Mentoring and skill sharing across disciplines
Advanced agile teams encourage deliberate skill sharing and mentoring across product, design, and development roles. This creates T-shaped professionals who have depth in their specialty while building knowledge across related disciplines. Cross-functional mentoring pairs team members from different disciplines for regular knowledge exchange. A designer might teach a developer about user experience principles while learning about technical constraints.
Product managers learn design thinking from designers while sharing product strategy approaches. Skill-sharing takes many forms, including rotation programs where team members temporarily work in adjacent roles, cross-training workshops led by specialists for their colleagues, and intentional pairing on tasks that cross discipline boundaries.
These practices speed up professional growth, but most importantly, they build empathy and respect across the traditional boundaries that often separate product, design, and development teams.
