Scaling Cross-Functional Teams

I was speaking with Richard Dalton for the Getting to Zero podcast and he highlighted a challenge that he faced managing over 300 teams at Verizon.

As a design leader he has a preference for customer-journey-aligned cross-functional teams. But at Verizon scale things start to break down particularly around duplication of work across the journey. For example the same screens are used across phone purchase, trade in, customer support and more.

This is indeed a tricky one. From my experience whenever we talk about re-use of screens across journeys there are always edge cases that apply only to a single journey. If we split them into separate teams there would be duplication but by keeping them together we are increasing complexity. Enabling Teams, functionally aligned expert teams, can help by encouraging the sharing of best practices and knowledge across teams and by reducing duplication using design systems or component repositories. Ultimately the question boils down to balancing the overhead of coordination with the cost of duplication.

A second challenge is around supporting Verizon’s multiple channels including online, apps, in-store and the call center ‘Care’. This is too much for a single team to handle so they create separate teams for each channel but this creates a dependency between teams whenever a new feature launches. Richard said in the past they wouldn’t care so much about consistency across channels but they want to ensure a seamless experience for customers.

If you have separate teams but they always need to work together, you really have one big team with extra management overhead. My, controversial, view is that you need to decide whether consistency is critical. If so, then make one big team and try to figure out how to streamline it. If not, then leave the teams work independently and accept the inconsistencies in the flow. You can use projects periodically in rare cases when consistency is required such as a new product launch.

I’ve linked to the video of the full conversation with Richard below - its a great one!

This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

Scaling Really Large Products by Rory Madden
Cross-functional teams let your product scale quickly up to a point. We share four different approaches (and one approach to avoid) that can help teams continue to perform as they scale.

Managers Believe Downsizing Is Effective. Research Says: Nope. by Pim de Morree
According to research, downsizing is not the silver bullet for saving a company. It's more like shooting yourself in the foot. Pim explains why.

Product Direction

8 Different Ways to Organize Your Backlog to Make it More Impactful by Ant Murphy
User Story Mapping, Funnel Backlog, Tree Backlogs and more. Ant shares different approaches to make more impactful roadmaps.

The Lifecycle of Goals: Research, Discover, Deliver, Monitor by Itamar Gilad
How to manage the goal lifecycle and steer towards business and user outcomes rather than “place bets” on unproven ideas.

Continuous Discovery

How To Improve Your Microcopy: UX Writing Tips For Non-UX Writers by Irina Silyanova
From button label to call to actions, the quality of the UX writing can be the differentiator. Irina goes into the detail about how you can improve.

Research Repositories for Tracking UX Research and Growing Your ResearchOps by Maria Rosala
Maria shares research on what people are using research repositories for, the tools they use, the different types and more.

Continuous Design

The Design Purity Trap & How To Escape It by Scott Berkun
Work is a social process which means communication skills and relationships are critical. This idea of design purity is a trap for designers.

Don’t Be Fooled By Figma’s New AI Features by Raff Di Meo
How to leverage AI effectively without losing focus on designers’ roles and responsibilities.

Continuous Delivery

The Builder's Guide to Better Mousetraps by Marc Brooker
This product sucks! I could do better. But ask yourself what could I be doing instead? Do I want to own this? Is my product different? And other key questions.

Refactoring to Serverless: From Application to Automation by Sindhu Pillai and Gregor Hohpe
Refactor serverless apps by swapping application code with cloud automation to reduce costs, decouple logic from architecture, and more.

We have drones and robotic arms joining us at UXDX EMEA

Can a robot be your new work bestie? Anja from Universal Robots says yes — if you get your UX and Product Design right first. In her upcoming session at UXDX EMEA, specially picked by our LinkedIn community, Anja will dive into how their team uses customer insights to ensure companies work with robots, not like robots. Come along to learn how to transition to a customer-driven approach and design for humans in robotics.

FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS 

Check out more upcoming community events 

New Podcast Alert!

We caught up with Richard Dalton to learn how he is managing to overcome the challenge of coordination over 300 agile teams at Verizon. We discuss the pain of re-planning whenever a change happens, the burden this puts on each team to try to figure out how to prioritise appropriately and how they are looking at enterprise portfolio planning software to help alleviate the pressure! If you find delivery slowing down due to coordination issues then you have to check this out.👇👇

Job of the Week

Lead Experience Designer
Verizon
📌 New York

About Verizon
Verizon is one of the world’s leading providers of technology and communications services, transforming the way we connect around the world. We’re a human network that reaches across the globe and works behind the scenes. We anticipate, lead, and believe that listening is where learning begins.

See role details here

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question was: What is your biggest challenge with structuring teams?

The “Team Way of Working” was the biggest vote with 20% followed by challenges in scaling teams efficiently and identifying boundaries between teams.

I will be going into a series of articles about how teams should work in the coming weeks so I decided to focus more on the second biggest challenge this week which is around scaling efficiently. We touched on how to define the boundaries between teams above in the scaling approach but I’ll dive into a lot more detail next week.