How to Build Cross-Functional Empathy When You’re Too Big to Fit in a Room and Don’t Need Another Meeting

Make things engaging and let the people closest to the work drive it

Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash

When I was at Mailchimp, I started a bi-monthly cross-functional all-hands event. I was a co-producer of the event along with our Sr. Director of Engineering.

It sounds like just a meeting. It wasn’t. It was a production AND a program to generate cross-functional empathy for our customers and our teams.

The beginning

We started with four observations after listening to our product teams:

• They didn’t feel connected to the broader community
• They were not clear on what was important to leaders
• They rarely heard about customer impact after they shipped
• They were no aware of all the projects that were happening

Then we formulated a hypothesis:

• We believed that if we created a forum where all cross-functional teams could come together and share stories that were aligned to certain themes, then we would drive greater empathy for each other and our customers.