<i>What also helped was the better communication that came with this team structure. Artists and developers weren’t seated across the hall or on different floors. The team sat together which meant that developers were seated right next to artists.</i><p>Interesting. Seems to advocate for shared office space and interrupting co-workers (later in the same paragraph).<p>The author clearly feels that there was a synergy there and doesn't presume to claim any wisdom as to why this was the case.<p>So we're left to tease out our own conclusions: keep team sizes small, cross-functional and in shared office space.
I was reading the article in anticipation of how such teams could scale, unfortunately the article admitted they don't.
We've tried a cross disciplinary team of 30+. The overhead of keeping everyone in sync removed most of the benefits. Another rather surprising problem was that by putting everyone in one room we had noise problems. Marketers and designers were far more extroverted, creating an overly loud environment for developers who wanted silence to code.
Horrible description of UX designers as "...often judged solely on how the product looks". You're working with visual designers, not UX designers.