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Building ‘zero to one’ products with cross-functional teams
Stack Overflow has long since been known as the developer’s online water cooler – a popular Q&A website holding a vast repository of code snippets, engineering discussions, and expert knowledge. But large language models, trained on public data, largely displace the need for developers to visit website forums. Facing a steep decline in comments, Stack Overflow has met an existential crisis.
While some recent moves aim to protect public IP from being scraped by LLMs, many still question the viability of Stack Overflow at large. Ellen Brandenberger, senior director of product innovation, is aware: “I wouldn’t be in this job if I didn’t know that question was being asked.”
To respond, Stack Overflow is actively experimenting and reinventing itself – and doing so quickly. To enable this, the cross-functional team model has proven especially useful for quickly building and validating untested AI products. In typical organizations, roles like engineering and operations often stay in their lanes. Cross-functional teams flip that, bringing together different areas of the business to collaborate on a single product.
That’s the model Stack Overflow uses for its new Knowledge Solutions product line, led by Brandenberger. Her teams, or “pods”, combine engineers, designers, researchers, and product managers, and partner closely with go-to-market to see the full product journey through.
But directing multidisciplinary teams doesn’t come without its leadership challenges. And collaboration, humility, goal-sharing, and staying grounded in the right metrics are the key to overcoming them.
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Respond to the market appropriately
Providing new products for the market is essential, but they don’t come out of thin air. They’re often a culmination of conversations with people in the field, analyst reports, traffic data, and live tests.
Before launching, Brandenberger’s team typically tests small releases with specific customer segments. This can help expose areas across multiple disciplines that need revisiting. For instance, this is a quick way to discover if the price of a product is too high or too low.
Stack Overflow also iterates based on live experiments with incomplete products. “We’ve been bringing some of these concepts directly into the market to perform market validation rather than building a full product, which is a new thing for Stack Overflow,” says Brandenberger. She treats this as formulating and testing a hypothesis before bringing it to full general availability.
“We’re working on products that didn’t exist two to three years ago and customer bases that are growing and changing quickly,” says Brandenberger. In this position, you can’t rely on standard product discovery and validation methods, like user questionnaires or data. “When you’re going from zero to one, you don’t have a lot of analytics.” When building completely novel products, teams must make educated guesses to guide the roadmap, and rely on usage data from live experiments to iterate in real time.
One such concept they’ve quickly brought into the market is enhancing Stack Overflow For Teams, which typically aggregates a company’s internal knowledge base, with the public corpus of technology information on Stack Overflow. The hypothesis is that this add-on could make agents and internal search tools significantly more effective, says Brandenberger.
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Loop everyone in on shared goal-setting
Brandenberger believes cross-functional pods are most effective when they have a say in shaping long-term strategy. Looping them in aligns goals, avoids duplication, and gives them autonomy to make smarter product decisions, says Brandenberger. While directors still own the roadmap and set yearly goals, teams help shape the process through hands-on strategy sessions.
“We engaged in a collaborative goal-setting process where the leadership team took a first pass at defining product outcomes… and the teams gave feedback on those,” she explains. Over the next two months, further reviews and iterations followed.
During this phase of setting objectives, Brandenberger likes to focus on the outcome of the product versus specific features. She adds, “I tend to start with ‘what’s our goal for the end user or customer?'” From there, managers and teams work backward to define their own goals and roadmaps.
Beyond goal-setting, Stack Overflow embraces a team-based ownership model for the entire product journey. Giving them a high degree of ownership and autonomy keeps feature development anchored in real user outcomes, helping product managers filter top-down executive asks, which may lack the full context of user needs or technical requirements.
“Those [executive] feature ideas are great, but sometimes they don’t lead to the desired outcome,” she says. Team autonomy has been a great filter for conversations with executives, Brandenberger adds, though she admits, “Not all product teams work that way, and it’s very dependent on the quality of your goals.”
Justify products with business metrics
Amid layoffs and shrinking IT budgets, enterprise tech strategies are becoming more scrutinized. This could be challenging for cross-functional teams. “Cross-functional teams are sometimes considered a cost center for the organization,” says Brandenberger. “A cross-functional team doesn’t grow linearly, like a traditional team.”
A traditional platform team might scale gradually, adding a single DevOps engineer or designer as needed. However, cross-functional teams often grow in “pods,” requiring a balanced mix of roles to maintain team function. This creates a higher upfront cost and requires more of a budget for growth. “If it’s a couple million dollars to add a team, it’s a bigger ask,” says Brandenberger. “The bar is a lot higher.”
This reality makes it crucial for directors of cross-functional teams to continually justify their actions. To do so, Brandenberger encourages product leaders to prove business value: either by driving revenue or reducing costs through efficiency.
She recommends identifying indicators of product use that drive long-term outcomes. This could include tracking average logins per week: a high average indicates users see value in the product and want to use it for the long haul, benefiting retention, and, ultimately, annual recurring revenue.
“While product teams shouldn’t be solely responsible for revenue or cost savings, without that connection [to business value], product leaders fail their organizations,” She says.
Cross-functional ≠ crossed wires
Cross-functional teams can seem counterintuitive. “There’s a perception that cross-functional teams can be slow-moving, since you need consensus to make a decision, and that leads to slow rates of success,” says Brandenberger. “I generally think that’s a branding problem for product teams, and not how they operate for the most part.”
The cross-functional approach can bring countless benefits, but requires keen oversight. For Brandenberger, when cross-functional team leaders are held accountable for the product journey and business growth, their mindset shifts from iterating features to building toward an extended roadmap – a meaningful transition toward business alignment.
Having shared goals is critical to ensure teams aren’t in conflict or duplicating each other’s work, says Brandenberger. Other than that, all the standard product management tenets apply: identify segments for growth, leverage your existing assets, perform market research, validate your hypothesis in the real world, and utilize your network of connections.
And finally, that timeless principle: Bring in engineering early and often. “Everyone says that, but really it’s a first principle that’s always good.” The same applies to designers or any other role in a collaborative, cross-functional team.
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Keeping in stride with AI
For a model like Stack Overflow, which has long relied on direct website traffic, AI presents a real threat to the business. Rather than resist change, Stack Overflow is using AI as a tool for reinvention and innovation. And in this new era, new ways of working, like cross-functional pods and high team autonomy, are becoming important lifelines to test and validate new approaches and quickly adapt to a reshaped developer landscape.
