Building Cross-Functional Teams For Digital Projects

Over the years, I've discovered the truth: Game-changing products won't succeed unless they have a unified vision across sales, marketing, and product teams. When these key functions pull in different directions, it's a death knell for go-to-market execution. Without alignment on positioning and buyer messaging, we fail to communicate value and create disjointed experiences. So, how do I foster collaboration across these functions? 1) Set shared goals and incentivize unity towards that North Star metric, be it revenue, activations, or retention. 2) Encourage team members to work closely together, building empathy rather than skepticism of other groups' intentions and contributions. 3) Regularly conduct cross-functional roadmapping sessions to cascade priorities across departments and highlight dependencies. 4) Create an environment where teams can constructively debate assumptions and strategies without politics or blame. 5) Provide clarity for sales on target personas and value propositions to equip them for deal conversations. 6) Involve all functions early in establishing positioning and messaging frameworks. Co-create when possible. By rallying together around customers’ needs, we block and tackle as one team towards product-market fit. The magic truly happens when teams unite towards a shared mission to delight users!

Everyone talks about cross-functional collaboration. But, most senior leaders are incentivized to protect their territory. I've guided and worked on many transformation projects, and the change happens when you flip the script. Here's what actually works to turn territorial leaders into enthusiastic partners: 1. Speak the universal language of business outcomes A CTO I worked with, transformed resistance into momentum by starting here: "Our time-to-market is 3x industry average. What could we unlock by cutting that in half?" Suddenly, the CFO saw cost savings. Marketing saw competitive advantage. Sales saw bigger wins. 2. Translate value in their metrics. Your innovation might mean: - Revenue lift (Sales) - Efficiency gains (Operations) - Brand equity (Marketing) - Risk reduction (Legal) Connect your initiative to what they measure. 3. Build proof with micro-wins. Start small. A quick pilot. A 2-week experiment. Show them real results in their world, not PowerPoint promises. 🫀 Here's what happens: When stakeholders see their success metrics improving, turf wars dissolve into transformation stories. I've watched this work in Fortune 500s and startups alike. The key? Stop selling your project. Start amplifying their impact. 💡 What's your experience? Have you seen other approaches that turn skeptical stakeholders into strategic partners? ♻️ Share this with a leader who may benefit from this ➕ Follow Shirley Braun , Ph.D., PCC , for insights on leadership, scaling, and transformation that sticks.

Who Are Your Top 5 Picks? 🤔 “Pick me, pick me, pick me!” those childhood moments when we sat in a circle, hoping to be chosen for the winning team before the recess bell rang. Now, as leaders, we’re still making picks, except this time, it’s about choosing the right team for high-stakes digital initiatives. The real challenge? How do you pick the right team? ✅ How do you ensure everyone is aligned and executing effectively? ✅ How do you set up the organization for long-term success? After working with some of the world’s biggest brands, I’ve seen what separates high-performing teams from those that struggle. Here are my top 3 takeaways: 1️⃣ Prioritize Relentless Curiosity Leaders At the start of any large digital transformation, there are more unknowns than knowns. That’s why you need team members who are: 🔹 Humble, flexible, and relentlessly curious 🔹 Always opening doors to uncover new insights 🔹 Focused on continuous learning rather than rigid expertise At CourtAvenue, we actively seek out this relentless curiosity. Without it, progress stalls, and the flow of information dries up. 2️⃣ Be a Bridge Connector I’ve been in too many rooms where leadership focuses on an “I” agenda instead of a “we” agenda. The result? Big bridges that don’t connect to anything. When picking your team, choose people who: ✔ Take a company-first approach ✔ Care about efficiency & eliminating waste ✔ Actively collaborate across teams to pull others forward 3️⃣ Build the Right POD Model 🔹 Pick your top five. 🔹 Empower them. 🔹 Then get out of the way. At CourtAvenue, we use a POD model that aligns with internal teams to maximize velocity and output. Here’s how it works: - The Operator – Moves the work forward & keeps the team accountable. - The Strategy Leader – Ensures external & internal teams speak the same language, aligning efforts with business goals. - The Creators (x2) – The hands-on experts, whether in AI, UX, or design, responsible for building & prototyping. - The “Did It Work?” Leader – Our Data Scientist, measuring KPIs, optimizing insights, and guiding the next steps. Final Thought: When building your team, look for people who: 🔹 Embody relentless curiosity 🔹 Act as bridge connectors 🔹 Align on business goals (not personal agendas) How does your organization structure high-performing teams? Let’s share insights , drop your thoughts in the comments! 👇 Kenny Tomlin, Michael Stich, Jana Roszkowski, Julie Koepsell, Scott Hamm, Kayla Brodman, Rosie McGuire, David Dettmer, Andrew Solmssen, Caleb "Barbara" Hudson, Alyssa Chico Ravine, Tenley Marsteller, Elijah Schneider, Jeannine Wheeler, CPA, CGMA, Nico Coetzee

