A proper cross-functional team consists of individuals with diverse skill sets and fields of expertise who work together to achieve a common goal. Diverse backgrounds and, therefore, varied perspectives can contribute to a better understanding of problems, improving the chances of creating effective solutions. At its core, NPD (New Product Development) design isn’t that much different from a focus group discussion. You have multiple people in the room to discuss a pressing issue and, hopefully, reach a consensus at the end. The consensus can take the form of a conclusion, an answer, or a suggestion. To increase the likelihood of reaching an agreeable decision that benefits everyone, ensure the focus group includes members from diverse backgrounds, each with a unique perspective. The same thing can be said of a cross-functional team working on an NPD project. If the team is multidisciplinary, the resulting product is expected to be the brainchild of multiple creative minds working together to build an optimized design.
An NPD team typically consists of industrial designers, engineers, prototype fabricators, R&D personnel, and marketers. But even if you have all of them working on the same project, it doesn’t always mean the team instantly becomes a cross-functional one. The only way to ensure it and keep the project running at a healthy pace is to maintain good communication among the members. For this purpose, you will need another specialist, in this case, a project manager, to function as a bridge that facilitates smooth workflow, reconciles differences, and streamlines progress in general. A capable manager works to break the old-school siloed culture in an NPD project. Despite the varied specializations and perspectives among the individuals or even groups, the project manager should try to build a truly cross-functional team out of the differences, an effective team driven to fulfill the same purpose in a collaborative way.
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And this is where Cad Crowd shines. Whether you want to bring in more experts to build a diverse team or a project manager to foster collaboration, look no further than Cad Crowd to discover and connect with some of the most qualified talents for your project. Backed by thousands of experienced NPD professionals from various backgrounds, the freelancing platform grants you easy access to the best the industry has to offer.
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Old linear days
Not so long ago, the NPD process was often associated with uneasy integration between supposedly related fields of expertise, such as engineering and design. As if the project wasn’t difficult enough, even with proper collaboration, the notion of each discipline being a stand-alone operation in a siloed development made things harder than they had to be. In some cases, such compartmentalization still exists today, and you might be surprised that many large companies suffer from it.
Say a company wants to build a new type of ceiling fan with colorful LEDs on the blades that produce psychedelic effects at full speed. The designers, with their own creative viewpoints, decide to keep the product small and wireless. They go so far as to suggest that the fan should be controllable via a smartphone app. Sketches and renderings design are sent to the engineering team, along with the desired tech spec. In this whole exercise, however, the designers are oblivious to how technically challenging it would be to make the product they describe. The engineers have to figure out the material, durability, RGB controller, wireless communication, not to mention the app development, and power consumption. Mind you, this is just an example. Maybe in the real world somewhere, there’s already a ceiling fan that can do all those our hypothetical designers say. We’ll just gloss over that.
In that strangely specific instance, the designers seem to see the engineering team as no more than a support group whose main function is to build whatever the sketch may suggest. This is especially true if the proposed design has already been submitted to someone higher up the administrative ladder, who, without so much as a memo to any of the engineers, gives the approval. Sometimes, things happen the other way around, as in the engineers write down the specification without input from the design team. The lack of communication means that both groups are unaware of each other’s constraints. They may misinterpret information because the briefs contain either too many or too few details. A lack of understanding leads to poor collaboration, putting development on hold.
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It’s an old approach where an NPD project moves like a relay race. One team finishes its job at a certain point, passes the baton to the next in line, then sits back and enjoys the view. One of the good things about the old approach is the sequential progress, meaning the project moves from phase to phase. It begins with market research, concept development, prototype fabrication, evaluation, certification, and finally commercialization. The ugly thing is that every team involved in the project works in a segmented fashion. The research people are concerned with nothing but market demands; the engineers specialize in technical details; the designers are scrambling to put the spec sheet into shape; the fabricators are left to their own devices to build prototypes; and so forth. All the teams are highly specialized, which is always a good thing, but the segmentation forces them to work, for lack of a better word, in isolation. It’s ineffective at best.
