On MultiDisciplinary Teams

"To work through the whole business stack at high velocity and not explode, you need a cross-functional workflow delivered through truly multi-disciplinary teams." Tim Malbon

One of the interesting aspects that Tim talked about in his post on the solution to Design Thinking (which was shortlisted for Post of the Month) is the composition of the multidisciplinary teams at Made By Many. The ‘atomic unit’ of team, says Tim, brings together three core disciplines: Strategy, Design and Technology. In their case strategy is Product Management (incorporating insights, Agile and SCRUM, business and product strategy), design is Product Design (blending interaction and service design 'with a systems design bent'), and technology is Product Engineering (spanning front and back-end development, DevOps, QA, tech strategy).

This triumvirate of skills areas is brought together to work on a problem at every stage of an engagement but no single practice area leads. Instead, each area extends the capabilities of the other ('it's a force multiplier…We’ve created a machine that renders insights and ideas into code in almost-real-time on a continuous and self-correcting basis').

I've talked to plenty of clients before now about the combination of these three capability areas. But it's also to interesting to consider the impact of a similar aggregation of capability areas at an individual level. A recurring theme throughout Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg's book How Google Works, for example, is the idea of 'Smart Creatives'. These, say the authors, are the people that can have the biggest potential impact within organisations, and the staff who combine technical knowledge, business expertise and creativity. It seems that this troika of skills areas has the potential to be transformational at not just a team level, but at an individual and an organisational level as well.