Every week seems to bring bad news about the state of the global economy and its impact on the tech sector. We appear well on our way to a downturn. Every startup will experience this recession differently. Some, particularly those in spaces such as SaaS, may get through it relatively unscathed. Others, like certain ecommerce and speedy delivery sectors, look set to have a tougher time. What every prudent founder will be looking at is how their startup can best weather the storm and set itself up for success when things inevitably get better.

The most obvious approach is to cut costs and increase efficiency. A no-brainer — but something that's a lot easier to talk about than to effectively put into practice. Inevitably, many startups first look at cutting headcount to meet this goal. However, more often than not this does a lot more damage than good. Vital skills and knowledge are lost, morale is hit and customer service suffers.

Instead, the answer could be found in a change of team structures, processes and approaches. A change that maximizes efficiency and resilience and promotes innovation. I am talking about the magic of cross-functional, multidisciplinary teams.

This is probably a record-scratch moment where you look confused and wonder why I’ve started writing like a management consultant. Hear me out. Although this may sound like a load of random jargon it actually describes one of the best future business structures.

Multidisciplinary teams: Taking down the silos

Generally speaking, businesses are divided up into departments. Marketers sit with marketers, and developers huddle with other developers. Marketing is in charge of marketing, the development team is in charge of, well, development. It's nice and simple and has a lot of obvious advantages. Unfortunately, it also has some glaring problems that are becoming more and more apparent as technology, changing working practices and rising customer expectations increase the complexity of what many businesses do. I’ll give a few examples below, but they can be summarized as the siloing of knowledge — usually around data, and causing bottlenecks, single points of failure and reduced innovation. 

Multidisciplinary teams are, as the name suggests, departments made up of people with a wide variety of skills. Cross-functional means that responsibilities, knowledge and aims go right across the business. 

Let’s focus on marketing. The way businesses communicate has become incredibly complex — more channels, more tools, digital transformation, an unprecedented amount of data and higher expectations. Websites are expected to provide a host of personalized experiences. All of this requires a huge number of skills working in tandem: data science, security, IT, digital marketing, copywriting, customer service, development and much more.

Collaboration, not conflict

Juggling all of these different skills found in different departments with different goals leads to a lot of headaches and, in some cases, conflicts. Marketers make requests of developers to complete an action immediately but it falls to the back of the queue because the developers have their own priorities. Data scientists provide inputs that don’t include the commercial insights that marketers need for strategies. Everyone forgets to inform customer service about the new marketing campaign copy. And so on. 

It’s inefficient, error-prone and an ultimately unsustainable way for many startups to operate. You can see these problems every time you experience a slow-running, poorly functioning or outdated company website. It was also readily apparent at the start of the pandemic as many companies struggled to switch their offerings online. A number of them — even some global companies — found they relied on one or two individuals (who were now absent with COVID-19) to manage website updates. They couldn’t put critical customer information online or even begin to create a new online channel for sales. 

Marketing is just the most obvious example; siloed teams impact everything from critical business decision-making — that is, the best infrastructure and tools to adopt — to sales, product development and commercial strategy.

A multidisciplinary, cross-functional team

A truly multidisciplinary, cross-functional marketing team includes all the skills you need to execute any project. This doesn’t mean splitting up the whole department into fixed smaller teams; it means allowing them to work cross-functionally on one project. Everyone works together and shares the same goals. Skills run in a continuum — data scientists know a bit about marketing, marketers know a bit about development. Information, insights and knowledge generated in the marketing team flow out to every other multidisciplinary department and vice versa. 

But wait a minute — weren’t we talking about surviving and thriving in a recession? This sounds expensive and disruptive, right? Well, no, not really. Certainly, if you intended to upend your entire business tomorrow and reorganize everything and everyone into a big multidisciplinary melting pot you would probably do more harm than good. I’m not advocating that. What I believe will work for a lot of startups is an incremental approach that focuses as much on the philosophy as it does on the practicalities. After all, building multidisciplinary teams involves a lot of best-practice measures that have their own wider benefits. 

How you can get started

Every startup will be different, but there are some broad rules of thumb to follow to get started:

              There’s no escaping the fact that change can be hard. I imagine many people reading this will shrug their shoulders and think they already do this. However, there’s a big difference between having the veneer of a collaborative startup and having the procedures, skills, mentality and infrastructure that make it a reality. The virtue of starting this journey now is that not only will it help you ride out the present recession, it will also future-proof your business for the technological, economic and customer challenges the next few years will bring. 

              Dominik Angerer is CEO and cofounder of enterprise CMS Storyblok.



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