How do you manage multiple cross-functional teams working together?

From my perspective, to get cross functional teams working together it is key to communicate clearly, work efficiently and build trust.

One of the first steps to working with cross-functional teams is to define clearly roles & responsibilities. This helps to avoid confusion, duplicated tasks or conflicts of work. Also helps team members to stay focus on their tasks.

Set manageable project goals is also key for cross-functional collaboration. Define SMART goals help team members to understands the objectives, expectations, and timelines.

Communication is essential for any team, but especially for cross-functional teams, who may have different backgrounds, languages, or styles. So clear and direct conversation with team members, asking questions, clarifying doubts to keep everyone on the same page. à Tools: regular meetings, email, Slack, repositories & Jira

Providing visibility to the stakeholders helps to keep updated regarding project progress to all parts involved. Understanding progress in real-time enables teams to adapt fast to changes and readjust strategy if needed.

Build trust among team members is also key. PMs must be honest and transparent with team members to build credibility. Also encouraging team members have open discussions during core team meetings and express their ideas openly with respect is an important part of collaboration between teams.

Good planning, open and honest communication, good prioritization and goals alignment.

Everything starts with the answers to the questions of what are we doing and why are we doing it now? Having clear answers to those questions will help create the program charter and get initial alignment with stakeholders, sponsors and program participants.

Open and honest communication is very important to help identify dependencies in cross functional areas and also for effective risk management.

Alignment in prioritization from a program global perspective helps avoiding misunderstanding when teams prioritize the work that is important for them.

Defining goals and objectives early in the program planning to ensure cross functional teams contribute to share goals and helping everyone contributing to the program to have a clear idea of the impact of their work.

For example when managing the program for Google Home Infrastructure I started with a proposal to improve infrastructure however as I started talking to multiple potential stakeholders and teams the scope of the program grew at least 3X. As this was at the program planning stage the requests to increase the scope allowed me to negotiate resources.

Product wanted to be able to detect bugs early in the development process and a semi automated release process, engineering wanted faster builds and faster build validation signals, testing wanted reliable infrastructure with less false positives. Detecting dependencies, prioritizing projects from a program global perspective allowed the different teams to focus on the common end goals rather than individual team priorities.

Evaluating program progress for individual projects as weekly standups allowed to identify risks  early in the process and evaluating the program progress every couple of weeks allowed to keep alignment and communicate cross functional challenges.

The key to cross-functional teams working together is having an open ended communication. This would help in fostering any kind of issues the team is facing. Also having a Sprint board, with every feature ticket with the team assignee, would give a better picture of how the work in progress is and who is the concerned team member to check on for a particular feature change or ticket. There are lot of times when there are situations when a team is dependent on another team, to proceed with the work. At this point, as a technical program manager can check for the long term goal of the project and see what could fit in the time line for alternative tasks that the Engineering team could pick up and make sure they are good to advance. Also determining the dependencies and checking how that can be reduced / eliminated  could help to get work done synchronously. Very simple example being, the UI team depended on the B.E developers for apis  to have proper data retrievals to display in f.E and  show up  some graphs based on search criteria, would have suitable amount of work to be done from B.e and F.E. In this case we would foster both teams to have effective communication, so that B.e team can give a fair idea of the api signatures and the response formats, so that UI can have an idea on how they can expect the data from B.E and proceed further with design changes

Cross functional teams have to be always in sync by continuous communication. The teams should be very well aware of what is expected to happen in the upcoming sprints at a high level at all times. Taking feedbacks, signing off changes before deployment etc are the key steps.