Cross Functional Teams
The story of how we implemented cross functional teams and why they are so successful.
I remember the time when our development team was around five people. Good old days. Everything went so smoothly. We moved fast. We decided fast. We had productive and short discussions. Once we passed ten people everything started getting hard. Communication, coordination and speed takes a sudden hit when a team goes over seven people.
But, you can’t stay small forever. If your product is successful, you have to keep moving. What should you do when your development team reaches ten people and you start having all kinds of unexpected growing pains? JotForm is growing rapidly and we needed to restructure how we operate.
For us, the solution was to split into small cross functional teams. Today, I’d like to share what I have learned about cross functional teams.
How we do it
Team Size
Teams consist of three to five people. Usually a senior developer, front end developer, back end developer, designer and CSS developer. Some teams also have project or product managers.
Communication
Some of our teams are remote only. And some of our teams are co-located. We never mix it up. Either all team members are located remotely or everyone sits together. Co-located teams literally sit together in the same area.
Management
Teams are self-managing. They decide what to work on and how to work on it. But, they do not randomly choose what to work on. Teams have short, single-sentence missions. The team will chose what to work on based upon their team mission.
Focus on a Single Metric
Each cross functional team focuses on a single metric. The most important benefit of this is that the teams can quickly get wins and build momentum around them. They will also have to focus on what really matters, and not waste time with things that do not make a difference.
We keep them short so they are easy to remember and focus on. For example, the goal of the Growth Team is to increase the number of the active users. That’s it. Nothing else. They have a single number to keep their eye on: “Number of Active Users.” They watch that number very closely.
Here is how we do it at JotForm:
Growth Team: Number of active users
Form Builder Team: User survey ratings
Data and Reporting Team: Number of reports created
Platform Team: Number of integrations/apps used
Widgets Team: Number of widgets used on forms
Mobile Team: Number of active mobile users
Maintenance Teams: Number of outstanding bugs
Performance Team: Average response time taken for common activities
Not all teams are cross-functional, and work across all products- Devops, Support, and Marketing.
Weekly Demo Days
Every Friday afternoon all teams meet in front of a large TV screen and show off what they have done that week. This is a great time to celebrate successes and get to know what everyone else is doing. For remote teams we have check-ins via Skype.
Some Successful Examples
Having never personally worked in a cross functional team in the past, I’ve been curious about how other companies are doing this cross-functional thingy. From looking at public blog posts and public job ads, I tried to find out more about it. Here are some cross functional teams from other well known tech companies.
Facebook
Newsfeed
Growth and Engagement
Search
Groups
Feed
Messaging
Integrations and Quality
Mobile
Release
Content
Airbnb
Payments
Internal Tools
Host
Guest
Hospitality
Photography
Translation
Public Policy
Trust and Safety
Marketing
Growth
Employee Experience
Business Travel
Wordpress.com
Themes
Social Team
Happiness Team
Twitter
Growth
Search & Content
Video Consumption
Direct Messaging
Infrastructure
Engineering Effectiveness
Consumer Products
Localization
Digits
Influencers
Syndication
Identity and User Safety
B2B Video & TV Lead
Consumer Video & TV Lead
Brand Analytics & Insights
Mobile Tools
International Markets
Platform Operations
These companies have dozens or hundreds of cross functional teams. So, these lists are nowhere near complete. But, the name of some of these teams should give you many clues on how they work. All these companies are known to move fast and build amazing products.
So, what makes cross functional teams work so well?
- Trust: Cross functional teams work well because of trust. Once the team size goes over five it gets harder to know everyone else in your team. When you know other team members and trust them, it’s easier to tell them how you feel about something. When you trust others in your team you work harder because you don’t want to betray their trust.
- Decisiveness: You discuss, decide and move on. That’s how it should be. Decisions should be made quickly. Larger teams can’t make decisions. They have fault lines that split people into multiple camps. Small, cross-functional teams don’t have that problem.
- Fun: When you have a handful of teammates, they become your close friends. You have fun spending time together. When you have fun you can be more productive and creative.
- Focus: As a team, you only focus on a single project. You push through. If someone gets stuck, you help each other out. You win as a team or lose as a team. You celebrate together and you mourn together. You move forward every day until you get the current project done. Then, you move on to the next project as a team.
- Agility: Small teams don’t need big processes. They get the job done without worrying about following a big process.
- Serendipity: Because cross functional teams sit together, they can overhear each other easily. The information gets shared with everyone and this creates opportunities to come up with good, creative solutions to problems.
- Speed: Since people from different functions (i.e., a developer and a designer) sit together, the feedback cycle moves fast and they get things done quickly.
- Physical Closeness: We are social animals. Being physically close to each other has many positive effects.
- Democracy: We get lost in large teams. In a small team, everyone’s opinion is valued and considered. We are more likely to express our opinions if we know the other people closely and trust them.
- Diversity: In functional teams, people may fall in to trap of thinking alike. On cross-functional teams, you have people from multiple disciplines. This makes their ideas better and stronger.
