gettyAs technology organizations grow, teams often become more specialized, with experts focused on areas such as cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, data engineering and AI. That depth of expertise can improve technical execution, but it can also make it harder for teams to stay connected to business priorities, customer needs and colleagues in other parts of the organization.When specialized teams lose that broader context, even strong technical work can become disconnected from the outcomes it’s meant to support. Below, Forbes Technology Council members share ways leaders can help technology teams maintain deep expertise while staying aligned with the organization and its broader goals.Create Intentional Opportunities For Teams To ConnectLeaders need to create intentional moments for technology teams to connect with the broader business and customer needs. Learning workshops, innovation forums and team hackathons can help teams share expertise, solve problems across functions and stay aligned around shared priorities. The goal is to make collaboration part of how specialized teams operate, not an occasional add-on. - Michael Praeger, AvidXchangeTie Specialists’ Work To Business ResultsTo kill silos, we have to stop measuring specialists’ work in terms of narrow technical checklists and start tying it to the bottom line. By embedding experts directly into product squads—rather than keeping them in a back-office “center of excellence”—we align their incentives with speed and revenue. This transforms specialists from isolated gatekeepers into strategic partners focused on the mission. - Ravi Dhaval, DeloitteForbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?Build Shared Accountability Across FunctionsAs technology teams become more specialized, leaders should create shared business accountability across functions, not just shared roadmaps. When engineers, product teams and SMEs align around customer outcomes and operational impact, specialization becomes a strength instead of a silo. - Ambarish Majumdar, MetaHost Regular Knowledge-Sharing SessionsCreate more forums—such as lunch-and-learns and context-sharing sessions where teams present outcomes and solution approaches—to keep knowledge flowing horizontally. Choose outcome-based teams over hierarchy- or org-chart-based teams, and assemble more cross-functional pods focused on business outcomes so engineers, designers and product team members all share a common goal. Finally, invest in continuous learning. - Vinod Nair, ComcastTreat The Whole Organization As A Technology TeamTreat everyone in the organization as part of the technology team. Look at it from this perspective: Everyone is a technology professional today, but as with anything, different team members have different skills. Design enablement, awareness and education programs that unify the organization around a common business direction that’s supercharged by technology. - TJ Marlin, Guardrail TechnologiesLet Specialists Spend Time With The Teams Their Work AffectsCreate a regular cadence where specialized technology teams spend time with the functions their work affects. Engineers should hear from sales, support, implementation, finance and operations, not just their immediate technical peers. That keeps the team connected to real business friction and prevents specialization from becoming isolation. - Greg Brown, IllumiaHave Team Members Shadow Other FunctionsOne way to prevent organizational silos is to make every engineer spend one day per quarter doing the “wrong” job. Have infra answer support tickets. Have growth sit in on bug triage. Have designers shadow sales calls. Most silos form because people only experience downstream consequences through dashboards. Shared mild discomfort creates more empathy than any cross-functional meeting ever will. - Aditya Agrawal, CreedConnect Engineers Directly With CustomersHave engineers sit with customers—not just read NPS reports—and actually listen to a support call or a sales demo once a month. When our dev team heard a courier in Manila say, “The app is too slow on my phone,” it reprioritized the roadmap faster than any strategy meeting could. Silos don’t break down due to org chart changes. They break down when people hear the end user’s voice firsthand. - Nimit Mehra, Zeo Route PlannerGive Teams Shared Systems And ContextGive teams shared infrastructure, not just shared meetings. When your tooling, model configurations and context persist across projects and interfaces, knowledge flows naturally. Specialization doesn’t create silos; disconnected systems do. Leaders should prioritize platforms that make context portable and accessible so any team can build on what others have started without waiting for handoffs. - Scott Breitenother, Kilo CodeOrganize Teams Around Customer OutcomesThe premise is backward. AI is collapsing