🐅 We have a structured, clear operating rhythm at Trucker Tools that involves regular departmental planning and goal setting - things I love! However, as our company scaled last year, we started to run into the ever-scary territory that everyone who's worked at a scale-up is familiar with: different departments were setting slightly different goals and prioritizing slightly differently from one another. We were losing cross-functional alignment on our most important initiatives. It was just too tough to completely sync comms up and down chains of communication across siloed departments. How did we bring back some of that agile, focused energy? We made things real simple and introduced Tiger Teams to deliver on our top 3 strategic priorities for the quarter. Tiger teams must include: ✅ A clear, measurable mission: "Complete XX in YY." 🙋♀️ A single team leader, who is ultimately accountable for the team's delivery 🏄♂️ Cross-functional team members of all levels who are responsible for delivery - these are NOT department or team leads necessarily, but instead the individuals who actually are doing the work, so that management chains don't get in the way of problem solving 🔢 A Google Sheet with clear action items, owners, weekly updates, visible to the entire company, so that everyone can stay updated on where things lie 💻 Weekly 15 minute standups to drive accountability, momentum, camaraderie, and provide a window for problem-solving The result? We hit every tiger team "mission" in Q1 and Q2, and Q3 is off to a great start. Even as our business has scaled and gotten more complex, returning to simple, nimble, problem-solving teams has been an unlock for us. Have you used Tiger Teams in your organization? Share your experiences below! 🚀

Scaling from 50 to 100 employees almost killed our company. Until we discovered a simple org structure that unlocked $100M+ in annual revenue. In my 10+ years of experience as a founder, one of the biggest challenges I faced in scaling was bridging the organizational gap between startup and enterprise. We hit that wall at around 100~ employees. What worked beautifully with a small team suddenly became our biggest obstacle to growth. The problem was our functional org structure: Engineers reporting to engineering, product to product, business to business. This created a complex dependency web: • Planning took weeks • No clear ownership  • Business threw Jira tickets over the fence and prayed for them to get completed • Engineers didn’t understand priorities and worked on problems that didn’t align with customer needs That was when I studied Amazon's Single-Threaded Owner (STO) model, in which dedicated GMs run independent business units with their own cross-functional teams and manage P&L It looked great for Amazon's scale but felt impossible for growing companies like ours. These 2 critical barriers made it impractical for our scale: 1. Engineering Squad Requirements: True STO demands complete engineering teams (including managers) reporting to a single owner. At our size, we couldn't justify full engineering squads for each business unit. To make it work, we would have to quadruple our engineering headcount. 2. P&L Owner Complexity: STO leaders need unicorn-level skills: deep business acumen and P&L management experience. Not only are these leaders rare and expensive, but requiring all these skills in one person would have limited our talent pool and slowed our ability to launch new initiatives. What we needed was a model that captured STO's focus and accountability but worked for our size and growth needs. That's when we created Mission-Aligned Teams (MATs), a hybrid model that changed our execution (for good) Key principles: • Each team owns a specific mission (e.g., improving customer service, optimizing payment flow) • Teams are cross-functional and self-sufficient,  • Leaders can be anyone (engineer, PM, marketer) who's good at execution • People still report functionally for career development • Leaders focus on execution, not people management The results exceeded our highest expectations: New MAT leads launched new products, each generating $5-10M in revenue within a year with under 10 person teams. Planning became streamlined. Ownership became clear. But it's NOT for everyone (like STO wasn’t for us) If you're under 50 people, the overhead probably isn't worth it. If you're Amazon-scale, pure STO might be better. MAT works best in the messy middle: when you're too big for everyone to be in one room but too small for a full enterprise structure. image courtesy of Manu Cornet ------ If you liked this, follow me Henry Shi as I share insights from my journey of building and scaling a  $1B/year business.