You want to do a cross-team or inter-team project. Cool. Let’s talk about how to do it without watching the whole thing fall apart.
First things first—you need a clear owner on your team. Not just a general “our team will take care of that.” Someone needs to take accountability for your side of the work. Otherwise, things get dropped fast.
Next up: someone needs to be in charge of the overall project. This is where I see so many projects go sideways. People assume “the teams will just coordinate.” Nope. That’s how you end up with a bunch of half-finished work and zero accountability.
The project lead could be a tech lead, manager, program manager—doesn’t matter. But someone has to be the person thinking about the full picture, end to end. Their job is to drive the project forward, across all teams involved.
If I’m running the project, that means I’ve got to go outside my comfort zone. I’m working with other managers, juggling priorities across teams, and making sure everyone has bandwidth and buy-in.
Tracking the work? That’s always tricky. You need a way to get tasks from different teams into a shared view. I’ve tried dedicated cross-team boards. I’ve tried shared epics with tasks pulled into each team’s sprint board. Honestly, none of it is perfect—but what’s worked best is this:
- Keep the main epic in a shared project or general engineering space.
- Break down the epic into tasks.
- Assign those tasks into the sprint board of the team actually doing the work.
It takes effort, and someone has to keep things from drifting. If you’ve found a better system, seriously—tell me.
Communication is where this lives or dies. I usually set up a dedicated Slack channel just for the project. Then I try to get async updates daily or every other day. Even with good tooling, it’s too easy for people to disappear into their own team’s work if you’re not nudging the project forward.
And if something’s going off the rails? Call a meeting immediately. Don’t let it stew. You need to realign expectations fast before it becomes a bigger mess.
The truth is, every team has its own goals, processes, and pace. Cross-team work cuts across all of that. So unless someone is pushing things forward—and keeping everyone connected—it’s just not going to happen.
But if you:
- Assign real owners
- Set up shared visibility
- Communicate consistently
- And drive the project forward like it matters…
Then yeah, you can actually pull it off.
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