From Cross-Functional to Cross-Purposes: Why Collaboration Falls Apart Over Time
From Cross-Functional to Cross-Purposes: Why Collaboration Falls Apart Over Time
19 May, 13:50 - 14:25 (Europe/Berlin) - Main Stage
19 May, 11:50 - 12:25 (UTC)
Cross-functional collaboration is widely regarded as essential for effective product development. You’ve built cross-functional teams. You’ve broken down silos. You’ve aligned product, business, and engineering more. Yet, collaboration can still feel challenging at times.
In this talk, Mihaela shares reflections on the experience of embedding business stakeholders into hybrid product teams, and the unexpected ways that teams often find themselves gradually drifting 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. Drawing from real-world examples, Mihaela explores common patterns that cause well-intentioned collaboration to falter over time and 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 how to support collaboration more effectively over the long term.
Mihaela Draghici, Engineering Manager,Volkswagen Digital Solutions
