might benefit from better fuel efficiency or aerodynamics. For digital products, though, such influences are far more pronounced. A designer, typically at the start of the value stream to build a digital product, may get heavily influenced by support considerations, a function at the other end of the value stream.
But even beyond the functional silos at workplaces, factors like geographies, languages, and culture influence the design process. Individuals with different backgrounds in these areas bring different outlooks and perceptions. Design is ultimately the art and science of creating perceptions of customers and users. Because of this, skills, knowledge, experience, and social and emotional factors like culture can have a different effect on the same idea.
The third aspect is the cognitive biases that affect design decisions. For example, confirmation bias would leave us with a design that the designer likes. But it may not resonate with potential customers and users. As a result, the teams from a single function would typically have had similar training and mindsets, resulting in design decisions conforming to prevailing and traditional choices. In addition, research by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman has demonstrated that framing the information architecture and presentation can lead to opposing actions being performed. That is why it is critical to deal with such cognitive biases and develop a product that balances the impact of such biases.
In summary, the three things that make cross-functional teams successful are;
- They employ the knowledge from different workstreams to develop a better product.
- They utilize social and cultural influences to better serve their customers’ needs by creating emotional engagement.
- Making design choices that are more informed and empirical maintains a balance between cognitive biases to ensure optimal product design and implementation.
How To Build A Great Cross-functional Team?
Building an effective cross-functional team is much more than pulling people from different business functions together. Many aspects influence the building of such groups.
Delivering the ultimate digital product is one of the most crucial factors. Agile principles demand that the team independently create the complete product in all aspects without relying on anyone outside the group. It is impossible unless the team has the skills from all the functions to build and sustain the digital product you are making.
The second most critical factor is the open and unimpeded flow of communication between every team member. A top-down communication approach does not work with cross-functional teams. Getting the most value from cross-functional teams requires open communication, which equally values seemingly simple or impossible ideas and appraises them on their merit. There are many techniques to do such kind of idea evaluation and decision making. Consensus Mapping, Delphi Technique, Decision Tree, Six Thinking Hats, and many other frameworks already exist that you can utilize to channel cross-functional communication effectively.
The third element of a successful cross-functional team is psychological safety, and it ties in with the open communication principle. If you are not allowing team members to experiment and make mistakes, people will not take initiatives and risks key to creative endeavors. Psychological safety is also the most significant factor that allows a team to be effective and engaged. Good ideas come from involved people.
Building cross-functional teams, though, is not an afterthought. You have to look at aligning organization-wide practices to enable cross-functional operations. Right from the recruitment process, leaders should encourage hiring a diverse workforce to decentralize decision-making and flatter communication structures across the organization. Cross-functional teams are influenced and constrained by the organization’s culture and practices, and the leadership should be mindful of that.
Challenges of Building Cross-functional Teams
While cross-functional teams are valuable, effective teams are hard to build. Many challenges can affect building one. Let’s see some of them.
Digital products are complex endeavors. They require highly skilled people, and these people have strong ideas about the whats and hows of product development. Differing opinions lead to conflicts, and if you can’t manage these conflicts promptly and decisively, they can derail the efforts. The leaders must have exceptional conflict management skills to influence such situations.
The second challenge is creating a sense of shared, collective responsibility. For a cross-functional team to work, it needs to direct its collaborative effort in one direction. While the team’s perspectives may be diverse, cross-functional teams will not be helpful unless they work for a common goal. It is also not enough to set the plan once and forget about it. It needs to be reiterated and broken down into smaller goals that the team can achieve periodically. Agile Methodologies (especially SCRUM) provide the concept of “Sprint Goal” for this reason. A sprint goal is what a cross-functional team works to achieve in a short timeframe. Consistently achieving the sprint goals leads to achieving the ultimate product vision.
All this is not possible unless the team functions as a cohesive unit, which is not possible if there is no trust between team members. Trust and respect are the foundational elements of any successful cross-functional team. It takes time to build such an environment, but it is also the leader’s biggest challenge.
In addition, there are specific skills required to ensure that the team is agile and is able to strategically work together to build valuable products for their customers. Read more about such skills in this article.
To sum up
It is not easy to build successful cross-functional teams. First, you must create an environment where the team members can ask questions, share different and diverging perspectives, appreciate, respect, trust other team members and their ideas, and handle conflict in a highly mature manner. But once you do that, cross-functional teams can result in incredible and innovative ideas for your digital product. It brings diverse perspectives together, thus enabling you to create a wholesome product.
