From Cross-Functional to Cross-Purposes: Why Collaboration Falls Apart Over Time
From Cross-Functional to Cross-Purposes: Why Collaboration Falls Apart Over Time
20 May, 15:25 - 16:00 (Europe/Berlin) - Main Stage
20 May, 13:25 - 14:00 (UTC)
Cross-functional collaboration is often celebrated as the gold standard for product development. You’ve built cross-functional teams. You’ve broken down silos. You’ve aligned product, business, and engineering more. So why does collaboration still feel challenging at times?
Mihaela Draghici reflects on the experiences with embedding business stakeholders into hybrid product teams and the unexpected ways that teams drift back into misalignment and silos—even after setting up strong collaboration frameworks. The culprit? A mix of hidden structural forces, team habits, and, most critically, language misalignment. When teams unknowingly speak different “languages”—not just across industries but across functions—communication breaks down, expectations become misaligned, and collaboration suffers.
This talk explores real-world examples of cross-functional initiatives that started strong but slowly eroded, revealing common pitfalls that cause teams to revert to silos. Mihaela will share lessons learned and practical strategies to prevent these failures, from identifying linguistic mismatches early, to maintaining long-term alignment across business, product, and engineering teams. If your teams are struggling to stay aligned despite their best efforts, this talk will show you why—and what to do about it.
Mihaela Draghici, Associate Director at Volkswagen SDC:LX,Volkswagen Digital Solutions
