What are cross-functional product teams?

Knee-deep in user research and release notes, it can be easy for product managers and your teams to work in silos, forgetting you have a diverse team behind you working towards the same goals.

When product teams fully realize the support available from other teams, you can collectively work towards goals faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Plus, when you implement a cross-functional communication strategy in your product team, you're more likely to avoid project management challenges like miscommunication, unnecessary product renditions, and workforce conflicts.

Here are five benefits of cross-functional collaboration and communication:

Marketing, sales, finance, and customer success—every team within an organization has a unique set of data insights that can prove extremely valuable to the product design process.

A cross-functional communication culture encourages teams to share their data in an empathetic way, conscious of the person receiving that data. For example, going beyond just emailing a data export by recording a short explainer video. This way, someone from another team can easily understand and use the data to their advantage.

2. Increased innovation

Collaborative teams are innovative teams: work is shared more, opinions and expertise are exchanged, and projects get diverse input—which leads to more empathetic and inclusive products.

For example, when you open your product build to other key members of the business, you collect insights that revolve around other business pillars. Inputs from support, marketing, and sales can all shed light on varying customer needs. At the same time, inputs from others within the product team can dive deeper into jobs to be done (JTBD).

Molly Hellerman, global head of innovation programs at Atlassian, stresses the importance of cross-functional collaboration and innovation—especially in the digital space. Hellerman says, “to encourage wider collaboration; companies must tear down information silos [...] the more you include people and get their ideas early, the faster you can iterate.”

3. Develop a common language and inclusive culture

Product teams sometimes develop a language of their own when it comes to operations. Whether you do this intentionally—like the Spotify Squads culture—or unintentionally—and the language emerges naturally—it can be hard for other teams to decode and meet your product team on the same page.

A cross-collaboration culture combats product-centric language and uses common language in a style that all departments and talent can understand. This helps battle miscommunication and builds a more inclusive company culture.

For example, a cross-functional collaboration strategy could include a company-wide language knowledge base. This knowledge base will act as the ‘glossary’ for your business so every employee (new or old) is kept in the loop.

4. Goal alignment

Great communication across teams helps different departments align on larger, business-centric goals and understand company-wide KPIs to reach them. Teams can identify where and when you can come together to help the business hit growth goals, and reach success faster and more efficiently.

For example, cross-team communication may identify a much-needed sync in any new feature prototyping stage. Your teams may want to align to run 1-on-1 UI tests like tree tests, 5-second tests, card sorting, and more.

5. Prioritize customer experience

Product experience insights are crucial to building customer-centric products that are empathetic and user-friendly. By creating a cross-communication culture, you can build products that put your users first and bring diverse inputs and data into the product build.

For example, your marketing or support teams may have valuable website data that can inform your product evolution:

• Which blog page or help article is the most visited?

• Which images or videos are most popular?

• What are the most frequently asked customer questions?

The answers to those questions provide useful insights for optimizing your product and the user experience.

What does a successful cross-functional product team look like?

A cross-functional product team doesn’t need to include someone from every department. Other departments are valuable resources for your work and can provide critical insights, guidance, and feedback—but you’re probably familiar with the expression: "too many cooks spoil the broth."

Be cautious as you build a cross-functional team and consider the talent you need to communicate with while remaining agile. To help you with this, let's look at the recipe for a successful cross-functional product team.

Here's who you need:

Product managers

A product manager is responsible for heading up the cross-functional initiative. A PM needs to be reliable, contactable, and have the ability to tie people together if they see a benefit from doing so.

Developers

It’s so easy for developers to get stuck in their bubble. Even with cross-functional collaboration in effect, the dev team will still need to remain somewhat self-organizational and manage the product backlog within their sub-teams.

A successful cross-functional product team will see developers communicating frequently, and each sprint or iteration will be a joint effort of everyone on board.

QA resources

Your QA team helps to spot (and swat) bugs, identify UX and UI opportunities, and ready your product for market. Your quality assurance team can be in-house or outsourced—both options are valuable and effective. But no matter where or who your QA resources are, they need to be accessible to the rest of your product team.

QA resources are not a one-way street. Ensure you have the infrastructure to host conversations—no matter how you’re choosing to operate QA.

The Spotify Squads framework might not be the best example of successful cross-functional product culture, but there are elements to consider for your cross-communication framework.

For example, tribes, chapters, and guilds are all ways in which Spotify tried to promote cross-team communication. Although the overwhelming amount of autonomy eventually led to the culture's failure, the way in which Spotify promoted communication across teams is something to be learned from.

4 Examples of cross-functional communication being successfully put into practice

Don’t just take our word for it: some companies are already leading the way with cross-functional communication, setting the example for how this work culture can be implemented in other product teams and entire organizations.

Here are four of them:

Spotify

As we mentioned, Spotify created a product-centric framework that eventually failed but highlighted a few practical ways product teams could build a cross-functional communication culture.

It’s worth considering squads, guilds, tribes, or chapter arrangements—as promoted by Spotify Squads—to find unique and relevant ways to tie people and their work together.

Apple

With over 130,000 employees and over a billion customers worldwide, a cross-functional product team at such scale would surely be a disaster, right? Wrong. Apple has an entire team and initiative with their Nerve Center—Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) team that helps ensure the business runs a cross-functional culture smoothly and efficiently.

“Cross-functional collaboration is crucial because no one team is responsible for a product or a service on its own,” says Jason Giles, the company’s Wireless Software Engineering Manager.

“Dozens of specialist teams may be needed for even a single key component of a new product. Yet each team works with a shared purpose—create an extraordinary user experience.”

Nokia

Nokia is going from strength to strength in recent years. Net sales are consistently up and their network infrastructure initiative drove a 28% increase in revenues in 2021.

The business promotes a “diverse culture [and] collaborative experience. No matter what part of the world you’re in, [Nokia enables] collaboration through advanced virtual meeting and knowledge sharing tools and systems.”

Open collaboration is the core of Nokia’s culture and is deemed to be the key to achieving such high goals. The Nokia Bell Labs initiative has spent nearly 100 years “cultivating a culture of research that is collaborative, interdisciplinary, and open.”

Hotjar

All product teams at Hotjar are made up of several different roles, so cross-functional collaboration is both implicit and crucial to work.

How much these roles need to collaborate with other teams mostly depends on each squad’s ownership area and if that’s vertical or horizontal in scope. For example, product teams working on specific features are more vertical in nature and have a narrower scope, so they might need to collaborate less than more horizontal product teams.