Cross-team collaboration

We collaborate effectively with other teams to align and resolve dependencies.

What is cross-team collaboration?

Cross-team collaboration refers to the ability of distinct teams within an organization to work together effectively, align on goals, and successfully resolve dependencies. It encompasses the structures, processes, and cultural elements that enable smooth interactions between teams that may have different priorities, responsibilities, and ways of working.

Effective cross-team collaboration means that: - Teams can identify and manage dependencies on each other's work - Information flows efficiently across team boundaries - Teams align their goals and priorities to support broader organizational objectives - Bottlenecks and silos are proactively identified and addressed - Teams learn from each other and share best practices

Why is cross-team collaboration important for developer experience?

Cross-team collaboration directly impacts developer experience in several critical ways:

Reduced friction and waiting time

When teams collaborate effectively, developers spend less time waiting for dependencies to be resolved or for decisions to be made. As one engineering leader at Cloud Data Platform noted:

"We suddenly found ourselves collaborating with three or four teams simultaneously. The situation was truly disastrous. After just a few months, my managers were saying they couldn't continue—it was simply impossible to sustain working until 10 PM every night."

Director of Engineering at Cloud Data Platform

Increased innovation and knowledge sharing

Effective cross-team collaboration enables the spread of ideas and best practices across organizational boundaries. However, as noted in one interview about hybrid work environments:

"The final risk we face is strong tie bias—our tendency to favor established, close connections. Over the long term, hybrid work environments can restrict learning and innovation because people naturally gravitate toward working in small, familiar groups, creating silos and significantly reducing cross-team collaboration."

Professional at Banking Group

Clearer path to production

When teams that manage different parts of the software delivery pipeline collaborate well, the journey from code to production becomes smoother and more predictable. One interviewee from Software Development Company highlighted a common breakdown point:

"Despite being the two most closely aligned practices, it's well-established that agile and DevOps teams often fail to collaborate effectively."

Head of Client Solutions at Software Development Company

What are common challenges to effective cross-team collaboration?

Communication barriers

Different teams often develop their own language, tools, and ways of working, which can create barriers to effective communication. Remote and distributed work environments amplify these challenges:

"One of our key challenges in an almost completely remote organization is that positive interactions only occur through deliberate effort—nothing good happens by accident, only the problematic things do. Team members must consciously choose to reach out and keep others informed. In a complex system, this deliberate communication tends to happen effectively within your immediate circle, but deteriorates noticeably as you move further out across the organization."

Senior People Analytics Manager at Software Development Company

Misaligned goals and priorities

When teams have different objectives or metrics of success, collaboration becomes difficult:

"The dynamics of cross-team collaboration get to the heart of how things function. It's particularly valuable for others to understand this system, especially if they either don't use OKRs or use them without tying them to concrete metrics. People really need to appreciate how crucial these quantifiable metrics are in facilitating effective collaboration—they provide the definitive mechanism for resolving competing priorities."

Senior Engineering Manager at Video Sharing Platform

Organizational complexity

As organizations grow, collaboration becomes more challenging:

"The challenge stems directly from organizational complexity. As organizations grow, the meeting structures and synchronization mechanisms across numerous teams become increasingly intricate. You need to influence a wider array of cross-team connections and collaborative workflows—a task that becomes progressively more difficult with scale."

Vice President at Industrial Machinery Manufacturer

Excessive collaboration overhead

While collaboration is necessary, it can become a burden if not managed properly:

"This data serves as a clear indicator that certain areas of the organization may be suffering from collaboration overload. It signals an opportunity for automation, process optimization, and reassessment of priorities. Conversely, we might be seeing isolated silos forming in other areas. Both these situations require targeted intervention."

CTO at Banking Group

How can organizations improve cross-team collaboration?

Create visibility into collaboration patterns

Many organizations lack visibility into how teams are actually collaborating. Tools that measure and visualize collaboration can help:

"An insight you can gain from network visualization is identifying which areas are central versus peripheral in your organization. The more peripheral a group is, the higher their risk of becoming siloed. Additionally, the dot sizes in our visualization represent each group's network role—essentially indicating how critical a team or business unit is to the organization's collaborative structure. Importantly, we can also identify potential bottlenecks by spotting areas receiving disproportionately high levels of collaborative requests."

People Analytics Partner at Marine & Energy Tech Company

Establish clear interfaces between teams

When teams establish clear interfaces and self-service mechanisms, they reduce the need for constant interruptions:

"I manage a support team that was overwhelmed with specific types of repetitive requests. When we investigated the issue, team members expressed significant frustration—they couldn't focus on meaningful work because of constant interruptions from these support tickets. Our analysis revealed the root cause: insufficient interfaces with other teams. They lacked comprehensive documentation that would enable other teams to self-serve, and they hadn't built their systems in ways that allowed others to use them independently without direct support. Once we identified this, the team undertook a substantial initiative to develop robust self-service capabilities."

Engineering Manager at Software Development Company

Create intentional collaboration structures

In remote and distributed environments, effective collaboration requires intentional design:

"This issue relates directly to the challenge of maintaining weak ties in the organization. It's significantly more difficult in remote settings. You need to deliberately and proactively manage your organizational network and support systems. The dynamics of fostering these connections in a predominantly remote organization are fundamentally different and require much more intentional effort to be successful."

