Context Overview
Functional teams hold expertise that colleagues in other areas need to understand, yet established boundaries can limit both individual growth and solutions to shared problems.
The Buddy Program began in Commercial Excellence and was later extended to global cross-functional work. It paired colleagues around interests outside their own roles and brought small teams together on product and commercial challenges they could not address as effectively alone.
With facilitated matching, agile project support and leadership review, participants exchanged skills while producing proposals for tangible improvements. Across three annual cycles, the programme formed approximately 45 buddy pairs; separate cross-functional improvement work brought together around six to seven groups each year.
Stakeholders
Commercial Excellence and leaders of participating functions; colleagues matched as buddy pairs; global cross-functional product-improvement groups; agile coach and facilitators; senior leaders reviewing selected proposals.
Deployment
- Map capabilities and interests. Map the core skills and work of participating functions, then collect the topics and capabilities individuals want to explore beyond their own team.
- Match colleagues around shared work. Introduce colleagues from different functions, facilitate an initial discussion of their interests and help each pair select one or two projects with a common purpose and a tangible output.
- Support project delivery. Provide an agile project framework at kickoff and dedicated coaching to support collaboration, communication, solution design and progress reviews.
- Connect teams around improvement challenges. Facilitate separate global, cross-functional groups of four to six people to develop solutions to defined product and customer challenges, including more user-friendly product features, customer-relevant commercial programmes and go-to-market improvements for launches.
- Share and select solutions. Hold a presentation event for the project outputs; use silent voting to identify proposals perceived as most impactful, then support participants in developing selected proposals for presentation to senior organisational leaders.
Metrics & Results
- Around 12–15 buddy pairs were formed per year, approximately 45 pairs across three annual programme cycles.
- Approximately six to seven separate cross-functional product-improvement groups of four to six people were formed annually.
- Programme feedback was around 86 on the reported NPS measure.
- 67% of participants reported acquiring new competencies they could continue to develop; 95% said they had learned something new about the organisation or colleagues’ work.
- Participants developed and presented cross-functional proposals addressing product usability, customer needs and go-to-market processes; proposals shortlisted through silent voting were further developed for senior leadership review.
Competencies, Frameworks and Tools
Cross-functional talent development; capability and interest mapping; buddy matching; peer learning and knowledge transfer; agile project facilitation and coaching; global team collaboration; product and commercial improvement ideation; participant feedback and leadership engagement.
Functional capability and interest mapping; buddy-matching and facilitated kickoff; agile solution-design framework and dedicated coaching; project progress reviews; presentation event and silent voting for proposal selection.