If you could remove cross-functional tension from your organisation entirely, would you? Most people at this June's session wouldn't. Tension brings in perspectives that wouldn't otherwise surface. Without it, you move faster, but you risk ending up with something predictable. The harder part is knowing what to do when you're in the middle of it.
We explored this at tiket.com across two parts: an open discussion with the room, followed by a Q&A with Yoel Sumitro and Mohamad Ario Adimas.
"Tension on its own isn't necessarily the problem. Not resolving it healthily is."
And when a disagreement is heading for a public forum where people feel the need to save face, resolve it privately beforehand, one conversation at a time. The Japanese call this nemawashi: meetings before the meeting.
What we took away
How tension shows up
- •Rogue stakeholders going off-script quietly, or hiring external voices to override internal pushback
- •Teams defaulting to excuses not to do something instead of working through it
- •Communication fatigue: when past conversations go nowhere, people stop having them altogether. Decisions stall, topics get avoided, and everything escalates to leadership by default
Why it happens
- •Different functions optimise for different, and at times conflicting, things
- •Role ambiguity leaves people unclear on who decides what
- •Leadership misalignment at the top filters straight down. When the CEO sides with PMs and the CTO sides with engineers, middle management ends up absorbing the conflict
- •And sometimes, it's just pride
What tension does
- •Tension surfaces different perspectives, and different perspectives can lead to novel solutions
- •The absence of tension lets a team move fast, but there's a risk of ending up with something predictable
- •Tension on its own isn't necessarily the problem. Not resolving it healthily is. At its worst, colleagues start to feel like enemies within the same company
How to navigate tension as a team
- •Shared understanding of who you're building for builds alignment and helps resolve tension faster than process does
- •Proactively pull in other functions before decisions are made, not after. Consult ops who work closest to the end users for their insights. Have tech leads review designs before development begins
- •When there are too many people involved in a project, RACI helps clarify boundaries: the PM decides what to build, engineers decide how
- •When subjective disagreements stall, let data decide: create two alternatives and test them
- •Distinguish early between the ideal version and the MVP and acknowledge the two versions with everyone
- •One lens for cutting through cross-functional tension in building a product: "Can we actually sell it?" If no, that's a signal worth taking seriously
How to navigate tension personally
- •Power can resolve tension quickly, either by clearing up ambiguity or forcing a decision. Whether that's healthy depends entirely on the person wielding it
- •When you're not in power, practise "disagree and commit": make your stance known, then do the job anyway
- •Simply being nice can be exhausting and inefficient. Driving results still matters, and it's often what leaders actually care about
- •People generally enter discussions wearing their own perspectives. Actively try to switch perspectives and understand where other people are coming from
- •Surfacing a disagreement in a public forum where people feel the need to save face can make people feel attacked and become defensive, overall increasing tension. Resolve it privately beforehand, one conversation at a time (the Japanese call this nemawashi: meetings before the meeting)