We don’t want to overlook things we should coordinate OR to waste time talking about things that don’t require coordination. Our approach helps teams avoid the noise of too much info, and highlights what truly requires discussion.
In this episode of the Humanizing Work Show, Peter and Richard delve into the often messy world of cross-team coordination. While collaborating within a team has its challenges, coordinating between teams can feel like navigating a maze—too much information, missed details, and meetings that waste everyone’s time.
We explore why common approaches to cross-team coordination often fall short:
- Unstructured Meetings: Regular cross-team meetings without a clear agenda can lead to irrelevant discussions and overlooked critical topics
- Overloading with Details: Sharing full backlogs or all team details creates noise, making it hard to identify what’s truly important for coordination.
To overcome these pitfalls, we introduce a streamlined approach to cross-team meetings that saves time and ensures no important details are missed. By visualizing the agenda—not every team’s workload—you can focus on what truly requires coordination.
What You’ll Learn:
- A Simple Coordination Model: Discover how we at Humanizing Work use five key areas to effectively coordinate within our small team.
- A Complex Coordination Strategy: Learn about a real-world example where a dozen teams improved their cross-team meetings using visual tools and a structured agenda.
- Practical Tips: Get actionable advice on setting up your own efficient cross-team coordination meetings.
If you’ve ever left a cross-team meeting feeling like it was a waste of time or worried that something important was overlooked, this episode is for you.
More ways to connect:
📧 Share a challenge or episode idea: mailbag@humanizingwork.com
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Episode transcription
Richard Lawrence
You’ve heard us say it before: Collaborate within teams, coordinate between teams. Which is to say, work closely together with the people on your team—and structure teams so that’s possible. And then plan and align the work of multiple teams where they affect each other.
Peter Green
Getting team collaboration right isn’t always a walk in the park, but there are pretty well-known, time-tested tools to structure those kinds of interactions. With good team leadership and the right people on the team, there are patterns to build on.
Cross-team coordination, on the other hand, can be much trickier to get right. There’s too much information to keep up with across many teams, and things like the curse of knowledge make it hard for us to know what to share, what to highlight, and what everyone else does and doesn’t know.
As a result, we all too often end up sitting in cross-team coordination meetings that feel like a waste of time—where the right things don’t get discussed, and people seem to go down long rabbit holes on details that definitely don’t need to involve everyone. You leave the meeting not only feeling like you’ve accomplished nothing but also with a nagging feeling that something critical might have been missed.
Richard
Visualizing the work is important, and there are standard ways to do this, for supporting collaboration within a team. Like on software teams, story boards and task boards are common examples. But when these teams need to coordinate, the guidance gets fuzzier.
In this episode, we’ll share an approach we’ve developed to visualize things teams need to coordinate about so balls don’t get dropped but so you also don’t have to get into the weeds on everybody’s work.
Peter
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So, let’s talk about coordinating between teams…
First off what doesn’t work:
There are two common cross-team coordination approaches we’ve seen that actually don’t work very well.
One is regular cross-team meetings with free-form discussion: “So, what do we need to talk about, while we’re here?” Those tend to suffer from anchoring bias, recency bias, and tend to have discussions that don’t really need to happen. There’s just no mechanism ensuring that you talk about the right things.
Another not-so-effective approach is for each team to just give other related teams full visibility into their work details in a backlog or wherever they manage things. That doesn’t work because it’s just too noisy. If you’re trying to be careful to coordinate well, you’re going to waste time trying to figure out what matters. And realistically, most people are too busy to do that, so things are going to get missed.
Peter
Those two approaches don’t work well but there’s a kernel of truth in each one. The regular meetings approach is right– coordination usually requires talking to each other out loud, not typing emails or messages, and those conversations should happen on a regular basis. The “share the backlog” approach is right in the sense that visualizing what other teams need to know can be very helpful.
Richard
Here’s the core problem: We don’t want to miss talking about things we should coordinate about. But at the same time, we don’t want to waste time talking about things that don’t require coordination.
Peter
What we’ve seen work best is a regular coordination meeting with a way of visualizing what needs to be talked about. You’re not visualizing all the work that each team is doing. Instead, you’re visualizing the agenda for coordination. And then you’re probably digging into supporting team-level information as needed.