technical silos by turning specialists into high-output generalists. The real risk today isn’t isolation; it’s a velocity gap between AI-augmented engineering teams and the legacy business. Leaders shouldn’t focus on “preventing silos” but on reorganizing around customer outcomes. If teams own business results, the silos disappear naturally. - Somit Goyal, IBS SoftwareBring Cross-Functional Pressure Testing Into DesignA silo forms the moment technical teams stop pressure testing their decisions against legal, privacy and business contexts. In my experience, the fix is making pressure testing a design input, not a downstream review. When technical choices get challenged early by the people who feel their consequences, the decisions are better, and the alignment is real rather than performative. - Donna Dror, UsercentricsEstablish A Shared Source Of TruthBreak down silos by establishing a shared source of truth. For example, in manufacturing, configuration lifecycle management acts as a “digital thread” linking specialized tech teams with the rest of the business (engineering, sales and manufacturing). By ensuring every function operates from the same logic foundation, you turn technical complexity into a high-impact team sport. - Johan Salenstedt, ConfigitHold Recurring Cross-Team ‘Interface’ MeetingsImplement a recurring “interfaces” meeting to ensure that information is flowing well across teams. Are PMs sending good specs to POs? Are POs writing effective stories? Are architects participating early in the design process? Is each engineering team getting what they need from teams they depend on? When done right, this breaks down silos and eliminates the game of telephone pretty effectively. - Naeem Bari, LinxupUse AI Agents To Improve Cross-Unit CommunicationDeploy AI agents, which excel where humans do not. Agents can be designed to operate across business units to streamline communication and data flow. They can be trained to share context and insights in real time, removing the friction inherent to human coordination and ensuring cross-functional alignment. The result is a more connected operating model that greatly reduces or eliminates isolation. - Atul Sabharwal, Snipp InteractiveRotate Tech Teams Through Business ForumsRotate technical teams through business-facing operational reviews and decision forums. When engineers regularly engage with customer impact reports, operational trade-offs and business metrics, they gain broader context beyond their specialization. This reduces siloed thinking and helps technical decisions stay aligned with organizational priorities rather than isolated technical objectives. - Amirtha Saminathan, Lowe’sDevelop Specialists With Broad Business FluencySilos reflect the importance of a “T-profile,” in which technology professionals have deep skills in one area alongside a broad set of general skills so they can make connections in a multivendor interoperability world. AI makes this fluency even more important today; data is accessed from many systems to produce business value and provide merit to an organization’s customers. - Diana Cano, Cambium Learning GroupMake Each Team Accountable To A StakeholderGive them a customer. Assign every specialized team a real internal or external stakeholder they’re directly accountable to—not through a PM layer, but face-to-face. When engineers, data scientists or designers have to defend their roadmap to the people who depend on it, silos break down naturally. Ownership of an outcome, not just a function, is what keeps deep teams connected to the whole. - Michael Flickinger, BizowieAlign Every Team Around The UserI’ve watched specialized teams slowly stop talking to each other, and it always looks the same. The QA team optimizes for coverage. Dev optimizes for speed. Product optimizes for features. Nobody optimizes for the user. The fix isn’t more meetings. It’s shared accountability for outcomes, not outputs. One metric. Every team owns it. - Khurram Javed Mir, Kualitatem Inc.Embed Technologists In Strategy DiscussionsLeaders should embed technologists in business team meetings—not just for project updates but for ongoing strategy conversations. When engineers and developers regularly hear business goals, customer pain points and operational challenges firsthand, they build context that improves decision making and naturally bridges the gap between technical execution and organizational direction. - Aruna Veerappan, UpworkCreate Roles That Translate Between Tech And BusinessEmbed cross-functional “translation” roles, like product ops or tech liaisons who bridge the gap between specialized tech teams and the rest of the organization. These roles ensure technical work aligns with business goals while also making complex concepts accessible to nontechnical stakeholders, preventing isolation without slowing innovation. - Anil Jaiswal, U.S. Bank