There are various drivers of subscription success, with collaborative teams a key driver. However, we see challenges remaining in optimising teams to fully exploit the trillion-dollar subscription opportunity.
Forecasts suggest the subscription economy could reach anywhere from around £1 trillion to £1.5 trillion globally this year. Many brands, of course, are already tapping into this market. But how do you create structures and teams that naturally enable cross-functional efficiencies and collaboration that boost results?
The collaboration challenge & benefits Subscriber teams are often functional. They’re hitting individual targets, completing tasks, and using the right tools. The problem? They’re often optimising for different outcomes, using different data, and celebrating different wins.
Take a typical company: Marketing chases leads. Sales focus on closing deals. Product pushes adoption. Customer Success prevents churn. Everyone’s busy. Yet the customer experience feels disjointed, and revenue growth is sluggish.
As Harvard Business Review writes, “Corporate growth is the ultimate team sport, relying on multiple functions’ data, technology, and expertise. This is especially true as technology innovation and AI introduce new revenue streams and business models, which require significant cross-functional collaboration to get off the ground.”
The problem is that cross-functional teams are often dysfunctional. According to McKinsey, “Many teams struggle to collaborate effectively, and some are worse off than that: Research shows that three in four cross-functional teams underperform when it comes to key metrics.”
The best companies avoid departmental silos. One example: Apple employed a cross-functional team to create the iPhone (you can read more here to refresh your mind about how their organisational structure supports cross-functional collaboration and overall success).
When you get it right, there are a multitude of cross-collaboration benefits, e.g.:
Data-driven customer understanding: When all information about the customer base is known to every entity in your business, enabling everyone to operate on a similar level, it facilitates better decision-making across teams.
Reduced churn, higher retention, and improved Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): Cross-functional collaboration fosters shared Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) across different teams, enabling the earlier identification of churn signals, more effective retention strategies, and the discovery of new opportunities. This impacts CLTV as teams act in unison.
Faster innovation and product-market fit: Cross-functional teams engage with shared customer data to gain insights that inform the joined-up conversations, innovation and development of features that genuinely meet customer needs and expectations.
Seamless customer experience: Marketing, sales, customer service, and product teams forge a seamless alliance, sharing insights and feedback in real time to tailor offerings that resonate with customers’ evolving needs.
Competitive advantage in customer-centricity: The only way businesses can grow in the subscription economy is by adopting a customer-centric approach in their operations. Cross-functional teams enable this approach more effectively than siloed departments.
Structuring for success Creating “pods” is one example of structuring for collaboration. Former CodeAcademy Head of Marketing Prasid Pathak explains: “A pod is a small, self-governed group of people with different but complementary skills. Instead of having separate teams for product management, design, engineering, and marketing, you’ll instead have a handful of self-contained pods, with each pod member expected to work cross-functionally towards shared business goals.”
Management sets the direction. Then, “because pods have cross-functional expertise, they aren’t dependent on external resources, making collaboration seamless. And since they have autonomy and aren’t directly led by the top management, decision-making is faster.”
For subscription businesses, this approach entails creating integrated teams that encompass personnel from various departments, such as product, marketing, customer success, finance, and technology, all working together on customer-facing initiatives.
Example: The Atlantic creates pods The Atlantic, first published in 1857 and one of the USA’s most enduring magazine media brands, launched its subscription strategy in 2019. Five years later, the brand, which is majority-owned by Laurene Powell Jobs‘ Emerson Collective, broke through 1 million subscribers.
At the time of the launch of the subscription model, the global news media body WAN-Ifra reported on The Atlantic’s transition to a pod-based model, which was part of its strategy to develop subscription success. Andrew Phelps, then Senior Director of Product, explained how The Atlantic abandoned traditional departmental silos in favour of cross-functional “pods [that] are teams of people who are self-sufficient and allowed to focus on specific problems without worrying about anyone getting in their way.
