The idea of the cross-functional team gets a lot of attention in the Agile and Scrum media. And it is a great idea.

As the thinking goes, if a piece of functionality requires, say, both front-end and back-end work, it’s easier to have all that work being done on one team, rather than trying to coordinate across two (or more) teams. And this is often true.

But it can, and often is, taken too far.

Remember the reason for cross-functional teams: To eliminate bottlenecks to providing customer value.

If you depend on some other team for a piece of functionality, but they are not a bottleneck, then you will gain nothing by embedding them within your team—and may lose a lot!