Cross-functional Peak Moment?

Jeremy Mulder

What is your peak moment working cross-functionally as a CS practitioner? 
Which colleagues/functions (marketing, product, customer, support, engineering, leadership, etc) were involved in that peak?

Andreas Knoefel

How about when one of my customers won a industry analytics firm's innovation award.

In tight collaboration with the VP of Marketing, I harvested the fruit of hard labor by my team from complex requirements to a lengthy and bumpy deployment and onboarding process to the celebration of the customer's CIO. Solution briefs, references and a customer showcase for Sales and Marketing, as well as a hefty cross-sell followed.

Jeremy Mulder

@Andreas Knoefel Love it! Thanks for sharing.

My cross-functional peak moment: switching conference rooms when nearly all of my colleagues showed up for an open-invite "Product Pride" meeting. It became an All Hands.

Meeting Agenda:

• Are you proud of our product? Why?
• A customer perspective: relationship pride.

[internal portion of the meeting]
Are you proud of our product (1-10)? Open-ended: list reasons why on sticky notes.
We plotted responses/sticky notes on the wall sized customer journey.  Y-axis: +/- Pride.
I asked my colleagues "What stands out to you?" and "What themes do you see?"
We grouped patterns and named them.

[customers join meeting]
We streamed a few customers live to share if they were proud of their relationship with us – where are things going well and where are there opportunities?
[customers leave meeting]

[Internal meeting continues]
Given what you just heard (desired outcomes, expectations, face-plants, trust, experience, value, intent to renew, etc) are you proud of the product? Why?
New set of different colored sticky notes plotted on the wall sized customer journey.

[pause]
Invitation to compare the sets of different colored sticky notes
"What stands out to you?" and "What themes do you see?"
Given what we are seeing, should we take action? On what? Why? Who benefits?"

We created a list of areas to address. The group picked one to focus on first.
Asked colleagues to opt-in to working on the project.
Cross-functional pod formed to own the project.

After the meeting, on engineer summed up the experience: "No one has ever asked me if I am proud of what we have built. And I have wondered, but I have never asked the same of my teammates... or the customers. That was eye opening. This is the most aligned I've ever felt in a work environment. I feel excited to do my part to help us reach our mission."

David Ellin

My best cross-functional experience came when I headed Customer Success for company that provided e-Commerce software and services. We always did "peak" planning (for the holiday season) during summer but every department did their own siloed planning. I created a series of cross-functional peak planning meetings that grew in interest with every meeting. We had our best peak holiday season in the company's history with the fewest amount of technology and service issues. I was asked by the CEO to make the cross-functional peak planning process an annual event and also do it for other peak eCommerce seasons (IE: Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, etc.).

The process highlighted to value of cross-functional brain storming and accountability (to one another).

Melanie Flores

This is inspiring. Brilliant marriage of visuals (use of different colors of sticky notes to help people spot patterns) and emotion. I can see this strategy being transferrable to many different situations that require group introspection.