Why Your Product Team Lost Its Edge (And How to Get It Back)

If you end up in an undesirable place, often the way out involves figuring out how you got there in the first place. I learned this recently in my personal life when I landed in the middle of a health crisis I wasn't planning on or expecting. But when doing a postmortem, it was clear to me how I got there: overwork, over-commitment, slacking off on things like diet, exercise, and sleep. That's a recipe for disaster.

Once I understood how I got there, I was determined never to repeat it. So when it came to my bad habits, I started concentrating on eliminating them one by one, understanding the triggers that led me there and being ruthless about making corrections.

It's no different when looking at the woeful situation that most enterprise product teams are in today.

The Cross-Functional Team Worship Problem

We all worship at the altar of cross-functional teams with the claim and belief that they are the most perfect representation of collaborative expertise to produce products that are truly top in their class. However, the reality is not so simple. We end up with process-heavy situations where teams are usually just trying to navigate the weight of the very frameworks and processes that they need to make a cross-functional team functional.

To understand how we ended up here in this collaborative quagmire, we need to pause and think about how we got here. The best way to understand the current situation with its drawbacks and challenges is to ask the following question: What if we looked at product teams that are executing with amazing results?

The ones where enterprise teams look longingly, even jealously—especially if they have competing software that's a new entrant in their category or market and they're getting their butts kicked.

The Startup Advantage: Why Scrappy Beats Specialized

Think about the dynamic of a startup. Startup members are usually scrappy generalists who are not overly concerned about their job description. They're just happy to be part of the experience and will do whatever they need to keep the whole thing moving forward.

That means your product engineers and developers will often find themselves doing a whole array of cross discipline tasks in one day. They'll take care of setting up server-side infrastructure and handle DevOps work that needs to be done—maybe even maintaining documentation as they go. Anyone with design strength will be designing user interfaces and workflows, getting stuck right in with analysis, trying to figure out what users are looking for and injecting themselves into the center of the whole situation.

What this results in is a more compact team that is eager to punch above its weight. Sure, each task won't be completed with the degree of specialization or completeness that would be achieved from having a specialist in each area. But there's also fewer communication gaps. There's more continuity because everybody just understands, gets it, and does what's needed to get the job done.

The Cross-Functional Team Theory vs. Reality

Now let's analyze the anatomy of a cross-functional team. The theory is that if we put a team of experts together who are all specialists in their individual areas, you should inherently end up with a product that is superior in every way. Right!?

Your designers are all experts in the field following modern best practices. Your architects all have a far-sighted view of your system, understand the technology stack and how to put it all together. Your engineers are all top-shelf and know all the latest frameworks and methodologies for approaching their code and executing with flawless precision. Your business analysts are all top-tier too—they know what questions to ask, to whom, and when. They have a deep understanding of your market, not to mention all your quality assurance developers coding automation with flawless perfection and your DevOps team members setting up server-side infrastructure that is second to none.

The blind spot here is that we've moved from maybe three or five members performing all of these functions to ten or twelve. As soon as your team grows in the number of people trying to collaborate, trying to share a united vision, trying to make sure that nothing disappears between the gaps becomes almost impossible.

The Product Lifecycle Evolution: How Teams Naturally Decay

So what is the solution? Do we reset all our cross-functional teams to function like startup teams and switch everyone from being specialists to generalists so that we can gain more momentum?

Well, that could be the answer for some teams, but it's not always the solution. To understand how to solve this problem, we need to understand where we are in the product lifecycle, what tech stack you're using, what market you are serving, who your audience is (whether internal or external facing), and frankly, how volatile your market space is.

Let's talk about product lifecycle. If you're part of a startup with a team of generalists just busting their humps to get everything taken care of, you're typically at the beginning of a product lifecycle. You're trying to launch something new because you've seen a gap that your product can fill. It's ultra-important to be able to move fast, solve problems deliberately, and have impactful outcomes from day one.

You are building with the user in mind 100%, but there are downsides to this approach. This approach typically generates more technical debt as everyone is getting the job done, but not getting it done to the degree that will result in stability and longevity. There's already refactoring to redo, maybe different products to migrate to, or screens that aren't set up optimally that will have to be refactored—but they're done, they're in there, and they'll work for now.

A product that gets produced like this will gain early traction because you're solving users' problems and you haven't been bogged down by how you're doing it. This is how viral products are built. They're scrappy, quick, solve a specific problem, and the time to market is relatively short so they can take advantage of the market gap.

The Inevitable Transformation

But fast forward a couple of years into this solution. The user base is growing, revenue is growing, and some of those early shortcuts are starting to show up and cause pain. You cannot continue to work in this mode. It's time to focus on the next evolution of growth for your product and your company.

So what do you do? You identify your areas of need and hire specialists who can help solve those specific problems. Got an issue on your server-side stack? Let's hire backend developers or dedicated DevOps engineers. Got an issue with your UI? Let's hire specialized designers so they can help us revise our interface. Got issues with mobile integrations? Hire an expert in that field.

Slowly your scrappy startup generalist team is being refined and growing into a team of specialists, but now the management style has to change too. Things are getting a little more disjointed—not everybody's on the same page. So we naturally start looking for something to solve that problem.

And that's where we usually turn to process frameworks. Should we do Scrum or Kanban or something else? Some management decisions are made, and before you know it, you have a functioning cross-functional team with all the fanfare of rituals and ceremonies.

For the first time, you sit back and marvel at what you've created. You have a legitimate, cross-functional, "agile" team, and you can now talk about sprints and iterations.

The Knowledge Exodus

But in time, your founding members move on to either management or other opportunities. You end up with more churn in your staff, and in a couple of years, you maybe have a handful of people who remember the initial product approach and vision. Now, even at the project management level, you have new faces that lack the domain knowledge that your original founding members had.

This is where things start to slow down.

You start noticing misalignments. You start noticing a drop-off in adoption rates. Revenue may even start to suffer, but that's usually a lagging indicator. You start noticing that your leading indicators are screaming sirens and alarms.

You also find yourself walking the tightrope of keeping your team structured, versus falling into rigid process worship that can actually stifle the agility you're trying so hard to preserve.

Breaking the Cycle

For many teams and executive teams, such an evolution of their product, company, and teams may seem inevitable and unavoidable. But that doesn't have to be the case.

Remembering how to solve the problem—or figuring out how to plot a better path forward—has a lot to do with looking back to understand how you got there in the first place.

The solution isn't necessarily to abandon cross-functional teams or go back to the chaos of early startup days. Instead, it's about:

Preserving institutional knowledge: Document not just what you built, but why you built it that way. Capture the decision-making context that led to your early wins.

Maintaining startup DNA: Even as you add specialists, ensure they understand and can contribute beyond their narrow expertise when needed.

Right-sizing your process: Add structure incrementally and only when it solves a real problem, not because best practices dictate it.

Protecting direct user connection: Keep your team connected to actual users and their problems, not just metrics and frameworks.

The goal isn't to stay scrappy forever—it's to evolve intentionally rather than accidentally, preserving what made you successful while building the capabilities you need to scale.

At New Vector we work with teams of all sizes to help them scale efficiently while still preserving their DNA. Whether you're starting to scale up or you're a mid-market product team experiencing growth pains, we can help you stay scrappy and focused on doing what you do best... delivering products your users are obsessed with.