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Málaga Leadership Offsite

Cross-Functional Ways of Working

How do we work together to get there?

Day 2 — 9:15
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The Problem
We grew 32% last year. How we work didn't scale with us.
Our async-first model breaks down at cross-functional boundaries
We set six performance gates and can't measure two of them
No process at Prerender is documented well enough for someone else to follow
How We Communicate
How We Plan & Track
How We Learn & Decide
These are three conversations. Each one gets 25 minutes.

How We Communicate

If you've been here a while:

Think of a time in the last 3 months when communication broke down between teams. What happened?

If you're new:

What's something that confused you or felt harder than it should be?

How We Communicate

"The Netlify integration that came back to bite us"

A known defect was consciously de-prioritized. It resurfaced and had to be fixed — late. The resolution was buried in a Slack thread that partnerships and product/engineering didn't see. The handoff from partnerships to product to engineering had no formal path.

"If I had a penny for every time someone said 'didn't you see it in Slack?'"

There's too much noise in Slack burying important signal. Some people are more plugged-in than others. Critical updates get lost in the same channels as casual conversation.

Where is the handoff between GTM and R&D most fragile?
What should go in Slack vs. Notion vs. a meeting?
How do we make sure critical updates aren't buried?

What are we committing to on communication?

How We Plan & Track

If you've been here a while:

Think of a time when a plan changed, a priority shifted, or something broke because of an unmanaged change.

If you're new:

What surprised you about how plans and priorities work (or don't work) here?

How We Plan & Track

"Engineering OKRs that nobody tracked"

The engineering team had OKRs. They weren't bought in. They didn't track toward them. The work was getting done — but disconnected from the goals we set. The OKRs became a reporting artifact, not a planning tool.

"Code changes that silently break everything downstream"

Countless changes in code that break the HubSpot integration, which then breaks onboarding automations. User roles stop syncing. Nobody notices until someone looks for something and it isn't there. Same story with Mixpanel — tracking breaks and we don't realize it for weeks.

What would make OKRs useful instead of performative?
Who should own the change management process for code that touches integrations?
How do we prevent silent breakage across systems?

What are we committing to on planning & tracking?

How We Learn & Decide

If you've been here a while:

Think of a time when you needed data to make a decision and it wasn't there, or research happened in one team but didn't reach you.

If you're new:

What information have you wished you had access to?

How We Learn & Decide

"The pricing project email that went to the wrong customers"

We communicated pricing changes to the wrong customer segments because HubSpot didn't have the data we needed. The CRM was missing key fields that should have been there. We couldn't segment properly, so the wrong people got the wrong message. The Mixpanel integration is a patch — the real problem is nobody has defined what data the CRM needs.

"Research happens everywhere. Insights reach nobody."

Product does bot behavior research. Marketing does competitive research. Engineering discovers things in production data. None of it flows between teams. We're sitting on unique data from our position between machines and sites — and we're not using it to build category authority or inform decisions.

What data should the CRM have that it doesn't?
Who should own a company-wide research practice?
How do we turn internal research into external thought leadership?

What are we committing to on learning & decisions?

Each person: state one commitment from this session.