Cross-functional collaboration: How to align business and tech

Your business and technical teams should operate in a way that makes you see them as a package deal—a dynamic duo like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. But if they’re functioning more like Holmes and Moriarty, it’s time to intervene (and quickly).

The business side knows what your target consumers want and need, and the tech team knows how to build the products and features that satisfy those needs. If these different departments aren’t working in sync, there’s a good chance your company will sink time and money into product launches and new features that miss the mark. This leads to lost revenue and higher customer churn—and who wants that?

By removing roadblocks that impact cross-functional collaboration efforts, business and tech teams can unleash their potential to deliver great products and value for customers.

1. Refine and integrate tech stacks

When business and tech teams use separate tools, effective cross-functional collaboration is hard—and it only gets trickier as that number of tools increases. This makes it tough to know who’s working on what project, what the timelines are, and why it’s important to the business. Add on constant context switching from toggling between platforms, and you’ve put a huge dent in productivity. To sum it up, people get confused, efforts get duplicated unnecessarily, and workflows slow to a snail’s pace. These hiccups wreak havoc on product roadmaps, leading to launch delays and unhappy customers.  

Keep cross-functional teams on track by paring down excessive software and creating an integrated, single source of truth to work from. A standardized hub of information gives business and tech teams quick insights into day-to-day workflows, reducing task overlap, and making it easy to resolve issues before they derail a carefully planned launch or campaign.

For example, business and tech teams using Atlassian tools as their foundational platform can sync real-time info from their respective work-management tools like Confluence and Jira. No manual updating required.

Lose excess apps without losing essential functions by asking the following questions: 

1. Which tools overlap?
2. Which tools serve distinct purposes and are necessary for each team to do their jobs?
3. How much does each tool cost, and are we overspending compared to similar tools?
4. Can we integrate this tool with the rest of our tech stack?

Not only does tech downsizing lead to better team collaboration, but it’ll also save your company money—win-win. 

2. Ensure key resources are accessible

Unshared customer feedback and product info end up buried in a sea of files, and both teams lose opportunities to deliver a better customer experience and drive revenue.

Let’s say product rolls out a new login security update that users find confusing—one the business team only knows the basics about. Social media and customer support start blowing up with product questions, but product team members have yet to log in for the day, and the business team can’t find the FAQ doc. Turns out it was labeled “New Security Update FAQ” and not “New App Update FAQ.” 

Now imagine if this info was shared in advance or was more easily discoverable. Instead of scrambling, your company could have proactively communicated with users to ensure a smooth transition. Without high-level visibility, customers stay frustrated because internal teams have to address communication silos first before they can resolve customer experience issues.

Both teams can avoid these costly issues by incorporating knowledge-sharing best practices in day-to-day project management, such as:

• Standardized file labeling to make searching intuitive
• A single source of truth like a knowledge base 
• A checklist of needed resources at the start of each project
• Secure tech features like SmartLinks to easily share files across departments

These actions reduce the chance of key info slipping through the cracks, allowing both teams to stay aligned and work smarter. 

3. Create shared purpose with clear KPIs and progress updates

Measurable, common goals help business and tech teams align their work directly with outcomes supporting greater customer value. Without shared goals, they waste time and resources on initiatives that don’t translate to real results.

To define clear metrics of success, business and tech teams need to collaborate from the start. When they’re unified with the bigger picture, they can strategically prioritize tasks to make sure they arrive there together.

But it’s not enough to just set and forget goals—both teams have to track their progress toward them. This continuous monitoring objectively shows departments if they’re off course, proactively signaling a need to change their approach to meet their desired target. 

For example, if both teams try to increase user retention by 10% in 3 months and actively monitor their progress, they won’t end up scrambling on day 89 after they finally realize they’ve only hit 5%. They’ll have known in advance that they were missing the mark, proactively brainstorming and implementing new actions to hit their goal—whether that’s new features, a new pricing plan, or a new marketing campaign.

The easiest way to track goals is in a central hub where teams can easily make and view real-time updates. For instance, in a work management tool like Atlas, departments can assign goals to different team members alongside clear status bars and deadlines that keep everyone in the loop.

If everyone has goals stored in different places or it’s tough to figure out when they were updated, it’s much harder to operate as a seamless, productive unit. 

4. Use structured agendas to make the most of meetings

There’s nothing worse than leaving a meeting feeling like nothing was accomplished—especially for  remote team meetings that take extra effort to coordinate across time zones (“I got up at 6:30 a.m. for this?!”). If teams just wing it in meetings, it’s way easier to get off track. And if people forget to mention key info, you’ll end up with unnecessary slow-downs and internal tension.  

Make it a best practice to come to the table with a clear agenda to set the meeting up for success. When teams have this type of game plan, meetings are faster and more productive. And reducing time spent in meetings is crucial for preventing burnout, which costs companies between $120 to $190 billion every year.

With the visibility from the agenda, people come prepared to brainstorm and discuss specific product and customer topics, and everyone walks away with actionable next steps. No more dead air on Zoom calls, and no more post-meeting Slack threads to try to work through a forgotten issue.

Save your team leads’ time by sharing these meeting agenda templates for productive, fun meetings. 

Prioritize cross-functional team collaboration with Atlassian tools

When it comes to effective teamwork, simplicity is key. The more hoops (aka apps and software) departments have to jump through to connect, the harder it is to work efficiently and thoughtfully together.

Help business and tech teams stay in the loop from one secure digital space with open access to information across teams. Whether you’re scaling from one teammate to thousands, launching a category-creating product, or operationalizing an improvement that saves millions of dollars from your bottom line, Atlassian work management tools provide the project management and collaboration infrastructure, templates, best practices, and more to help you get impossible shit done.

Ready to power up your flexible workforce? Learn more about Atlassian work management tools