In cross-functional teams, it's easy to say everyone should stay in their lane. Product does product. Customer Success handles customers. Marketing tells the story. Engineering builds. And if everyone does their job well, things should work.
But in practice, that model creates friction. Not because people are bad at their jobs, but because they don’t understand how the others work, what trade-offs they’re managing, what good looks like in their world, and what pressures are shaping their decisions. And when that’s missing, alignment turns into a full-time job. You need meetings to explain things that should be intuitive. You need handoffs for work that should feel shared. You get delays, rework, and tension. Not because of miscommunication, but because of missing context. And the cost adds up: Slower execution, mismatched priorities, teams optimizing for different definitions of success, and customer pain that could have been prevented with five minutes of shared insight.
What I’ve learned is that real alignment doesn’t come from more coordination. It comes from cross-functional fluency. Teams move faster when product understands how customer success thinks about retention, when engineers grasp how marketing frames the value, and when sales understands that the roadmap is a conversation and not a commitment.
reference: (Fabian Kleeberger)