How to coordinate across teams without adding more meetings

1. Make dependencies visible

A dependency is anything one team needs from another to move forward. The problem is rarely that they exist; it’s that they live in private conversations. Write this quarter’s dependencies down somewhere shared:

• What’s needed, in one sentence (“legal review of the Acme master agreement”).
• Which team asks and which team delivers.
• When it’s really needed, and what happens if it’s late.
• A named person on each side, not “the legal team”.

2. One owner per dependency, not a committee

The most useful coordination rule is a boring one: everything that crosses departments has a single named owner and a date. Two owners means, in practice, nobody. The owner doesn’t have to do it all; they have to know where it stands and flag delays.

When ownership changes (holidays, shifting priorities), say so explicitly. “Marta has this now” saves weeks of messages into the void.

3. One place for blockers

Every team has its own tool: one uses Jira, another a board, another a spreadsheet. You don’t need to merge them. You do need one place where cross-team blockers are visible. A Slack channel with clear rules works:

• Only cross-team blockers get posted, not updates.
• Each post says what’s blocked, who can unblock it and since when.
• Whoever unblocks replies in the thread; whoever posted closes it.
• Anything blocked for more than a week goes to the head of operations.

4. Replace the status meeting with a weekly pulse

Coordination meetings tend to spend most of their time on updates people could have read. Try replacing yours with a written summary every Monday under three headings: what’s blocked between teams, what’s overdue, and risks for the next two weeks.

If something needs deciding after the summary, call a short meeting with only the people involved. The meeting stops being where problems are discovered and becomes where they get solved.

5. Cross-team meetings end in tasks

The meetings you keep should end with a list of agreements, each with an owner and a date, sent to everyone the same day. Without it, each department walks away with its own version of what was agreed. Short minutes written on the spot save the next “what did we say?” meeting. And when a decision changes later, update the same list rather than starting a new thread, so there is only ever one current version.

Common mistakes

• Monitoring individuals to find out what’s going on: it erodes trust and shows activity, not blockers.
• Forcing everyone onto the same task tool before fixing communication.
• Shared ownership (“product and sales are on it”).
• Asking each person for a weekly report: more work for the team and less time to unblock things.

How Tessa does it

Tessa does the collecting and the reminding. She takes notes in Google Meet (Zoom and Teams in beta), writes the minutes and creates each owner’s tasks. Requests made by email or Slack become tasks too. She then reminds owners of their commitments and tells the requester if something gets stuck.

Each week she prepares the department pulse: blockers, overdue work and risks, with a minimum of 5 people per group and no individual metrics. What Tessa reads in each person’s email stays private; the pulse only uses shared work.