Cross-Functional Team
A cross-functional team is a group of people with different functional expertise working together toward a shared goal. In product development, this typically includes product managers, designers, software engineers, and anyone else required to discover and deliver value to customers.
The key characteristic of cross-functional teams is that they bring together diverse perspectives and skills needed to make good product decisions—balancing business viability, customer desirability, technical feasibility, and usability.
Why do cross-functional teams matter?
Traditionally, product managers, designers, and software engineers worked in silos following a waterfall process with multiple hand-offs. The product manager would gather requirements and hand them to the designer. The designer would create designs and hand them to engineers. This approach sounds efficient but creates problems in practice.
When teams work in silos, hand-offs create endless loop-backs. Designers uncover gaps in requirements. Engineers discover scope issues. Each iteration requires rework and leads to wasted effort, longer timelines, and often sub-optimal solutions.
When product managers, designers, and software engineers work together from the very beginning, they make better decisions about what to build. They create solutions that work for the business, are usable and desirable by customers, and are feasible to build in the designated time.
How do cross-functional teams work best?
Effective cross-functional teams develop a shared understanding of their customers and their needs. They interview customers together, map opportunities together, and make decisions together based on their collective knowledge rather than individual preferences.
The entire cross-functional team doesn't need to be involved in every decision—that would grind progress to a halt. Instead, a smaller group (often called a product trio) typically leads the discovery process while staying embedded within the broader team responsible for delivery.
The goal is to balance the speed of decision-making with the quality of decision-making by including the right perspectives for each decision.
Learn more:
- Product Trios: What They Are, Why They Matter, and How to Get Started
- Core Concept: Collaborative Decision-Making in a Product Trio
Related terms:
- Product Trio
- Product Team
- Collaboration
- Decision Making
Last Updated: October 25, 2025