Cross-functional teams

At this point, I'm simply tired of companies slapping "cross-functional" labels on random groups and calling it innovation. A real cross-functional team brings together people with different skills who work toward a shared goal without running back to their functional silos every five minutes.

I've seen too many leadership teams create what they call "cross-functional squads" that are just developers with a product person who drops by for standups. That's not cross-functional—that's just traditional development with occasional visitors.

So, what really is a cross-functional team?

What is a Cross-Functional Team?

A cross-functional team brings together people with complementary skills to deliver end-to-end value without constantly begging other teams for help. That's it.

But here's where most companies get it catastrophically wrong: they assemble specialists who sit in the same Zoom calls but never actually function as a team. They're optimizing for functional excellence while ignoring team cohesion, which is precisely backward.

The most painful meeting of my career was watching a "cross-functional team" argue for 45 minutes about whether a bug was a backend or frontend issue. In a real team, they would have just fixed the damn thing instead of playing hot potato.

Roles on Cross-Functional Teams

Core Members

The foundation of any effective cross-functional team is the Product Trio:

• Product Manager — Owns the "why" and "what." Identifies market needs, prioritizes features, and ensures the team builds something people actually want.
• Designer — Owns the "how it works." Creates the user experience and visual design that makes the product intuitive and effective.
• Tech Lead — Owns the "how it's built." Makes architecture decisions, guides technical implementation, and ensures the solution is reliable, scalable, and maintainable.

This trio provides strategic leadership (learn more about Product Trio), but they don't build products alone. Core team members also include:

• Engineers — These are the builders who implement the technical solution. While the Tech Lead provides technical direction, engineers bring the product to life through code, architecture implementation, and technical problem-solving.

Depending on your product and industry, several other roles may need to be core members with full-time dedication:

- Quality Assurance — Essential for complex systems where failures could be catastrophic. I worked with a medical device company where QA wasn't just a core member—they had veto power over releases.

- Data Analyst/Scientist — For data-heavy products, having this role embedded in the team dramatically improves decision quality. One retail analytics team I coached accelerated their roadmap by 40% simply by moving their data scientist from "consultant" to a core team member.

- Content Strategist — I've watched content-driven products fail spectacularly because this role was treated as a service provider rather than a core team member with decision authority.

- Subject Matter Expert — One of the most effective teams I have ever worked with included a customer support person with a full-time team membership. They caught issues nobody else would have spotted because they understood customer pain points at a deeper level.

The composition isn't one-size-fits-all. A financial services team I advised brought in a compliance expert as a core member, which saved them from a regulatory nightmare that would have killed their launch. Another team embedded a security engineer after a breach, and their velocity increased because security was built in from the start rather than bolted on at the end.

The question isn't "What's the standard team composition?"—it's "What skills do we need to deliver outcomes without constant dependencies on others?"

Extended Team Members

Not every skill needs to be present full-time. Legal, marketing, data science, and other specialized functions can join as needed. The key is having clear agreements about their availability and commitment.

The worst arrangement? Part-time members with full-time responsibilities. I've watched marketing people get pulled into ten different teams while being expected to deliver for all of them. That's not cross-functional—that's just mental.