Coming from a job where we transitioned to cross-functional teams, all we did was reorient the silo. The business was unhappy with teams oriented around specifi

Coming from a job where we transitioned to cross-functional teams, all we did was reorient the silo. The business was unhappy with teams oriented around specific projects, and felt we were struggling to produce quality releases according to the roadmap because teams had lack of understanding of the big picture along with competing priorities. With a CFT, we would focus on a vertical slice of whatever systems it took to deliver a feature, and orient our team structure around the right expertise in the systems we’d need to touch. We would also take responsibility for managing our own releases rather than relying on bottleneck-prone maintainers to do it. This seemed sensible at first, it even gave us a sudden burst of productivity. It soon fell apart, however, as now it became incredibly difficult to manage releases across products where multiple teams have competing priorities. Quality quickly plummeted and we had an even worse time releasing software, and every end of sprint the problem compounded. We still ended up with a bottleneck of a few experts to sort through the firehose of changes each team was trying to push out and get it handled. Our workload actually increased, along with stress and frustration. The issue in this case was a perfect storm of tech debt, poor planning, poor architecture, and simply too many priorities. The business thought that rotating the team structure 180 degrees magically multiplies our productivity, and somehow convinced themselves that the work these teams do are completely independent, all while building out a roadmap with very little cooperation from the engineers. On top of investing in fixing the technical and organizational issues just producing software, I would rather leadership had focused the entire business on a small set of complimentary or at least non-competing (limited by available resources, of course) priorities so we could each focus on an piece of the puzzle and bring our particular expertise to bear on producing a coordinated and high quality solution. I certainly agree that teams oriented around their microservice or whatever was bad, but orienting around a project/feature really any different; we should have been oriented around a holistic product and the customers’ well-being.