“The idea is that rather than having a web team and an iOS team and an Android team, which is more typical in a lot of organisations, we have a story-telling team and a home team, as in home screen or home page, and each of those teams has an editor lead, a developer lead, a designer lead, and a product lead.”
Phelps told WAN-Ifra that the pod system helped erase formal delineations and reporting roles, allowing a more diverse group of people to co-own the same problems. That has been crucial to helping foster innovation within the company, he said.
Aligning teams through North Star metrics Creating collaborative teams is all well and good, but they must unite behind shared objectives. Once that direction is set, the secret to better collaboration isn’t more process—it’s better metrics. When teams optimise for shared outcomes, collaboration follows naturally.
Top companies have North Star Metrics that reflect the company’s priorities. In subscription businesses, Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) is arguably the primary consideration, either as the North Star Metric itself or closely paired with customer or consumption growth. This is because CLTV captures the full value equation—not just acquiring subscribers but keeping them longer and maximising their value. It naturally balances growth with retention and upselling.
CLTV, as North Star, encourages the team to focus on subscriber quality over quantity, driving decisions that improve retention, reduce churn, and increase account value. While each team will also track individual KPIs and agile objectives, these ultimately drive the North Star priorities. For example:
Product improves retention and drives upgrades
Marketing targets higher-value customer segments
Customer success focuses on expansion and renewal
Operations optimises for profitability
View from the Atlas experts Atlas, an Internet Retailing and SubscriptionX partner, works with clients ranging from Discovery to Google and Zuora, as well as FT Specialist, The Guardian, The Economist, and more.
“The essence of shared metrics”
Abi Spooner, Strategy Partner at Atlas, agrees that it is “essential to have the same metrics (to work to). I’ve worked with clients where the acquisition teams focus on volume and cost per acquisition (CPA), and the retention teams target churn.
“In that situation, you either end up with an acquisition team smashing all targets, driving low-quality orders, and a depressed retention team who can’t keep any of them long-term. Or you have a powerful retention team who forbid the use of trial offers at acquisition but then limit the opportunity of the acquisition team to drive volume at all.”
The goal is to unify efforts behind a single North Star metric. This “will allow both teams to deliver their best: Driving quality subscribers who will continue to subscribe in the long term. A trial offer with high churn can frequently deliver more full-price subscribers than just going out with a full-price offer.”
“Aligning with Finance”
She also offers words of advice on incorporating Finance into the equation. “The most powerful alliance for any Marketing/Growth team is with the Finance function. If Finance understands lifetime value (LTV), and has defined the timeline for return on investment, they can be a valuable partner.
“Breaking the link between spending and immediate revenue return can revolutionise the business. When you can demonstrate—through transparent LTV calculations that Finance can verify—that a £50k investment will generate £120k profit in 18 months, it’s a brilliant way to ensure you’re spending in the right way.”
Marketing/Growth teams must “learn to speak Finance’s language, work together on forecast and investment cases and make them part of the subscription team’s DNA. If they understand the flow of revenues – and most importantly, the fact that profit is mainly driven from retention than immediately at acquisition – Finance can be incredible partners in business growth.”
“Reducing churn is a team sport”
Atlas Membership Partner Steve Price shared a slide (below) showing how teamwork can reduce churn. He explains, “Reducing churn is a team sport because it involves all teams and departments within a subscription-focused business. It doesn’t matter who owns the P&L; the team involves everyone who can impact the numbers.
“The Marketing team need to use subscriber data – engagement, behavioural and contract – to develop communications and journeys that impact onboarding, early life- and in-life KPIs. However, they need the support and ideas from MarTech and data teams to help identify subscribers who are likely to churn.
“Product develops what the subscribers receive to increase satisfaction and value. Content, in the media context, is essential for engagement and developing subscriber relationships. Customer Service is the eyes and ears because they can provide real-time feedback on why subscribers are cancelling.
