After working with a rare, high-performing product team, Dave Baines and Sam Quayle were inspired to bottle that experience and build the product development consultancy, Hyperact. Dave had been tackling misalignment between cross-functional teams — a common challenge for growing organizations — for over 15 years before founding Hyperact, and knew that while many consultancies over-index on either engineering-driven solutions or design-heavy approaches, his company would instead focus on eliminating silos and helping teams work more effectively together.
Today, Hyperact embeds directly within client teams and uses powerful Miro templates to refine product strategies, team structure, and development processes — all essential to achieving cross-functional alignment.
Cross-team alignment is challenging in scaling agile teams
Misalignment is one of the biggest barriers to speed and efficiency when organizations are scaling — and, when organizations are slow to innovate, they risk falling behind market trends, customer needs, and their competition.
Misalignment is even more likely when multiple teams — often working asynchronously — must collaborate across different functions and priorities. Dave explains, “In small teams, alignment happens naturally through direct conversations, but this begins to break down at scale.”
Three key challenges contribute to this misalignment:
Too many priorities
As organizations grow, so do the number of concurrent initiatives they’re engaged with. Work starts overlapping, dependencies increase, and teams struggle to agree on what truly matters. Without clear coordination, each team risks duplicating its efforts or working at cross-purposes with other stakeholders.
Centralized decision-making
As headcount grows, organizations can run into two issues: leadership may continue to make decisions without being fully in tune with the day-to-day processes or they may continue to require approval for every decision, which creates bottlenecks and inertia for teams. The key is to set the teams up for success by providing strategic context and supporting them to make as many of the decisions as possible.
Poor organizational design
As organizations scale, lines of communication increase, ways of working become less standardized, and it can become much harder to ensure that teams have everything they need to make progress.
Simply working harder won’t overcome these alignment challenges. To drive forward and achieve success, scaling organizations need structured collaboration tools that reinforce alignment without adding friction. Below are four templates to help.
4 templates to unlock cross-team alignment
Dave adopted Miro in March 2020 as the first Covid lockdowns set in, and remote work became a necessity. He found that Miro instantly opened up a greater scale of collaboration.
“I remember seeing the amazement on some participants’ faces as they saw dozens of cursors whipping up diagrams in seconds,” Dave says.
Miro eliminates the need for lengthy write-ups and serves as a shared knowledge base. Combined with strong facilitation and tools like dot voting, Miro enabled Hyperact and its client teams to diverge and explore ideas and then quickly converge on what matters most.
To help their clients achieve cross-team collaboration as they scale, Hyperact developed four Miro templates. Check them out below.
Product Team Canvas
The Product Team Canvas distills everything a team needs to stay aligned — priorities, user insights, and ways of working — into a single, accessible artifact that passively builds cross-team alignment.
“I’ve used this in every team I’ve worked with over the last five to ten years,” says Dave.
Beyond helping teams stay focused, it also helps new hires quickly get up to speed. “It’s rare for anyone to receive that level of business context so early on,” Dave says.
Assumption Map
The Assumption Map is essential for kicking off complex initiatives so teams can align on risks, concerns, and priorities from the start.
“It’s my go-to for when many stakeholders are involved,” says Dave. “It’s an open, accessible way for everyone to get everything out of their heads and align on language assumptions, risks, and critically, the way forward.”
By framing uncertainties as assumptions, teams can collectively prioritize what needs validation, and create a shared backlog that multiple teams can rally around. “It’s the best tool we have for driving alignment across teams from day one,” Dave says.
Story Mapping
The Story Mapping template builds on the popular concepts discussed in User Story Mapping, by Jeff Patton. “We wanted to make story mapping as simple and accessible as possible,” says Dave.
Hyperact’s approach helps teams build a shared understanding of the product, clarify what’s essential, and break work into manageable slices. It makes prioritization intuitive — focusing on what meets user needs, surfacing dependencies, and shaping how teams collaborate — without unnecessary complexity.
Service Blueprint
As a broader, systems-thinking approach, the Service Blueprint template focuses closely on how users interact with a product. The framework maps the entire end-to-end process, including each behind-the-scenes step that impacts delivery.
“Some of the biggest opportunities aren’t at the usual customer touchpoints but in the hidden operational layers where the real challenges and wins lie,” says Dave.
Dave used this approach when working with car retailer Cinch to align many teams around a single blueprint in Miro. By doing so, they created a shared reference point for the whole organization, be it product engineering, operations, or customer support. Dave adds, “We even held regular sessions where product managers walked through their areas. Just that ceremony alone was transformational.”
Clarity, autonomy, and tools are key to cross-functional success
Cross-team collaboration thrives when everyone understands the bigger picture and has what they need to move forward. “A team can have the best direction in the world, but if they don’t have the right tools or the ability to make decisions quickly, progress will stall,” says Dave. One way to reinforce strategic clarity is by using a Decision Stack — a light framework that helps teams understand where they’re heading, why it matters, and how to make aligned decisions.
“You don’t need a perfect strategy — just a simple, structured way for teams to connect their work to the bigger picture.”
Using cross-functional collaboration as a foundational pillar for successful innovation is a value that Hyperact and Miro share. High-performing teams don’t wait for perfect conditions; they align, iterate, and push forward together. When collaboration is effortless, innovation becomes inevitable.
