Cross-Functional Teams vs. Teams of Functions

Many organizations believe they have cross-functional teams when they actually have "teams of functions" - groups where each member still reports to separate functional managers, follows distinct processes, and adheres to rigid role boundaries with formal handovers between disciplines.

True cross-functional teams operate fundamentally differently, with everyone working toward shared goals, blurred role boundaries, collective ownership of end-to-end processes, and a focus on outcomes rather than individual functional achievements.

Transforming to genuine cross-functional teams requires changes to KPIs, processes and significant training and support. But the juice is worth the squeeze, as they say.

You can read more in my article below.

This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

Cross-Functional Teams vs. Teams of Functions by Rory Madden
Many organisations claim to have cross-functional teams. But scratch the surface, and the collaboration is often cosmetic and this reduces the expected benefits.

One Bottleneck At A Time by James Stanier
Treating teams and organisations as systems means finding the single constraint that is truly limiting throughput, then subordinating everything else to fixing it so leaders stop spreading effort thinly and start improving real flow.

Product Direction

Synthesizing Qual, Quant, And Strategy With Claude Code + Posthog MCP by Else van der Berg
A practical walkthrough: from diagnosing revenue drops, onboarding friction, to validating "aha" moments and business opportunities

Fixing Strategy by Roger L. Martin
Fixing strategy means moving away from technocratic planning and treating it as a general management practice built on imagination, principles, iteration and distributed choice, so teams shape the future through judgment and learning instead of pretending analysis can predict it.

Continuous Research

How A Few Usability Tests Changed Our Whole Product Roadmap | Dscout (Sponsored Content) by Bex Jeanson
Usability testing can uncover the issues that matter most before roadmap decisions are locked in. Use early research to spot friction, challenge assumptions, and redirect effort toward the problems that will have the biggest impact.

A Practical Guide To Structuring Researchops Through Organizational Change by Carolyn Morgan
ResearchOps works best when its structure fits the organisation around it, rather than following a fixed model. Choose clear ownership, consistent standards, and the right mix of centralised and embedded support to help research scale through change without losing quality.

Continuous Design

The Design Engineer Symptom: What A Rising Job Title Reveals by Anne Lefour
The rise of the design engineer title signals a broader shift in how digital teams work, as design and engineering blend around shared tools, faster iteration and more technical design practice, forcing organisations to rethink collaboration, expectations and career paths.

Designers As Agent Orchestrators by Benhur Senabathi
How designers can move from handoff to orchestration by using AI with clearer intent, better documentation, stronger systems thinking, and faster prototype-to-product workflows.

Continuous Development

No Management Needed: Anti-Patterns In Early-stage Engineering Teams by Antoine Boulanger
Early-stage teams do not usually need more management; they need better hiring, sharper founder attention and less process, using lightweight coordination and extreme transparency until team size and complexity create a real need for structure.

The Hidden Danger Of Shipping Fast by Cleo
Shipping fast only works when users can keep up with what is changing. Treat attention as a constraint, promote fewer things more deliberately, and surface features in context so product velocity leads to adoption instead of wasted output.

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Early Sale Is Ending!

Prices Rise This Week

These are the last tickets available at the early sale rate for UXDX USA and UXDX EMEA 2026. Prices go up this week, and after that, tickets move to the regular rate.

If you already know Berlin or New York is on your 2026 plan, now is the moment to secure your place. And if you’re a startup, freelancer, or student, don’t forget you can also apply for discounted tickets.

FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS 

UXDX 2026 Speaker Announcements

The pressure on product teams is only getting bigger. Organisations are being asked to move faster, make smarter decisions, and adapt how they work without losing focus, quality or momentum. That is exactly what these upcoming UXDX 2026 sessions are tackling.

At UXDX USA 2026 in New York, Josh Payton from Wise will share how losing nearly half the team forced a complete rethink of the design organisation. His session looks at how Wise moved from burnout and constant firefighting to a culture built on autonomy, balance and impact.
Also in New York, Randy Hunt from Notion will explore how Notion reshaped its design organisation around skills and behaviours rather than titles and functions. As the company scaled from personal users to global enterprises, this approach helped the team stay adaptable, creative and close to the craft.

At UXDX EMEA 2026 in Berlin, Kristina Gibson, ex-Dott, will lead a hands-on workshop for teams that feel stuck waiting for perfect data before making strategic moves. She will share a practical framework for exploring opportunities, evaluating bets and turning product strategy into roadmap action.
Meanwhile, Pooja Dey from Sage will show how product marketing and UX can work together to shape product investment, not just go-to-market plans. Drawing on Sage case study experience, she will share how buyer journeys, onboarding insights and in-life usage can help teams prioritise better, reduce risk and design for adoption.

These sessions are packed with practical lessons and grounded examples of how leading teams are rebuilding, aligning and moving forward with confidence.

Missed the announcements of other speakers? You can find the highlights of the speakers announced in February here.

Video Of The Week

From Cross-Functional to Cross-Purposes:
Why Collaboration Falls Apart Over Time

In this week’s video, Mihaela Draghici (Volkswagen Digital Solutions) shares the honest sequel: why collaboration falls apart over time, even after you’ve done the work to remove silos. She breaks down the forces that quietly pull teams back into old patterns:

• Budget cycles vs quarterly planning

• Governance and steering committees are slowing down decisions

• Role ambiguity and mismatched expectations

• Language gaps that create invisible misunderstandings

• Rituals that turn performative instead of useful

Then she gets practical on what helps teams stay aligned: pairing, shared glossaries, rotations into each other’s worlds, and regularly resetting the working model as teams and contexts change. Watch the full session below:

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question: What is the biggest blocker to using AI for higher-level work in your organisation?

Last week’s poll asked what most blocks organisations from using AI for higher-level work, and the top answer was telling: missing context and decision history (30%). In other words, the problem isn’t that AI cannot generate options; it’s that it doesn’t know enough about the why behind past decisions to be trusted with the next one. Close behind was trust and reliability at 27%, which shows that even when teams do try to use AI at a more strategic level, confidence in the output is still fragile.

The lower answers matter too. Only 10% picked data privacy and vendor risk, and 12% chose organisational resistance, suggesting that for many teams, the biggest blocker is not policy but knowledge design. If your decision history is trapped in people’s heads, buried in Slack, or scattered across decks and docs, AI will always struggle to help at the level that actually matters. One commenter captured the tension well: higher-level work can use AI as a lever, but human judgment still responds best to uncertainty, serendipity, and the unexpected cuts that frameworks miss.

My read is that this is a documentation problem disguised as an AI problem. Teams that want AI to support better strategic thinking need clearer context, stronger records of trade-offs, and more explicit reasoning around past decisions. Without that, AI will stay stuck as a fast producer of plausible outputs rather than a useful partner in higher-level judgment.

If you want to go deeper on how careers and leadership are shifting as AI compresses the ladder, my ebook Managing Your Career In The Age Of AI explores how to build judgment, relationships, and influence in a world that keeps trying to automate the surface of the work.