“I worked at The Telegraph when digital subscriptions were crucial to the transformation of the business and every project had members of all teams involved in the planning, development and delivery. Over time, team boundaries blurred, and the common goals of reducing churn and growing subscriptions were adopted by everyone. And it worked so well.”
Technology as the collaboration multiplier Finally, the role of technology in collaboration is worthy of an article in its own right. But, briefly, as this MIT Sloan Management Review article explains, “The most digitally advanced companies — those successfully deploying digital technologies and capabilities to improve processes, engage talent across the organisation, and drive new value-generating business models — are far more likely to perform cross-functional collaboration.”
It matters:
AI and automation are enhancing human collaboration. MIT Sloan research indicates that when AI is utilised within its capabilities, it can enhance the performance of highly skilled workers by nearly 40%.
Microsoft’s Copilot integration demonstrates this in practice. Internal studies show that users summarise meetings nearly four times faster and feel twice as productive. There is also a significant gain in breaking down information silos.
Slack’s integration with Salesforce is another example. Their shared “Channels” approach means customer data flows directly into team discussions. Support teams can “swarm” cases, with Salesforce’s support team now resolving issues 26% faster without endless handoffs.
Tools that foster collaboration without sacrificing well-being (Women in Tech Network)
Final thoughts Subscription businesses have a far better chance of success if they create and enable cross-functional teams that work together smoothly, striving towards shared goals. Aligned teams multiply each other’s impact. That sets them and their subscription businesses apart.
Heyl is a Content Partner at Atlas and Founder of That Coalition, a fractional event services and content provider.
Heyl has worked with third-party clients such as Chartbeat, Lineup Systems, and Tubular Labs in Europe and the US, Prospect in the UK, and industry bodies such as PRCA (Communications and Public Affairs) in the UK, MVFP (German Publishers Association) and the Association of Indian Media (AIM).
Subscribe! Our editor carefully curates two InternetRetailing newsletters a week filled with up-to-date news, analysis and research. In addition to this, there is a dedictaed mailer focusing on the subscription economy with detailed commentary from Heyl every second Wednesday – click here to subscribe to the FREE newsletter.
And why not follow us on LinkedIn to receive the latest updates on our research and analysis.
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You are in: Home » Subscriptions » Building subscription success through team collaboration
Building subscription success through team collaboration
Cobus Heyl
There are various drivers of subscription success, with collaborative teams a key driver. However, we see challenges remaining in optimising teams to fully exploit the trillion-dollar subscription opportunity.
Forecasts suggest the subscription economy could reach anywhere from around £1 trillion to £1.5 trillion globally this year. Many brands, of course, are already tapping into this market. But how do you create structures and teams that naturally enable cross-functional efficiencies and collaboration that boost results?
The collaboration challenge & benefits
Subscriber teams are often functional. They’re hitting individual targets, completing tasks, and using the right tools. The problem? They’re often optimising for different outcomes, using different data, and celebrating different wins.
Take a typical company: Marketing chases leads. Sales focus on closing deals. Product pushes adoption. Customer Success prevents churn. Everyone’s busy. Yet the customer experience feels disjointed, and revenue growth is sluggish.
As Harvard Business Review writes, “Corporate growth is the ultimate team sport, relying on multiple functions’ data, technology, and expertise. This is especially true as technology innovation and AI introduce new revenue streams and business models, which require significant cross-functional collaboration to get off the ground.”
The problem is that cross-functional teams are often dysfunctional. According to McKinsey, “Many teams struggle to collaborate effectively, and some are worse off than that: Research shows that three in four cross-functional teams underperform when it comes to key metrics.”
The best companies avoid departmental silos. One example: Apple employed a cross-functional team to create the iPhone (you can read more here to refresh your mind about how their organisational structure supports cross-functional collaboration and overall success).
When you get it right, there are a multitude of cross-collaboration benefits, e.g.:
Structuring for success
Creating “pods” is one example of structuring for collaboration. Former CodeAcademy Head of Marketing Prasid Pathak explains: “A pod is a small, self-governed group of people with different but complementary skills. Instead of having separate teams for product management, design, engineering, and marketing, you’ll instead have a handful of self-contained pods, with each pod member expected to work cross-functionally towards shared business goals.”
