A multidisciplinary team brings together people from different areas and backgrounds to work together on an innovation challenge, preventing the solution from being designed from a single perspective. In this article, we tell you how to compose them in practice: size, mix of profiles, and roles within the session.
Whatever methodological framework you use, if the goal is to design or redesign services, it is essential to generate collaborative work dynamics with multidisciplinary teams. The reason is simple: each profile detects different problems and opportunities. A designer notices experience frictions that a business analyst doesn't see, and vice versa. When the challenge is worked on only with technical profiles, or only with commercial profiles, the resulting ideas tend to repeat the same type of solution.
In our workshops, the quality of the ideas generated during divergent thinking significantly increases when the table mixes areas, even if that implies a slower initial learning curve to level concepts.
Our recommendation, validated in service design and lean startup workshops, is that each team should have between 3 and 6 members. With fewer than 3 people, the team lacks the minimum diversity of profiles and becomes overloaded in the execution phase (researching, prototyping, and presenting). With more than 6, the conversation fragments, it's difficult for everyone to participate in each exercise, and the facilitator loses visibility of what's happening at the table.
If your total group exceeds 6 people per challenge, the solution is not to form one large team but to divide into two teams that work on the same problem in parallel and compare results at the end.
If the design challenge is related to customer experience, ensure that each team includes people who are in direct contact with the customer (front office), along with representatives from back office areas. In practice, this translates into combinations such as:
| Profile | Contribution |
|---|
| Front office (sales, customer service, support) | Direct knowledge of real customer frictions and questions |
| Back office (operations, finance, technology) | Vision of feasibility, costs, and internal restrictions |
| Design / UX | Translation of findings into flows, prototypes, and visual language |
| Business / Product | Focus on the business problem and prioritization |
It is not necessary to have all four profiles at each table; with at least one front office and one back office, the risk of designing a solution that does not fit the actual operation is already reduced.
Form the teams before the workshop begins, not in the room. If you let people group freely, they tend to sit with their peers from the same team or area, replicating the homogeneity you want to avoid. A simple method we use is to ask each participant, upon registration, for their area and their level of contact with the end customer, and with that information, we arrange the distribution before day 1.
This is especially relevant if the workshop follows the agenda of a 2-day innovation workshop, where the definitive team works together from research to testing, without changes in composition between exercises.
In addition to the mix of profiles, it is advisable to assign rotating roles during the session, so that the work does not always fall on the same person:
- Presenter: presents the team's progress in common reviews and at the close.
- Timekeeper: notifies the rest of the team when there is little time left within the block.
- Scribe: organizes the post-its and keeps the map or template legible for everyone.
- Discussion moderator: ensures that all voices are heard, especially those of quieter or lower-ranking profiles.
Rotating these roles between day 1 and day 2 prevents one person from dominating the conversation and helps the team appropriate the method used, whether it's an empathy map, an stakeholder map, or any other tool in the process.
There are early signs when a team is not well-formed: everyone proposes the same type of solution, no one questions the operational viability of an idea, or one person dominates the entire conversation while the rest just nod. If you see this on day 1, you still have time to reorganize the composition before entering the ideation and prototyping phase on day 2.
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