Time for integrated NPD
But things are changing. Many product design companies have moved from the old linear approach to a more streamlined workflow, in which every NPD project is now assigned to a multidisciplinary team rather than a collection of highly specialized divisions. They’ve discovered that a cross-functional team is just as capable of churning out high-quality, profitable, and unique products as its sequential counterpart, but faster and more flexible. There’s no alternative, really. Product designs have become more complex, and the market is getting increasingly more competitive. Everybody wants their products to be the first to hit store shelves. No one needs the delays caused by poor communication, which happens far too commonly in a segmented NPD team. Companies have been exploring ways to improve efficiency.
A segmented team hinders that very idea, because so much time is wasted just waiting for somebody from another division to pass the baton. And when the baton finally gets handed over, progress can’t continue right away because the receiving group has to reanalyze it first to be able to decide what to do next. All the groups within a segmented team can be so different from each other, in terms of both specializations and principles, that they have no clear relationships and no single rulebook to determine who gets to do what and when.
Some companies create a “task force” to handle specific NPD projects. Unlike the regular segmented team, a task force is supposed to be multidisciplinary and separate from the other groups. It can indeed be an effective answer, but the fact that a project requires a task force is a sign of poor efficiency in the existing design management. If your company’s business is all about making new products, why don’t you have a permanent cross-functional multidisciplinary task force to begin with? For example, in an NPD project where the “design group” has to work in a separate environment from the rest of the team, you’ll probably encounter too many unnecessary back-and-forth exchanges just for everyone to agree on the concept.
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You can describe the main role of a design group as creating or developing concepts that optimize a product’s functions, fabrication, aesthetics, and value. Don’t you think it would be nice if the design group also gets involved in the market research services and engineering phases? A segmented team means the design group only works at a certain phase of the project, let’s say following R&D and just before engineering. They’ll likely be able to develop a strong concept based on the R&D report, but what if the engineering group finds it too challenging to fabricate?
The next thing you know, there’s a lot of back-and-forth between the three groups, and by the end, the project makes little progress because so much time is wasted on documentation explaining why things won’t work. The engineering group suggests the form factor is too small, while the design group insists that anything larger would make the product difficult to use. A better approach is to integrate the different groups (design, engineering, marketing, research, etc.) into a single cross-functional team. No more segmented workflow, no more compartmentalization, no isolation, no siloed development. An NPD project has always been about design compromises and effective engineering backed by accurate market research. A multidisciplinary team, working under the watchful eye of a professional project manager, blurs the boundaries between specializations, allowing members to collaborate closely regardless of the project’s development phase.
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An NPD project run with an integrated approach is highly likely to be much more efficient than the old linear method for one good reason: you have a multidisciplinary team where members work together from the beginning to the end. Although sequential product development offers structured phases and easily identifiable progress, the dynamics of a multidisciplinary, cross-functional team yield more refined concepts, more thoughtful decisions, and an overall better design, thanks to the interplay among members. Some of the development phases can even happen concurrently. For example, the designers produce sketches before the feasibility test results from the R&D people are in. Or, the engineers can start fabrications of a PoC (proof of concept) before the designers finalize the aesthetics. A cross-functional team also finds it easier to keep iterative development going through the latest phase of the NPD project.
Product designers and others
We’ve all been found guilty of complaining about a bad product with, “Who designed this thing that now doesn’t work anymore?” Perhaps with an expletive or two in reality, but let’s leave that in the inner thoughts for now. Although the complaint really is an all-encompassing expression of criticism toward the entire development team and the company behind the product, it’s as if we’re only blaming the designers for whatever flaws the product has. Unfair as it may seem, there’s some truth to that, and it only shows how important designers are in an NPD project. A design, in its own right, is like the middleman that connects engineering expertise and product requirements. The designers work to build a medium to deliver useful technologies and features to users. This medium takes the form of a physical product design that users can touch and interact with.
