Breaking Down Silos: How Aligned Teams Ship Faster
Every tech leader has seen it: A “high-priority” feature takes weeks (months!) longer than expected, not because the work was hard, but because of misalignment between product, engineering, and delivery.
- The root cause? Teams optimized for local efficiency, not system-wide flow.
When product defines requirements in isolation, engineering builds without early feedback, and delivery is brought in too late, delays and rework are inevitable. But the best teams don’t just collaborate more— they redesign their workflow to eliminate handoffs entirely.
Here’s how they do it.
The Cost of Invisible Handoffs
Research from the DevOps Reports shows that high-performing teams spend more time on cross-functional collaboration than their peers. The 2-pizza team allegory nods towards this. Why? Because handoffs create hidden delays, miscommunication and rework:
The “Almost Done” Trap
A product team once celebrated a feature being “dev complete”—only to discover it needed a full backend refactor to deploy. Result: 3 weeks of unexpected delays. Lesson: “Done” means nothing if engineering and delivery aren’t aligned from the start.
The Feedback Black Hole
A fintech team built a complex reporting tool exactly to spec -but users rejected it because the UX wasn’t tested early. Lesson: Validation shouldn’t wait for a “finished” product.
3 Ways High-Performing Teams Work Differently
1. Shared Outcomes, Not Silos
Instead of measuring output (e.g., “features shipped”), the best teams focus on outcomes (e.g., “reduced customer onboarding time”).
What works:
Joint goal-setting workshops where product, engineering, and delivery define success together. Especially when success can be tied back up to meaningful numbers to the rest of the business. This presupposes leadership have taken the time to give outo clear measurable accountabilities.
Some of my most successful projects have been when it has been possible to attach clear financial value to the work and then demonstrate it was achieved (along with any false hypothesis that failed)
Visualizing work end-to-end (e.g., a Kanban board spanning all teams).
2. Continuous Alignment > Big Handoffs
High-performing teams replace phased workflows with continuous collaboration:
What works:
Engineering + product pairing: One team brought PMs into sprint planning and demos, cutting misalignment by 60%. A recent phrase is product engineering. Really adopting Delivery Engineering should be an obvious extension and step.
QA from Day 1: QA is often considered as a testing team - why not simply define the tests that woudl define something as sucessful up front? Doingn so provides everyone with the focus of knowing what the goal is - and when to stop and move onto the next piece of work.
3. Optimize for Flow, Not Utilization
Teams that measure throughput (time from idea to customer) outperform those fixated on individual productivity. It is highly undesirable to do new work whilst old work is piling up. It is orders of magnitude better to do nothing, better yet do another job to help with the queue of work!
What works:
Weekly flow reviews to spot bottlenecks (e.g., “Why do features stall in QA?"). Cumulative flow diagrams. Hopwever it is necessary to do this cross team and cross silo. This is why having one kanban board for all is desirable.
A lean manufacturing exercise is to designate a role to identifying 2-3 problems to fix per week - the whole then addresses these.
Limiting work-in-progress to prevent overload at constraints.
Where Teams Get Stuck (And How to Unblock Them)
Even with the right principles, shifting from silos to flow is hard. Common pitfalls:
Engineers fear “endless meetings.” - stop ‘meetings’
→ Fix: Replace status updates with structured working sessions (e.g., 30-minute design spikes) with specified outcomes
Product hesitates to “interrupt” engineering.
→ Fix: Embed a PM in standups for real-time feedback. Design in prioritisation, when new information arives that invalidates decisions an interruption is more desirable than wasted time. ‘Interruptions’ are often symptomatic of product not having assembled available information prior to commitment - it is a sympton of a quality problem.
Delivery is brought in too late.
→ Fix: Include ops in early architecture reviews. When the release process is not understood (or influenced by needs of those to the left) we get insanity of agile feeding into waterfall - or worse a waterfal based service->product flow into an agile angineering->qa->delivery chain.
In workshops we’ve run, teams that address these blockers see 20–40% faster cycle times within weeks.
The Bottom Line
- Speed isn’t about working harder—it’s about working together differently. The best tech leaders:
- Measure system outcomes, not team outputs.
- Replace handoffs with continuous collaboration.
- Spot bottlenecks before they become crises.
- Where does your team struggle most?
Key Takeaways:
- Handoffs create delays; continuous alignment prevents them.
- Joint goal-setting and flow visualization are game-changers.
- Small process tweaks (like embedded QA) yield big results.