How cross-functional, multidisciplinary teams can help you survive a recession

Every week seems to bring bad news about the state of the global economy and its impact on the technology sector. We seem well on our way to a recession. Every startup will experience this recession differently. Some, especially those in spaces like SaaS, can get through it relatively unscathed. Others, such as certain sectors of e-commerce and fast delivery, seem to be having a harder time. What any prudent founder will look at is how best for their startup to weather the storm and prepare itself for success when things inevitably get better.

The most obvious approach is to cut costs and increase efficiency. A no-brainer – but something that’s a lot easier to talk about than to put it into practice effectively. Inevitably, many startups look first at reducing their workforce to achieve this goal. But more often than not, this does a lot more damage than good. Vital skills and knowledge are lost, morale is affected and customer service suffers.

Instead, the answer could be found in a change in team structures, processes and approaches. A change that maximizes efficiency and resilience and promotes innovation. I’m talking about the magic of cross-functional, multidisciplinary teams.

This is probably a record-scratch moment where you look confused and wonder why I started writing as a management consultant. Hear me out. While this may sound like a bunch of random jargon, it actually describes one of the best future business structures.

Multidisciplinary teams: demolish silos

In general, companies are divided into departments. Marketers sit with marketers and developers huddle with other developers. Marketing is responsible for marketing, the development team is responsible for, well, development. It is very simple and has many obvious advantages. Unfortunately, it also has some glaring issues that are becoming increasingly apparent as technology, changing work practices and rising customer expectations increase the complexity of what many companies do. I’ll give a few examples below, but they can be summarized as the siloing of knowledge – mostly around data, and causing bottlenecks, single points of failure and reduced innovation.

Multidisciplinary teams, as the name suggests, are departments made up of people with a wide variety of skills. Cross-functional means that responsibilities, knowledge and objectives run right through the company.

Let’s focus on marketing. The way companies communicate has become incredibly complex: more channels, more tools, digital transformation, an unprecedented amount of data and higher expectations. Websites are expected to provide a wide range of personalized experiences. All this requires a huge number of skills working together: data science, security, IT, digital marketing, copywriting, customer service, development and much more.

Collaboration, not conflict

Juggling all these different skills found in different departments with different goals leads to a lot of headaches and in some cases conflict. Marketers ask developers to take an action immediately, but it falls behind because the developers have their own priorities. Data scientists provide input that doesn’t provide the commercial insights marketers need for strategies. Everyone forgets to inform customer service about the new copy of the marketing campaign. And so on.

It’s inefficient, error-prone, and ultimately an unsustainable way for many startups to operate. You see these issues every time you experience a slow, malfunctioning or outdated company website. It was also immediately apparent at the start of the pandemic, as many companies struggled to change their offerings online. A number of them — even some global companies — found that they depended on one or two individuals (now absent with COVID-19) to manage website updates. They couldn’t put critical customer information online or even start a new online sales channel.

Marketing is just the most obvious example; Silo teams influence everything from critical business decision-making—that is, the best infrastructure and tools to use—to sales, product development, and commercial strategy.

A multidisciplinary, multifunctional team

A truly multi-disciplinary, multi-functional marketing team has all the skills you need to execute on any project. This does not mean that the entire department is split into fixed smaller teams; it means they can work cross-functionally on one project. Everyone works together and shares the same goals. Skills run on a continuum – data scientists know something about marketing, marketers know something about development. Information, insights and knowledge generated in the marketing team flow out to every other multidisciplinary department and vice versa.

But wait – didn’t we talk about surviving and thriving in a recession? This sounds expensive and disruptive, right? Well no, not really. Sure, if you planned to turn your entire company upside down tomorrow and reorganize everything and everyone into one big multidisciplinary melting pot, you’d probably do more harm than good. I’m not advocating that. What I think will work for many startups is an incremental approach that focuses on both the philosophy and the practicalities. After all, building multidisciplinary teams involves many best-practice measures that have their own broader benefits.

How to get started

Every startup will be different, but there are some general rules of thumb to follow to get started:

• Let your data flow: Many startups, large and small, have information in silos. Controlling your data – where it is kept, who is responsible for collecting, managing and analyzing it, where it is shared and how it is used – is the first step. Making sure you have the technology and procedures in place to make it accessible to the entire company is the next step. Building the skills across your entire team to generate insights is the icing on the cake.

• Break down those walls: Even the smallest startups can suffer from different teams operating in quasi-rivalry with each other. It is often a structural problem. Priorities and goals are not shared between departments – except maybe a brief mention during a meeting with all hands. Actively encouraging and creating forums where different departments consistently meet to collaborate and share problems and successes can be the easiest way to start closer integration and collaboration.

• Education, Education, Education: Teaching your team new skills can be the most powerful initiative. It increases productivity, builds resilience and can really help speed up the integration process. But it doesn’t just happen by itself. You must proactively train your team in a structured and targeted way. Identifying the key skills needed, who is best equipped to acquire them and, crucially, creating an environment where they can be applied immediately means developing a comprehensive training program.

• Make technology an enabler: It’s bizarre how many companies have a tech stack that is largely inaccessible or inappropriate outside of the department it was originally requested for. Worse is that, for example, IT takes and enforces all purchasing decisions. Your tech stack can and should support cross-functional collaboration. It is the key to free data and information flow. By examining your team’s sentiment to identify issues and opportunities, you’ll know how to make quick improvements. Eventually you want to get to a point where you no longer need power users to get the most out of your stack.

• Talk the talk and walk the walk: Your team will take a cue from you and your leadership team. If you want to get buy-in to this approach, you all have to stick with it. This means being more transparent with management decisions and being more involved and well informed about how departments work in practice. This is much more than receiving activity updates. It really means understanding what everyone does on a daily basis. If your CFO can tell you what Dave is working on in development, you know you’ve made it.

• Start small but think big: Any of the above actions would bring a big ROI to your startup. The key is to remember that at some point you have to build fully multidisciplinary teams. By managing one department, continuously monitoring results and learning from mistakes, you can eventually roll them out across your company. Don’t rush – the costs are self-paying and the risks are limited by moving in a thoughtful and strategic way. Remember that your team has to be sold for the idea or it will struggle to work.

There is no escaping the fact that change can be difficult. I can imagine many people reading this shrugging their shoulders and thinking they are already doing this. However, there is a big difference between having a collaborating startup and having the procedures, skills, mindset and infrastructure that make it possible. The benefit of starting this journey now is that it will not only help you overcome the current recession, but will also future-proof your business for the technological, economic and customer challenges that the coming years will bring.

Dominik Angerer is CEO and co-founder of enterprise CMS story block.