From Cross-Functional to Cross-Purposes: Why Collaboration Falls Apart Over Time
Two years ago, Mihaela Draghici stood on the UXDX stage in Dublin and told a hopeful story. Her teams at Volkswagen Digital Solutions had taken deliberate action to break down the silos between product teams and the business departments they serve. Cross-functional teams were finally being brought into conversations about vision, strategy, and outcomes, not just handed a plan and told to deliver it.
A Talk About People, Not Tools
Mihaela starts with a disclaimer that gets a laugh and a little relief. This is not a talk about AI. It is a talk about people working together.
She gives the context quickly. Volkswagen Digital Solutions builds digital products for multiple departments across the Volkswagen Group, including procurement, production, logistics, and sales. The delivery model is cross-functional product teams, designers, engineers, product managers, data roles, and other technical specialists, working alongside business experts and domain specialists.
On paper, it is the model everyone wants. In practice, it still breaks.
Her focus is not on the first moment silos appear. It is on what happens after you do all the right things to remove them, and still find the organization drifting apart again.
The Original Problem: Being Asked to Deliver Someone Else’s Plan
Mihaela describes the earlier friction that pushed them to change. Business leaders set plans in executive committees. Product teams would then be presented with those plans and expected to deliver. That structure left little room for negotiation, little room to adapt based on data, and little room to apply user-centered or outcome-driven thinking.
From the product side, it was hard to show progress in a meaningful way and hard to explain why certain practices mattered. Prototyping to validate ideas. Setting up analytics to understand actual usage. Running discovery to make sure the team was solving the right problem. All of it can look like a delay when the organization is in a project delivery mindset.
From the business side, the pain was real, too. Stakeholders wanted clearer alignment on product decisions and a better understanding of what product teams were doing. They also wanted product teams to understand their own constraints and realities better.
Both sides were meeting. They were planning. They were updating each other. And yet, over time, they were still working in isolation.
The Fix: Hybrid Teams With Shared Ownership
The solution Mihaela’s teams introduced was structural. They reconfigured teams into what they call hybrid cross-functional product teams, meaning business stakeholders were integrated into the product team rather than kept adjacent to it.
The intent was not symbolic inclusion. It was shared ownership and shared responsibility for success and failure. Shared vision. Shared tools. Shared ways of working. Business experts and domain specialists were included throughout the product lifecycle, not only at checkpoints.
To make that practical, they created a working model agreement that defined responsibilities across each stage of the cycle. They included business stakeholders in team ceremonies. In return, product people gained access to high-level steering committees and management groups where they previously had no seat.
Mihaela also talks about pairing as a deliberate lever. The engineering teams already worked in pairs through extreme programming, so they extended the concept to other roles. Pairing PMs with business product owners. Designers with business stakeholders. Designers with engineers. Creating regular contexts where people from different functions work side by side and exchange knowledge continuously.
The aim was closeness. Trust. Empathy. Shared context instead of handoffs.
What Improved When People Worked Together
Mihaela explains how they checked whether the change was working. They ran team health checks, interviews, and surveys to capture qualitative feedback. They looked at product success, whether the products were used and created the expected impact. They also looked at investment patterns, whether leaders were willing to fund continued improvement and future initiatives.
Over the last two years, there were real wins. Multiple products were rolled out across sales, procurement, production, and logistics. Continuous discovery practices were introduced in several teams. Experiments were led by teams, not forced from above, and they produced business value.
One example is wonderfully concrete. For a product built for factories, the team paired with an IT specialist working on site and built a tool that simulated a machine connected to the factory. It created a small testing lab in the office, allowing the team to experiment incrementally before investing in a full solution. It is the kind of work that only becomes possible when domain expertise is inside the loop rather than requested from afar.
The feedback Mihaela describes is encouraging. People in teams felt more confident about understanding the problems they were solving and the users they were solving them for. Business stakeholders were engaged and responsive, contributing insights that improved solutions. And business colleagues appreciated how engineers, architects, and designers made an effort to understand why procurement works a certain way, or why a factory process exists the way it does.
