As organizations grow, they face increasing complexity in their operations. Companies turn to specialized tools to help scale their activities efficiently. For example:
- Sales teams rely on CRM platforms to track leads, manage pipelines, and drive revenue growth
- HR teams use recruitment and employee management systems (HRIS) to streamline hiring and maintain compliance
- Finance departments leverage accounting software to handle budgets, invoicing, and reporting
- Support teams and helpdesks adopt ticketing systems to manage customer inquiries, prioritize issues, and ensure timely resolutions
While individual functions like sales, HR, finance, or support benefit from specialized tools to manage and scale their activities, cross-team collaboration often lacks a clear owner and structure. This is the natural result of how organizations are set up.
Challenges of cross-team collaboration #
In a fast-paced B2B SaaS environment, people face pressure to meet demanding timelines for product launches or market expansions, sometimes causing them to deprioritize detailed process implementation in favor of quick wins.
However, this same pressure often amplifies the need for structured collaboration: without robust processes, teams risk dropped handoffs, inconsistent customer experiences, and communication breakdowns – issues that can ultimately slow them down more than a well-balanced approach to flexibility and structure.
This lack of ownership often leaves cross-team collaboration in a state of neglect:
- No one feels directly responsible for improving it. Each team assumes others will handle coordination.
- Accountability is fragmented. Because collaboration doesn’t belong to one team, no one drives efforts to make it efficient or structured
- Subject matter experts are tasked with managing cross-team alignment, even though this requires skills in process and change management that are outside their core expertise
- High performers, who understand how the organization works best, end up taking on coordination duties. This pulls them away from high-value work, diminishing their impact on the business
The absence of ownership is compounded by the lack of effective cross-team frameworks. While teams do have platforms tailored to their own functions, collaborative processes are often mapped out in generic tools like Miro, Confluence, or Google Docs. These tools are widely used and easy to adopt, which can help reduce training overhead.
However, as organizations scale and cross-team collaboration grows more complex, “generic” tooling often does not provide the structure or best-practice guidance necessary for consistent, repeatable processes. Many people also lack the specialized know-how to design and maintain robust workflows on their own, causing collaboration to remain informal and ad hoc, running the risk of critical details being lost and miscommunication taking place in crucial steps of projects.
What do organizations need to succeed in cross-team collaboration? #
For organizations to overcome these challenges, they need two key elements:
- A clear framework for accountability. Even if collaboration involves multiple teams, there must be a way to assign ownership for structuring and maintaining the process.
- Specialized tools for cross-team workflows. Generic tools lack the features needed to manage inputs, outputs, timing, and responsibilities across functions effectively.
This is why we built ProcessPlot. By providing a dedicated platform for mapping, executing, and analyzing collaborative processes, it gives organizations the structure and ownership they need to make cross-team collaboration work as seamlessly as individual team functions.
