👩🏭Cross-Functional Teams
Agile teams collaborate across their job titles. In fact, there should be no "job titles" limiting people to responsibilities! Read more below.
Last updated
Agile teams collaborate across their job titles. In fact, there should be no "job titles" limiting people to responsibilities! Read more below.
Last updated
Coming soon
"Cross-functional" teams are teams that work across functions together. They have diverse backgrounds and perspectives. They aren't only working in one single function.
In a traditional waterfall team, each person has a specified duty. The designer designs. The coder codes. The researcher researches. When one person leaves, the specified role must be filled. When the researcher is busy, the rest of the team waits for them to finish.
That's not efficient at all. Agile teams are structured more flexibly.
In Agile teams, teammates are "Cross-functional". Everyone hops into responsibilities across functions whenever they want to. A cross-functional team works together across functions toward a "shared outcome". The entire team, and all of its functional roles, collaborate to get that outcome achieved. If this means that designers volunteer to code, and researchers volunteer to design, this is celebrated.
You should never hear "That's not my job" in an Agile team.
People should not be waiting around for other team roles to finish their work and pass it over. People on cross-functional Agile teams collaborate across different positions.
It's not a situation of "my work versus your work". Everyone has a shared outcome to achieve. Everyone contributes to the success.
Cross-functional teams celebrate when people want to do work that "is not in their job title description" because that's the nature of strong Agile team fundamentals.
If they have strong psychological safety, service leadership, and self-organization on the team, people volunteer (when it makes sense) to work "outside of their job title".
Developers can perform research.
Product can owners jump into coding.
Project managers can take on product ownership tasks.
Designers can write requirements for the business analyst role.
Researchers can design things.
The full team rallies around client conversations.
This is cross-functional teamwork in action.
Each week, this changes because the team asks who wants to own work whenever they prioritize tasks. People agree to the responsibilities they play in the moments that work needs to be prioritized. They self-organize and agree together who's going to be involved, and how.
An Agile team is like the a crew assembled for the "perfect heist".
They all have different backgrounds. They each bring their own unique capabilities. They volunteer in the moments that work is needed to achieve the outcome.
Each teammates pitches into work that the other teammates are doing all the time. Diverse perspectives are always heard in the work. The more diverse perspectives are heard, the stronger the outcomes.
You as an Agile teammate have unique capabilities too.
No matter what skills you have or don't have.
Even if you have 0 professional experience! Even if you're an intern! You're a valuable member of the Agile Heist Team.
You've got the psychological safety to take risks, and you've got service leaders around you helping you grow. You and the team self-organize to agree to who will pitch into work. The team prioritizes opportunities for people to continuously improve and try things for the first time.
Here are some things you will hear on strongly performing Agile cross-functional teams:
If strong psychological safety: “I’m a developer, but I want to participate in user testing this sprint with the designers and researchers.”
If strong service leadership: “How do you want to be supported in the work? How do you want to get involved in other team roles?”
If strong self-organization: “All teams can vote together on what tasks we’re going to take on this iteration”
If strong continuous improvement: “Let’s get with the research team to discuss how this design task went and discuss how to change the way we collaborate in the future”
If strong iterative value delivery: “We’re going to have a usable feature to test with users by the end of the week”
This may sound confusing to you if you've never experienced it.
Why not stick in your job duties? If your job title is one thing, and you are supposed to work cross-functionally, does that mean you are not doing things in your job title?
No!
Everyone makes their own decision about what they want to contribute to on the team.
During meetings like Sprint Planning in the Scrum Method, teams get together to agree to the shared outcome with a Sprint Plan and ask teams who wants to do what.
This is when the team cross-functionally spans across different roles if they want to do so. If not, they commit to whatever work they want to agree to. It could be work dedicated to their role! A designer may want to only design. A coder may only want to code.
The important distinction is this: the team has the capabilities to span across any function while performing work, and they may need to do so in their daily cross-functional work together. Someone might get sick. Someone might leave the team. Someone might be busy with other things. The important thing is for the team to not wait. They are a psychologically safe, self-organized team, and the people who are not in those roles can also do all kinds of other work if they are in a supported environment.
Agile teams maintain a deliverable called a RACI chart ("Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed") to map out roles based on the needed tasks. This may change every week, and someone maintains it for the team. No one dictates this. The team gets together to agree and build consensus about who does what tasks.
Learn more about RACI charts later, when we cover Agile Deliverables.
