From Handoffs to Ownership: Why Service-Aligned Teams Deliver Faster

Most companies claim to be “breaking down silos,” yet they continue structuring teams in a way that guarantees slow delivery, competing priorities, and endless handovers. The issue? They are optimising for cost, not value.

Traditional team structures focus on horizontal silos, grouping people by function (backend, frontend, QA, operations, etc.). Each team does their part and then hands over the work to another group. While this might seem efficient on paper, in reality, it creates:

✔ Delays from waiting on other teams to complete work

✔ Loss of context as handovers mean details get lost

✔ Competing priorities as teams optimise for their own KPIs, not the broader goal

Why Handovers Are Slowing You Down

Think about how most companies run projects:

• Product writes a feature spec and hands it over to Design.

• Design mocks something up and passes it to Engineering.

• Engineering builds it and throws it over to QA.

• QA tests it and moves it to Operations.

• Operations runs it and deals with the fallout when something breaks.

At every step, teams are waiting, re-explaining, or reprioritising. Instead of working together to solve a problem, each team focuses only on their piece. This handover-driven model is why projects stall, teams feel disconnected, and businesses struggle to move quickly.

The alternative? Service-aligned teams. Instead of structuring teams around capabilities, structure them around a service, product, or customer outcome, giving them full ownership from start to finish.

Service-Aligned Teams: Owning the Outcome, Not Just the Task

A service-aligned team is cross-functional and built around delivering a specific outcome, not just completing tasks. It contains all the necessary skills, including engineering, design, QA, operations, and even business stakeholders, so there is no need for external dependencies to move forward.

What This Looks Like in Practice

I saw this in action when working with a government agency on a major infrastructure migration. The challenge? Moving servers from a physical data centre, which was facing a week-long outage, to virtual servers that could move between two data centres using virtualisation technology.

A traditional approach would have meant:

• The network team figuring out connectivity first.

• The server team setting up the infrastructure later.

• The database team waiting for the servers.

• The developers waiting for the database.

• The business teams only getting involved when something failed.

Instead, we took a service-aligned approach:

• We pulled together one team with all the required skills, including network engineers, server admins, database specialists, developers, testers, and business support.

• Everyone worked together in real time rather than waiting for handovers.

• The goal was clear: Ensure service continuity for customers, not just complete individual tasks.

This task force solved the problem faster, with fewer issues and less confusion. More importantly, it changed how the organisation thought about structuring teams for future initiatives.

Why Most Companies Get This Wrong

Many organisations try to fix silos but make critical mistakes:

❌ They still leave out key skills, meaning teams still rely on external approvals and bottlenecks.

❌ They keep matrix management in place, meaning employees report to multiple leads with competing priorities, killing autonomy.

❌ They measure success at the function level instead of looking at how well the entire service is delivered.

If your “cross-functional team” still needs multiple approvals, separate budgeting, or different reporting structures, it is not truly service-aligned.

Where to Start: One Simple Change

💡 Get everyone in the same room to solve a problem, not just the leads.

When you bring all necessary skills together and let the doers (not just the managers) work directly with each other, you will quickly see why vertical silos, aligned to a product or service, outperform horizontal ones that are aligned to functions.

✔ Focus on value first, cost second. Companies that optimise for cost end up slowing down, while those that focus on value unlock faster delivery and better outcomes.

Final Thoughts & Discussion

Too many organisations try to “break silos” by shifting reporting lines or tweaking processes. But real cross-team collaboration happens when you stop optimising for efficiency and start optimising for outcomes.

💡 How does your company structure teams, around functions or services? Have you seen service-aligned teams work in practice? Drop your thoughts below! 👇