Early-stage start-ups may not have well-defined product teams. Everyone does everything and there are no clear boundaries on roles or responsibilities. However, as the business grows, there is a need to focus on specific areas. This is where streamlining begins. Specialist roles become necessary. This also leads to silos getting created, where each specialization takes off on its own path, which can result in less coordination. When there is less coordination between different streams, shared business context is also compromised.

This can be quite hard to see happening, since each specialization is often tuned to work efficiently. Their efficiency breaks down only when they have to coordinate with other teams. For instance, marketing teams may have great synergies amongst themselves, but when they require assistance from engineering, they may find that the response is slow. This is because the engineering team has set its own priorities and has to handle requests from other teams as well. Since marketing and engineering are not working under the same context and toward the same priorities, there is friction. Each team now feels that they are being slowed down by the other team.

Even within product engineering teams, we're likely to see this. For instance, data (business intelligence and data engineering) is a specialization, but it is relevant for many streams of a product, as is TechOps.

However, data and TechOps have their own priorities, which could suffer because of incoming requests from other teams. We discussed in Chapter 11, Eliminate Waste – Data Versus Opinions, the catch-22 situation that happens when the data strategy is kept inaccessible to the organization and the data team becomes a bottleneck in reporting data to teams when they need it.

This is a bottleneck that we have created by striving for efficiency through streamlining. Streamlining has its advantages: there is better focus and speed, and also, less distractions from other operational functions. However, the disadvantage is the lack of context. Due to this lack of context, each team tends to further increase their own efficiency by creating better tracking mechanisms, and more processes, but in silos. This results in higher frustration and distrust among teams since no matter how efficient they try to be, other teams always disrupt their well-oiled processes.

Another glaring result of streamlining is the broken experience for the customer. All of us have likely seen some variant of this. When we buy a product (say, a car), we are welcomed by a sales person, who gives personal attention to us and assures us of the best quality and price. Once the sale is done, the sales person is out of the picture. Other functions take over. Billing, delivery, and customer support treat us very differently. We have come to rationalize this, saying, "After all, they have their money from me now." Very often, different departments aren't connected and this issue can even be seen within customer service teams. When talking to support folks at call centers, if they transfer our call to a supervisor, or to another agent, we have to repeat ourselves all over again. Each person we talk to has to be able to understand our context. The onus is placed on the customer to do this.

In order to get an overarching view of our individual functions, we end up creating program management roles. We think we need one person, or team, that oversees coordination between individual functions. By doing this, we will have shifted the problem from the individual teams to a different group, which has the responsibility of managing inter-team coordination, but has no accountability in delivery. Now what? Again, let's dwell on this for a moment and jump to our third reason for process waste. The solution to this is in the latter half of this chapter.