A product can be as sophisticated as a lunar module, or as modular as LEGO bricks, but if the design is a mess with buttons all over the place, or a rechargeable battery with a charging port in the wrong place, no one is going to have a good time playing with it. Even the marketers would scratch their heads as they make up words describing how mind-numbingly difficult it is to use the product. Good-looking design shouldn’t come with a terrible user experience in the same way that useful features never have to hide underneath poor build quality. If the product actually is well-optimized for what it’s supposed to do, the marketers can do their jobs without having to sugarcoat the sales pitches. From the perspective of an NPD as a whole, all these conflicts are minimized, perhaps completely avoidable even, so long as there’s a cross-functional team working on the project.
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While it’s true that designers aren’t the only people working to develop a new product, almost everything they do is a central activity connected to the work of others on the NPD team. Research, engineering, manufacturing, and marketing services have their impact on design, but maybe not to the same extent that design affects them. Still remember how people blame “design” when something goes wrong with a product? The vast majority of people aren’t technical enough to think of a product, especially a physical product, as more than anything but either good or bad design. It’s probably not the main reason design is crucial, but it’s definitely one of the big ones.
Within a cross-functional team, designers can comfortably take on an integrative role, where they can directly contribute to development while also taking into account what others (researchers, engineers, marketers) have to say. And the sentiment goes every other way. Members of an integrated team are naturally dependent on one another. It’s a collaboration in every sense of the word. An NPD project by a cross-functional team has the benefit of diverse information that’s “immediately” available in every stage of the process. Emphasis on the word immediate, because the team doesn’t suffer from the typical organizational red tape, which often causes delay at best and complete inaction at worst.
Major interactions
All the various disciplines within a cross-functional team have no choice but to maintain close interaction with one another; there’s no point in being multidisciplinary to begin with. Since we’re talking from designers’ viewpoints, this close interaction happens mainly with three other disciplines: marketing, engineering (or R&D), and manufacturing services.
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- For the designers to come up with a concept that makes sense, they need to know at least two things: the competitors’ products and their average prices. Designers can always use more detailed marketing information, such as characteristics of target demographics, consumer trends, business constraints, compliance standards, and emerging technologies. Marketers must ensure that all this data is consistently updated and available to designers at all times. It’s good to have more data, but some of them might not be entirely relevant to what the designers need. A cross-functional team runs efficiently because the designers are in continuous interaction with marketers to filter out any information that’s beside the point. The designers have only the information they need to know, nothing less, nothing more, allowing them to work faster with more accurate results.
- Regular contact with engineers or R&D people in general can also improve the workflow. Since R&D personnel also communicate with other disciplines, the information they share may influence designers’ approaches to product development. For example, the engineers can keep the designers updated on many things, such as manufacturing methods, material choices, and prototyping technologies. Perhaps the designers wanted to make the product as light as possible while maintaining durability, and, thankfully, the engineers are aware of a newly developed alloy that is perfect for that purpose. For sure, the designers can find out about the material on their own, but the collaborative nature of an integrated team allows this whole information-sharing activity to happen quickly. No matter what concept and design emerge from the development, a cross-functional team ensures that they result from well-informed decisions.
- And then there’s also the manufacturing discipline, which, of course, contributes to the idea of the DFM (Design for Manufacturing) approach. The endpoint of an NPD is mass production. But the problem is that many companies don’t have their own factories. Even massive corporations like Apple, Nike, and Walmart outsource their production to third-party manufacturers. And not every product or design can be easily mass-produced. It takes quite a lot of adjustments to the machinery, the assembly line, or perhaps brand-new tooling, depending on how complex the designs are. Sometimes, parts of the designs have to be revised to streamline the manufacturing. The idea behind DFM is to build a design that’s actually intended for mass production. With manufacturing professionals feeding relevant information to the designers, the NPD project can generate a design that’s already well optimized for production.
To reiterate our very first point at the beginning of the discussion, a team can be called “cross-functional” if the members come from different professional backgrounds and work together toward a common goal. In an NPD project, such a team may consist of industrial designers, engineers (electrical/electronics, mechanical, computer, etc.), marketers, researchers, and fabricators. The team can work to its full potential so long as everyone can leverage each other’s specialized expertise to address the often complex challenges of product development. Each discipline also offers a unique perspective, allowing the team as a whole to understand problems from all possible angles and generate optimized solutions. Specifically, designers in a cross-functional team typically serve as a link among all other disciplines, gather project-relevant data from them, and use that information to generate concepts that meet product requirements.
