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Working as a cross-functional team

Connect research, design, and development around a shared customer problem, with continuous learning and clear working agreements.

Who it is for

Stream Teams

The Stream Team learning to own research, design, development, and customer outcomes together.

Duration
1 day

Inside the module

What the module covers

Many teams have every discipline present and still pass work between specialists through tickets, so lead time stays the same.

This module is a practice day for one Stream Team. The team works on a single item together, runs one board with hard work-in-progress limits, agrees objectives and reporting with product leadership, and improves its own process.

By the end, participants have practiced how to

  • Run a teaming session with Driver, Navigator, and Facilitator roles, rotating every four to five minutes
  • Decide which work the whole team does together, which work suits pairing, and which is done alone
  • Set up a Stream Kanban Board that carries work from prioritized opportunity to verified outcome, with hard WIP limits
  • Draft quarterly Objectives and Key Results with the Product Team and report progress through a Weekly Product Report
  • Find the constraint in the team's process with value stream mapping and the Theory of Constraints
  • Test a process change with a Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle and review it in a retrospective

Module outline

How the time is spent

Each part ends with a short exercise, on your own work where you have it and on a prepared case where you do not. We adapt the examples and emphasis to the people in the room.

  1. Teaming and pairing

    Working as one unit on a single piece of work, so that every decision-maker is present and nothing is handed over inside the team.

    Three interwoven UXDX loops connect research, design, and development within one team.

    Put it into practice

    The team runs a twelve-minute teaming session on one bounded step from a real item in its own work, rotating every four minutes, then holds the closing retrospective on sticky notes and picks one change for its next session.

    Topics covered

    • Lead time over step time: the cost of internal handovers
    • Teaming roles: Driver, Navigator, Facilitator, and the mob
    • Six guiding rules, from frequent rotation to closing happy
    • Setup: single keyboard, large screen, whiteboard, rotation timer, remote tools
    • Pairing first: Driver-Navigator and Ping Pong methods

  2. One board and flow

    Making all of the team's work visible on one board and limiting work in progress so the bottleneck shows.

    Put it into practice

    The team places its five or six items in flight on the Stream Kanban columns, marks on each card which of the five context fields (opportunity, persona or job, target metric, assumption, experiment) it can fill and which are missing, and sets a first WIP limit per column.

    Topics covered

    • Stream Kanban columns from Prioritized Opportunities to Released and Verified
    • Card context: opportunity, persona or job, target metric, assumption, experiment
    • Hard WIP limits and a pull system: flow over utilization
    • Four types of work: mission, maintenance, unplanned, and alignment
    • Tracking time in each column to find bottlenecks

  3. Aligning with the Product Team

    How the team agrees objectives with the Product Team and keeps its work transparent.

    Put it into practice

    The team drafts one Objective with two Key Results for the coming quarter, each paired with a health metric, checks it against the anti-patterns with the facilitator playing the Product Team certifier, and sketches the blocks of its first Weekly Product Report with the source of each number.

    Topics covered

    • Quarterly objective setting with OKRs, agreed with the Product Team
    • Anti-patterns: targets tied to forecasts or funding, absolute targets
    • Stream Team Workspace: board, dashboard, goals, OKRs, research repository
    • Weekly Product Report: six-week and twelve-month charts against target
    • Weekly Product Review: explaining metric variance, leaving status reports behind

  4. Continuous improvement

    Using the team's authority over its own process to find the constraint and test one change at a time.

    Put it into practice

    The team maps its own flow from idea to customer on one whiteboard, with working and waiting time at each step, marks the biggest constraint, and plans one Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle as an improvement story for its board.

    Topics covered

    • Process vision: zero blocking dependencies from idea to satisfied customer
    • Theory of Constraints: identify, exploit, subordinate, elevate, repeat
    • Value Stream Mapping to see where work piles up
    • Retrospectives, including short daily ones, that produce improvement opportunities
    • Plan-Do-Check-Act cycles, tracked as improvement stories on the board

Practical results

What the cohort leaves with

  • The material for a team charter (value streams, metrics, roles, and ground rules from the day), assembled by the team in its first week
  • A working agreement on when the team works together, pairs, or works alone, with a starting schedule for teaming sessions
  • A Stream Kanban Board with current work placed, the missing context marked on each card, and a WIP limit for each column
  • A draft Objective with Key Results and the layout of the team's Weekly Product Report
  • A value stream map with the constraint marked, one planned improvement experiment, and a list of obstacles for leaders to remove

Before the module

Bring a list of the team’s current work in progress across research, design and development, the product strategy in two sentences, and the business metric the team’s stream is expected to move.

The company learning plan

Where this module fits

Part of the Stream Teams courses, taken at the Equip the pilot team stage of the implementation.

See all company courses →

Stream Teams

Explore the supporting documentation