Collaboration is important, but building strong cross-functional relationships isn’t just about communication—it’s about creating real impact. When stakeholders from different functions come together with a shared purpose, that’s where magic can happen.
At one point, we were struggling with conflicting priorities across Support, Success, Product, and Engineering. What support felt were customer experience priorities didn’t have the insight of product roadmap or engineering constraints. We were all oriented around the same high level objectives, but getting everyone aligned tactically ? Not so simple.
So we created a tiger team—support, success, product, and engineering, all in the same room, every week. Together, we built a means to review product, customer and business issues, assess priorities, and assign shared resources to address them. It wasn’t easy, we all did a lot of learning. But over time, with this structure each team could rely on the others to better shape issues, identify needed data, derive proposed plans, and partner to execute on them.
Step by step, here’s what worked really well:
Setting a recurring cadence (ours was weekly): The routine kept everyone focused on solving problems, not just discussing them.
Using clear and agreed measurements: Aligning around metrics important to all teams quickly broke down siloes. Support volume was important to Support, but so was churn and retention to the CSM’s, and roadmap progress to Product and tech debt to Engineering. Creating shared measures and prioritizing based on shared impact was a paradigm shift in enabling us to work together effectively.
Sharing accountability: We made sure people were accountable for the shared outcomes, not just their own work.
Within a few months, we saw really measurable effects- a 2x increase in the fix throughput for prioritized customer-impacting bugs; higher CSat and NPS based on customer communications across success and support, and a clear end-to-end dashboard view of customer experience touchpoints in which we all felt ownership.