So far, it sounds like a success story.
And then Mihaela delivers the twist that makes the talk matter. Even with those changes, collaboration still fell apart over time.
Why Collaboration Falls Apart Even When You “Fixed” It
Mihaela’s key insight is that drift is not a mystery. It is the result of forces that quietly pull teams back to old patterns.
She groups the causes into three areas.
Hidden structural forces pull people back to previous behaviors. Those behaviors create habits. Habits become mindsets. And mindsets are slow to change, especially when the organization does not notice they are reappearing.
The second problem is language. People often do not speak the same language, even when they believe they do.
The third is what happens when expectations and perceptions diverge. Misalignments create communication gaps, and communication gaps lead to lower motivation, lower engagement, and in some cases, loss of trust.
Mihaela then makes the reasons tangible through examples.
The Structural Forces That Undo Good Intentions
Mihaela starts with processes, not because she loves bureaucracy, but because processes are powerful. They are often necessary. And they can still create friction.
One example is budgeting cadence versus product planning cadence. Business departments approve budgets annually, sometimes over three or five years, often in waterfall style with preset milestones and requirements that are expected not to change. Product teams plan quarterly and want space for experimentation and iteration.
The result is predictable. Business leaders want commitments. “We already promised this to management.” Product teams want to stay adaptive. Both are rational within their systems, and the collision can quietly break collaboration. Another structural force is regulation and operational constraints, especially in an industry like automotive with strong limitations around production and logistics. Those constraints must be understood early, or teams will design solutions that cannot exist.
Mihaela also points to role ambiguity inside a complex organization. When responsibilities are unclear, people duplicate work or compete for the same outcomes without realizing it. And decision-making becomes slow because of steering committees and layers of governance. Product teams want speed. The system is built for careful consensus. Friction grows.
Over time, these structures reintroduce the project mindset. “Here is the list of features, deliver them, move on.” That mindset may never be stated as policy, but it reappears through the gravitational pull of governance. Then there is a quieter issue: time and availability. Hybrid collaboration asks business colleagues to dedicate significant time to product work. At first, enthusiasm is high. Over time, the effort becomes harder to sustain, especially when people have their “real job” pulling them back.
Finally, team rituals can lose meaning. Meetings stay on the calendar even after they stop helping. People attend because attendance is expected, not because it drives outcomes. When rituals become performative, collaboration starts to rot from the inside.
The Strategies That Keep Teams From Drifting Apart
Mihaela ends with optimism, but it is practical optimism.
First, keep investing in pairing. Diverse pairs create shared context and reduce the “us versus them” dynamic.
Second, stop assuming shared understanding. Build a shared glossary that teams can update and revisit. Make it easy to contribute, not a document that becomes stale.
Third, use rotations and work exchanges. Send people into each other’s worlds. Spend time in procurement. Spend time in factories. Move between locations. Shared reality builds empathy faster than any workshop.
Fourth, check in regularly. Revisit the working model agreement when the product lifecycle changes and when team members change. Revisit role expectations often. Do not treat the original agreement as valid for years.
Fifth, adapt structures to context. Do not assume one collaboration model fits every department. Use processes in your favor, and tune them to the realities of the domain.
Mihaela’s final framing is the one that ties the whole story together. The best cross-functional teams are not the teams without collaboration problems. Those do not exist. The best teams notice problems sooner and address them faster.
That is the difference between cross-functional in name and truly collaborative over time.
And then she ends with a question back to the room, the one that turns her sequel into an invitation. What collaboration challenges are you living with right now, and what are you doing to address them?
Want to watch the full talk?
You can find it here on UXDX: https://uxdx.com/session/from-cross-functional-to-cross-purposes-why-collaboration-falls-apart-over-time/
Or explore all the insights in the UXDX EMEA 2025 Post Show Report: https://uxdx.com/post-show-report