By the time it gets to us, the real decisions are already made.
Teams contribute one at a time
Several teams feed into the work, but one after another. Each reviews and passes it on. Their perspectives never meet early enough to shape the work together.
- Cross-functional reviews happen in a line, not in a room.
- The final output mostly reflects whoever saw it last.
- Teams describe their role as "checking" rather than "contributing."
Who: one person from each team that touches the work. Look at: the last piece of cross-team work. For each team, note when they first saw it and whether any change they asked for got made. You're probably looking at this pattern if most teams saw it late and their changes were small or dropped. Probably not if teams met early and shaped it together.
The team stopped thinking together. That pattern is about a single team that no longer works through problems as a group. This pattern is about teams that were never brought together.
Ask everyone to get up to speed on the background with AI before the next session.
Lay the structure out as a handful of movable cards with the group before anyone writes.
Products tend to mirror the structure of the organization that builds them, an observation known as Conway's law. Established pattern in software. That the combined work would be better if teams met earlier is our reasoning.