Learn the Benefits of Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration

Learning Objectives 

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Define cross-disciplinary collaboration.
• List five benefits of cross-disciplinary collaboration.

What’s Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration?  

We all feel it. Our world right now is complex and changing fast. And because of that, no one person can have the answer. That’s why more and more companies seek to work in cross-disciplinary ways. Cross-disciplinary collaboration is when people from different teams, functions, and life experiences work together toward a common goal. 

With cross-disciplinary collaboration, team members–such as product and community managers, developers, engineers, and designers–contribute diverse talents, experiences, and perspectives. 

This diversity maximizes the number of possibilities the team can explore. It allows them to create more choices that address blindspots, which leads to smarter, more innovative products, services, and experience solutions. It also reduces design debt, which occurs when more deliberate, tested design concepts or solutions get set aside to achieve short-term goals.  

What Are the Benefits?

Let’s look a little closer at the benefits. Cross-disciplinary teams positively impact business because they:

• Catalyze innovation: A cross-disciplinary team is diverse. Diversity alters the behavior of a group’s social majority in ways that lead to improved and more accurate group thinking. For example, during the initial stages of the design process, the designer often leads team sessions to understand the design challenge better and define success. Diverse voices and skill sets on the team drive more innovative thinking and solutions.
• Create better, more inclusive products, services, and experiences: Cross-disciplinary teams that have diverse skills, lived experiences, and perspectives are able to make their offerings better, more inclusive, and more profitable. For example, a researcher can share insights to help team members, like the designer and product marketing manager (PMM), better understand how to make a product or service more appealing to users–such as how a more intuitive app interface helps users solve a specific pain point.
• Make better decisions: Diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams in decision-making because they process information more carefully and consider myriad perspectives. For example, the PMM who is well-versed in a specific market’s needs can position the product's value to customers.
• Reduce risk: Cross-disciplinary teams can provide insight into how a wide range of user groups interact with a product, service, and experience. This level of inclusion can address blindspots and mitigate reworking.
• Transform the workplace: Diverse teams help keep biases in check, help team members question their assumptions, and ensure there are inclusive practices so everyone feels heard and belongs. Cross-disciplinary teams that are engaged, empathetic, and conscious of their biases are more likely to understand customer needs better because they have diverse perspectives and lived experiences that are more reflective of the customers and communities they serve.

Cloud Kicks and Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration

If you completed the Challenge Framing and Scoping module, you learned how Cloud Kicks, a small fictional sneaker company, turned customers into brand and product fans amidst supply chain disruptions. (You might even have followed this Cloud Kicks story across all the modules in the Learn Strategy Design trail, which focuses on strategy design best practices.) 

In this module, we take a fresh look at how Cloud Kicks assembled a project team with the right capabilities to solve the challenge. This meant bringing together a cross-disciplinary team with diverse: 

• Skills
• Professional training and education
• Lived experiences
• Perspectives

Skills

Cloud Kicks faced issues with its supply chain and customer-facing experience, both of which are complex. So it needed to include team members with key skill sets in design, user experience (UX), and business processes/manufacturing to do research and prototyping.

Professional Training and Education 

Team members’ diverse professional training and educational backgrounds also helped them navigate this complex challenge and system. For example, team members with experience and education in customer-centric fields like marketing tend to think more deeply about customers’ core pain points, which also translated into user insights the team used during the design process. 

Lived Experiences

To ensure the representation of diverse life experiences, Cloud Kicks assembled a team that was diverse in cultural and professional backgrounds, working styles, and values. 

Perspectives

Cloud Kicks also included team members who offered perspectives across a broad business context. This included customer service, community management, brand, sustainability, project management, and product development. They invited these team members to participate at key moments in the design process when their perspectives and expertise mattered the most, including during research, prototyping, and planning the product roadmap.

Meet the Team

Let’s get to know the core team that Cloud Kicks assembled.

• Mary Evans, team lead and business process architect
• Vijay Lahiri, developer
• Erica Douglass, community manager

Many small organizations like Cloud Kicks have team members who wear multiple hats. They often recognize the business value of design but are not at a stage in their design maturity—the level at which design operates within an organization—to designate specific design roles like a UX designer. 

For example, Mary, the team lead and business process architect, also wears the UX designer hat. On the project, she worked closely with Erica, who’s deeply connected to the Cloud Kicks customer base, to understand user needs better and use those insights to inform the team’s design process. She also asked Vijay to join the core team to collaborate and advise on technical feasibility during the prototyping stage. 

The team’s diverse lived experiences and perspectives enabled them to design with intersectionality in mind. This means thinking through how factors of one’s identity, such as gender identity, cultural background, and age, interact with one another and form a clearer picture of who someone is. 

For example, Vijay brings a unique perspective as a person of color and as someone well-versed in both American and Indian cultures. His multicultural background heavily influences his passion for supporting initiatives like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies to help people of color and women advance their careers in tech. 

Erica grew up watching her parents, dedicated small business owners, steadily grow their small chain of health food stores across the San Francisco Bay Area. That experience was formative for her, showing her how deep and trusting ties to the community help to grow a sustainable business. 

Mary, a proud mother of three teenagers, deeply values family time and maintaining strong boundaries between work and her personal life. She brings the most years of work experience to the team, both as a founding employee of Cloud Kicks and as a seasoned professional.

Cloud Kicks recognized the unique value and multidimensional perspectives each team member brought to the project. This also included high-level professional backgrounds, working styles, and values. 

In any cross-collaboration effort, each team member brings a diverse set of skills, lived experiences, and perspectives that they can use to drive success. 

Next, learn about the mindsets and practices you can use to strengthen cross-disciplinary team relationships and drive inclusive, cross-disciplinary collaboration. 

Resources 

• External Site: IDEO U: How Great Teams Leverage Tension as a Source of Innovation
• External Site: McKinsey & Company: Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters
• External Site: Medium: Salesforce Design: Perspectives from Black Designers