Smaller teams, with a narrower focus of responsibility, may be able to deliver better results. This happens due to lesser distractions, clarity in objectives, and higher team coordination. However, as explained earlier, teams can get too focused on their internal priorities, and lose track of the larger context. We also discussed how adding a program management overhead, to solve cross-team coordination, only adds to the chaos, since program management has responsibility without accountability.

When there is responsibility without accountability, it causes a mismatch in expectations. Managers can choose to get things done in areas where they have better control, because it makes them succeed with little effort. It helps them to check things off the to-do list, whether or not there is value delivered. However, because they have no accountability, when there is a delay, the tendency is to blame people or to optimize productivity. It also causes managers to prefer folks who say yes to everything, and not respond to the folks who offer rational justification for delays. In addition to this cultural side effect, this results in poor value for the end consumer too, since we are focused on delivering output and not on delivering impact.

Streamlining can create focus, but it also creates a broken experience for the customer. One effective way to solve this is to set up cross-functional teams or at a bare minimum have cross-functional interactions. Let's say that the product team is trying to build an email notification to send to users on their first time signing up. Making the email work is only part of the solution. The content of the email (what information we tell the consumer on sign-up) may need input from marketing and sales or business development. In case of issues, coordination from customer support is needed. If we think about an email notification as a technical problem to solve and fill it with half-thought-out content, then we aren't doing any justice to the customer experience. We might think that we will reach out to marketing or support when we need their input, but that's not always possible.

So, instead of creating two teams with a narrow functional focus and adding a communication overhead, we need to create cross-functional teams:

As shown in the preceding diagrams, instead of making cross-team communication the responsibility of one person, we need to make cross-team collaboration the norm. Some ways in which we can achieve this are as follows:

While each team can continue to work on their area of expertise, they should be expected to contribute to and be aware of other team's priorities, and no team should be working on anything other than what is needed to meet the outcome-driven timelines. This eliminates the need for external coordination, and also reduces rework and missed opportunities, and improves focus on the consumer experience. So, instead of striving for efficiency through streamlining, we should strive for consistency in user experience across team functions.