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Chances and challenges
One of the most obvious characteristics of a cross-functional team is spontaneity, or its willingness to try new ideas and see things from fresh perspectives. A shift from the old linear days to the modern integrated approach in NPD often signals an attempt to break down the traditional hardline of the siloed method. And any form of change where a company moves away from rigidity toward flexibility never fails to stimulate new kinds of thinking and learning, perhaps even a new culture of collaboration. As the disciplines previously segmented in a silo-driven development are now brought together without barriers, whether organizational red tape or isolated work environments, the sense of teamwork feels more literal, and every experiment feels more well-rounded.
It only makes sense that a diverse team composed of multidisciplinary members from various backgrounds has a better chance of coming up with creative solutions than segmented groups or individuals. This doesn’t necessarily mean that a cross-functional team can always generate optimized product designs; it’s just that the likelihood of it happening is noticeably improved thanks to the collective expertise. For better or worse, this kind of specialization diversity (which sounds like an oxymoron because it is) transforms the workspace into a real creative environment. Everyone challenges each other’s assumptions and explores all possible alternatives. It’s inevitable, and that’s why you may need an experienced project manager to prevent any design discussion from turning into nothing but noisy, meaningless debate. A project manager keeps things civilized and purposeful.
The traditional NPD project with a linear approach will never eliminate sequential handoffs between the segmented specializations. Repeated handoffs don’t necessarily indicate inefficiency, but there will be time wasted throughout the administrative procedures involved. We won’t say handoffs are inefficient in any way. Depending on how you handle the transition from one phase to the next, handoffs can be nothing but smooth sailing across the board, for example, when you have a qualified manager to keep the project somewhat centralized. But no matter how efficient the handoffs are, zero-handoff definitely takes less time.
But it’s not without its challenges, too. Chief among these is to get everyone on the same page to begin with. A cross-functional team is prone to conflicts. If you fill a room with people from varied professional backgrounds and ask them to solve one problem, they may first argue about everything, which is understandable because they have different methods, focus on different things, and use completely different metrics for success. They’re not familiar with each other’s approaches to problem-solving, which can turn the NPD project into a mess. It’s therefore important to remove all these potential issues right off the bat. You can do this by setting clear and measurable objectives to guide the team’s efforts. Collaboration in a cross-functional team only works well if everyone is aware of their specific roles. The team also needs good leadership not only to prevent and solve conflicts, but also to provide resources and acknowledge contributions.
Closing thought
An NPD can take great benefits from a cross-functional team. The integration of a wide range of disciplines and knowledge, working on a project as a single group, brings the promise of an optimized product design, one that’s actually seen as the ideal solution after going through so much scrutiny by experts of varying specializations. But different professional backgrounds usually entail specific viewpoints, approaches, methods, and goals that are not perfectly aligned. And to overcome any conflict that may arise from these differences, the team can always rely on a capable leader, a project manager, or a captain to set the tone for teamwork and help everyone reach a common understanding of the job.
Cad Crowd, a freelancing platform with a heavy emphasis on design, engineering, and the NPD sector in general, gives you easy access to some of the most capable talents in the business. Whether you’re looking to reinforce your existing team or build one from the ground up, Cad Crowd offers flexible hiring options with competitive rates to boot. Backed by more than 15 years of experience, a guarantee of accuracy, and a user-friendly interface, Cad Crowd stands as one of the top US-based platforms for finding experienced professionals for NPD projects of all kinds.
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How Cad Crowd can help
Working with the right experts makes the dream work. Having clear communication and collaboration is a step toward making a product successful. With suitable and right deliberation, communication, and support, any simple idea can be turned into a fully made product that customers will trust and be happy to buy. Contact Cad Crowd today and start bringing your ideas to life with a free quote.
