Cross-Functional Teams That Grok It: The Collective Empathic Understanding of Product Requirements

Software development has become increasingly software 'product' development, without the authoritative 'customer' stakeholder role that many requirements engineering processes assume exists in some form. Many progressive software product companies today are empowering cross-functional product teams to own their product – to collectively understand the product context, the true product needs, and manage its on-going evolution. Some teams do this better than others and neither established requirements elicitation and validation processes nor conventional team leadership practices explain the reasons for the differences. This research inquires into how cross-functional product teams, as a collective, create and nurture a shared mental model that accurately represents the external product domain and its realities. The research also examines how teams use that collective understanding to shape development plans, internal and external communications, new team member onboarding, etc. The aim of this research is to develop substantive theory that describes how self-directed, cross-functional product development teams take an empathic-based approach to discovering, understanding, and maintaining a deep, collective understanding of the domain and true product needs. This theory will support software product development leaders in creating rich-er conditions for teams to grok.