Let’s look at two examples of this at different extremes: One simple one for a small group of individuals who need to coordinate their work, and one to support a large, carefully orchestrated, multi-team coordination meeting.
Richard
The simple example is what we use for our weekly review at Humanizing Work. For background… There are just a few of us, and we do a mix of individual work and collective work.
In the early days, we talked about everything that we’d each completed or that we were still working on, and it was super noisy. Some things we’d worked on really closely together, and didn’t actually need to talk about them, but we talked about them anyway. Other things were fully delegated to one of us and the others didn’t really need to know about it. The things that really required coordination often got buried in the noise or when we got to them, we just didn’t have enough energy to really focus on them well.
Peter
We’ve evolved this process over many years, and now we each spend a few minutes before our weekly review on Fridays thinking about what benefits from coordination in 5 areas:
- First, things we want to celebrate
- Second, things we want to share and get feedback on
- Third, things we want to pre-plan going into the next week (because of time zones and client work our review isn’t always the last thing on our Friday schedule and planning isn’t always our first meeting on Monday, so this sometimes informs Friday afternoon or Monday morning work)
- Fourth, things we need to decide together
- And finally, things we want to give account for (like, “Hey, I said I would get this thing done, and I didn’t. And here’s why and what I’m committing to now.)
Those are the right categories for us and the work that we need to coordinate, but of course it’s different in different contexts.
Richard
One of our clients has a dozen different teams doing various aspects of marketing tools and marketing operations for a good-sized company. These teams are by and large organized around areas of complexity, just like we advise, and they’re primarily cross-functional and able to deliver increments of value—that might be a change to a marketing tool or, say, an ad campaign for a particular product or service.
While these teams each have their own backlog and mostly collaborate within the team, it’s common for work to require coordination across teams. For example, there might need to be alignment among three teams responsible for email marketing, paid ads, and web content leading up to a big webinar.
Peter
Before we helped this client experiment with a new approach, they had been doing a recurring monthly meeting, mostly with managers keeping track of what needed to be talked about across teams. It was running long, and key coordination topics were getting missed. They asked for our help to make their coordination more efficient and more effective.
Richard
We landed on a visual in our favorite collaboration tool Miro (side note to the marketing people at Miro: if you’re listening, we’re open to sponsorship discussions for the Humanizing Work Show). The visual we did in Miro provided a structure for the meeting. We also suggested they switch from a monthly to a bi-weekly schedule that landed in the middle of the Scrum teams’ sprint cadence.
Peter
Each team had a row with 5 boxes. 4 of the boxes were agenda items and 1 was a place to capture decisions made or actions committed to in that coordination meeting. The four agenda categories were: Done, Slower than planned, Next up, and Triage.
“Done” was a place to quickly share accomplishments that were relevant to other teams. A little bit like our “celebrate” category. “Slower than planned” was for highlighting delays on work that might cascade to other teams. “Next up” was a place to make visible upcoming work that might affect other teams. And “Triage” was for unblocking work, for cross-team decisions, for items a team wanted advice from other teams on…for anything that needed to be discussed to move forward.
Richard
There was only time for about 5 minutes per team, on average, for sharing and for discussion of their items. So at the top of the board, we added a big header that said, “Things other people need to know about,” and team leads were encouraged to put N/A on a sticky in any category that other teams didn’t need to hear about that week.
Peter
This structure was a good starting point for those teams. And we expect that over time they’ll fine tune it and tweak it to make the meeting even more effective. Our point in sharing it is not to claim that this is the only structure that works, or that we’ve discovered the ultimate, end all coordination structure. We created that structure based on working with this group over multiple months and hearing the patterns of conversations the teams should be having that were sometimes not happening, so it’s a good fit for them. It did give the leadership of that group a chance to take a breath. They had been working extra hard for a long time to make sure coordination happened, and this gave them some real hope that the teams themselves could take on more of that work.
Richard
If you’d like our help improving your team collaboration or your cross-team coordination, please reach out to us on our site, humanizingwork.com, and let’s talk about how we can help. All of the content we share on the show is a result of things we do ourselves or things we picked up from working with clients in a wide range of industries, cultures, and company sizes. We can only share a small portion of it here, but we hope what we do share is useful to you.
Peter
And as always, thanks for tuning into this episode of the Humanizing Work Show, and we hope to see you back next time! Thanks for listening.
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