What is a Cross Functional Team?

Cross functional teams are groups consisting of people from different functional areas of the
company – for example, marketing, product, sales, and customer success. These can be
working groups, where each member belongs to their functional team as well as the cross
functional team, or they can be the primary structure of your organization.

Why Do Cross Functional Teams Exist?

If you’ve ever called a company with a simple question – say an airline or a healthcare clinic,
and found yourself being transferred from department to department, feeling no closer to your
solution after twenty minutes than you did when you first made the call, you’ve felt what it’s
like to experience an organization functioning in silos.

This is a frustrating experience for the customer, and a missed opportunity for your company
to develop a lasting relationship. While an organization has many different functions, each of
these functions exists to serve the customer, so they should work together to provide a
comprehensive, positive customer experience.

Cross functional teams help organizations put their customers first, by encouraging
effective communication across teams.

Bringing people together with different perspectives can improve problem solving and lead to
smarter, more sustainable decision making. Instead of competing for resources, cross
functional teams collaborate to optimize use of time, money, and effort to improve customer
satisfaction while helping to meet organizational goals.

Benefits of Cross Functional Teams

Cross functional teams are growing in popularity because of an increased demand from
customers to provide consistently personalized, high-touch customer experience. Some of the
benefits of cross functional teams include:

 Improved coordination across functional areas

 Increased innovation in product and process

 Reduced cycle times for key customer touchpoints

Improved coordination across functional areas

For many SaaS companies, coordination (or lack thereof) between marketing, sales, and
product teams can make or break the business. Often, this is an issue of conflicting interests:
If marketing is focused on landing enterprise customers to drive sustainable growth, while
sales reps are motivated to win small sales quickly, the product team can’t create a product
that will meet the needs of all of its customers.

Cross functional teams can help teams stay focused on corporate goals, so if the organization
is trying to position itself as an enterprise tool, marketers can work with sales reps to identify
ways to effectively market to enterprise executives. The product team can use insights
gathered from sales performance and marketing research to prioritize features most valued by
their target customer. A cross functional team of marketing, sales, product, and customer
success representatives can work together on assigned accounts to provide enterprise
customers with a customized, cohesive customer experience.

Increased innovation in process and product

When organizations operate in silos, it’s difficult to identify and implement improvements
across the value stream. Cross functional teams can work to identify best practices for
different processes, then cross-train other cross functional groups to promote cohesion and
efficiency across the organization. Working together to find solutions for common problems,
cross functional teams can find more innovative, more comprehensive solutions than each
functional group could develop on its own.

Cross functional teams don’t only promote process innovation; they also promote more
innovative products. Imagine if every product decision your company made included insights
gleaned from marketing campaign data, UX focus groups, sales conversations, product usage
data, and other rich sources of customer information from across the company. This is the
power of cross functional teams – creating a forum where learnings from across the company
can inform smarter decision making.
Reducing cycle times

Think again of the phone call example above, where a simple request took 20 minutes to
resolve, not because of the complexity of the request, but because of the inefficiency of the
company trying to resolve it.

Cross functional teams help organizations identify their inefficiencies, while improving their
ability to find solutions that work. In this way, using cross functional teams can drastically
reduce cycle times for any recurring pain point.

So instead of passing a customer request from silo to silo, the team can work together to
resolve the request as quickly as possible, providing a far better customer experience. This is
true of something small, like a customer request, as well as far larger projects, such as
developing a new feature to meet customer demands.

The Advantages of a Team-Based Lateral Organizational Structure

One of the newest forms of business organization is the team-based lateral organizational
structure. A team based lateral structure is an organizational chart that groups employees on
the same employment level into teams that perform specific job functions. This structure
combines the low-overhead, minimal management structure of a lateral structure with the
team efforts common to a hybrid structure. There are numerous advantages to a team-based
lateral organizational structure.

Less Overhead Management

A team-based lateral organizational structure is similar to a traditional lateral structure, in

carrying less overhead management to cause delays in decision-making and implementation
of best practices or new ideas. With no need to climb a lengthy chain of command to
receive approval for ideas or changes to the business model, a team-based lateral structure
can make necessary changes on the fly and allow for rapid response to different market
conditions. This is especially important in today’s digital economy.

Teamwork

By spreading the responsibility among team members rather than having a single individual
in charge of decision-making or management of a business area, decisions can be reached
by a quorum and can take place rapidly as team members can be assigned to research areas
of need, implement changes, or work on other problems while other team members
continue to focus on the current situation or business practice. Decisions made by a team
are sometimes better thought out and more effectively implemented than decisions made by
a single individual.

Eliminate Delays

A team-based lateral organizational structure can eliminate traditional scalar chains of

command, which can cause delays and worker frustration with cumbersome communication
lines. A team can more effectively raise concerns to management without appearing to be
disgruntled or unnecessarily upset, and without opening themselves as individuals to
repercussions by management for the issues raised by their team. This can make individuals
more willing to speak out about problems or inefficiency in the workplace.