Senior People Analytics Manager at Software Development Company

Balance collaboration and focus time

Effective collaboration requires finding the right balance between interaction and individual work:

"Our architects face significant time management challenges because they support multiple teams and individuals across the organization. To address this, earlier this year we implemented what some organizations call 'Throughput Thursday'—though we schedule ours on Wednesdays. On this day, architects block their entire calendar and decline all meeting requests. This protected time allows them to focus exclusively on addressing backlog items and other critical work that requires deep concentration."

Engineering Manager at Software Development Company

Use metrics and OKRs to align teams

Creating shared metrics helps teams align their priorities:

"Shared metrics provide our definitive mechanism for resolving conflicts and making tough prioritization choices. They allow us to clearly decide 'we're going to pursue this initiative rather than that one.' What's truly fascinating to observe is the collaborative negotiation that emerges—teams often sacrifice wins in their own areas to enable success with another team. There's a rich ecosystem of give-and-take that develops around these metrics."

Senior Engineering Manager at Video Sharing Platform

Is more collaboration always better?

Interestingly, there's evidence that too much collaboration can be counterproductive:

"I noticed something in the data about collaboration network size that seemed to suggest larger networks are more effective. However, I think there's a fascinating counterpoint worth exploring: in many situations, less collaboration can actually be advantageous. Reduced collaboration often enables teams to move more quickly and decisively. Excessive collaboration can actually be a warning sign—similar to how we think about the 'two pizza team' principle. One of my colleagues wrote an insightful blog post suggesting that creating intentional silos can be beneficial—strategically dividing work to minimize the need for constant communication and collaboration across the entire organization. This perspective deserves more consideration."

Head of Engineering at Observability Platform

The optimal level of cross-team collaboration depends on the organization's structure, the nature of work, and team interdependencies. The goal should be intentional collaboration that effectively resolves dependencies without creating excessive overhead.

How can cross-team collaboration be measured?

DevEx Surveys

How can cross-team collaboration be measured?

The Network Perspective DevEx Survey measures cross-team collaboration with the statement: "We collaborate effectively with other teams to align and resolve dependencies."

Identifying pain points: Low scores on this question highlight teams that are struggling with cross-team collaboration.

Enabling benchmarking: As one interviewee explained:

"Naturally, you receive a comprehensive summary of the data. However, what we've discovered to be exceptionally valuable is the pivot table functionality. This gives you access to internal benchmarks, allowing you to view results across any combination of dimensions and groupings—for instance, specifically examining the testing area. You can see how every team performs relative to others. We've found that these internal benchmarks are significantly more effective than external ones for driving meaningful improvements."

Managing Partner at Professional Services Software Provider

Prompting action: Identifying collaboration issues through the survey is the first step toward addressing them:

"Our process begins by generating improvement recommendations at the organizational level—as though we're addressing the entire media division with its 70 developers. This gives us a comprehensive assessment across the whole domain. However, we don't stop there. We then filter these insights and target specific action proposals to the individual teams where particular issues or comments were identified."

Media & Product Design Director at Digital Media Group

Providing direction: The survey not only identifies issues but also helps organizations prioritize solutions based on their specific context.

Organizational Network Analysis (ONA)

Beyond surveys, quantitative data can provide deeper insights. Network Perspective Work Smart AI helps teams optimize collaboration by analyzing signals from calendars, chats, and meetings. It reveals patterns in intra-team and cross-team interactions, showing where collaboration drives value and where it creates drag—enabling teams to redesign their work environment for sustained productivity and satisfaction.

At its core, the tool applies Organizational Network Analysis (ONA), a methodology that maps how information flows across teams and pinpoints bottlenecks or dependencies that slow delivery. Combined with survey insights, ONA gives leaders a holistic view of both the human experience and the structural dynamics of collaboration—making it easier to focus improvements where they matter most.

As described by one interview participant:

"The second contextual element we provide teams is visibility into their cross-team collaboration patterns—information that typically remains invisible to most teams. We show them which teams they're collaborating with and quantify that collaboration as a percentage, since every chat message, mention, or meeting generates measurable interactions between team members. This data helps teams continuously identify which domains, teams, organizational areas, projects, or hierarchy levels might be creating collaboration overload."

Engineering Manager at Software Development Company

By regularly measuring cross-team collaboration with the DevEx Survey and complementing it with behavioral data analytics, organizations gain a complete picture of collaboration health and can take targeted actions to strengthen developer experience.

Conclusion

Cross-team collaboration is a critical factor in developer experience that directly impacts productivity, innovation, and developer satisfaction. By understanding the challenges specific to their organization and measuring collaboration effectiveness through tools like the Network Perspective DevEx Survey, engineering leaders can implement targeted interventions that balance the need for effective dependency resolution with the autonomy teams need to deliver value.

The most successful organizations approach cross-team collaboration as a system to be continuously measured and improved, not as a static set of processes or structures. They create visibility into actual collaboration patterns, establish clear interfaces between teams, implement intentional collaboration structures, balance collaboration with focus time, and use shared metrics to align teams around common goals.

Improving cross-team collaboration is not about maximizing interactions between teams, but about making those interactions more effective and less burdensome. With the right measurement tools and improvement strategies, organizations can create an environment where teams work together smoothly to deliver value, resulting in better outcomes and a more positive developer experience.