Management sets the direction. Then, “because pods have cross-functional expertise, they aren’t dependent on external resources, making collaboration seamless. And since they have autonomy and aren’t directly led by the top management, decision-making is faster.”
For subscription businesses, this approach entails creating integrated teams that encompass personnel from various departments, such as product, marketing, customer success, finance, and technology, all working together on customer-facing initiatives.
Example: The Atlantic creates pods
The Atlantic, first published in 1857 and one of the USA’s most enduring magazine media brands, launched its subscription strategy in 2019. Five years later, the brand, which is majority-owned by Laurene Powell Jobs‘ Emerson Collective, broke through 1 million subscribers.
At the time of the launch of the subscription model, the global news media body WAN-Ifra reported on The Atlantic’s transition to a pod-based model, which was part of its strategy to develop subscription success. Andrew Phelps, then Senior Director of Product, explained how The Atlantic abandoned traditional departmental silos in favour of cross-functional “pods [that] are teams of people who are self-sufficient and allowed to focus on specific problems without worrying about anyone getting in their way.
“The idea is that rather than having a web team and an iOS team and an Android team, which is more typical in a lot of organisations, we have a story-telling team and a home team, as in home screen or home page, and each of those teams has an editor lead, a developer lead, a designer lead, and a product lead.”
Phelps told WAN-Ifra that the pod system helped erase formal delineations and reporting roles, allowing a more diverse group of people to co-own the same problems. That has been crucial to helping foster innovation within the company, he said.
Aligning teams through North Star metrics
Creating collaborative teams is all well and good, but they must unite behind shared objectives. Once that direction is set, the secret to better collaboration isn’t more process—it’s better metrics. When teams optimise for shared outcomes, collaboration follows naturally.
Top companies have North Star Metrics that reflect the company’s priorities. In subscription businesses, Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) is arguably the primary consideration, either as the North Star Metric itself or closely paired with customer or consumption growth. This is because CLTV captures the full value equation—not just acquiring subscribers but keeping them longer and maximising their value. It naturally balances growth with retention and upselling.
CLTV, as North Star, encourages the team to focus on subscriber quality over quantity, driving decisions that improve retention, reduce churn, and increase account value. While each team will also track individual KPIs and agile objectives, these ultimately drive the North Star priorities. For example:
View from the Atlas experts
Atlas, an Internet Retailing and SubscriptionX partner, works with clients ranging from Discovery to Google and Zuora, as well as FT Specialist, The Guardian, The Economist, and more.
“The essence of shared metrics”
Abi Spooner, Strategy Partner at Atlas, agrees that it is “essential to have the same metrics (to work to). I’ve worked with clients where the acquisition teams focus on volume and cost per acquisition (CPA), and the retention teams target churn.
“In that situation, you either end up with an acquisition team smashing all targets, driving low-quality orders, and a depressed retention team who can’t keep any of them long-term. Or you have a powerful retention team who forbid the use of trial offers at acquisition but then limit the opportunity of the acquisition team to drive volume at all.”
The goal is to unify efforts behind a single North Star metric. This “will allow both teams to deliver their best: Driving quality subscribers who will continue to subscribe in the long term. A trial offer with high churn can frequently deliver more full-price subscribers than just going out with a full-price offer.”
“Aligning with Finance”
She also offers words of advice on incorporating Finance into the equation. “The most powerful alliance for any Marketing/Growth team is with the Finance function. If Finance understands lifetime value (LTV), and has defined the timeline for return on investment, they can be a valuable partner.
“Breaking the link between spending and immediate revenue return can revolutionise the business. When you can demonstrate—through transparent LTV calculations that Finance can verify—that a £50k investment will generate £120k profit in 18 months, it’s a brilliant way to ensure you’re spending in the right way.”
Marketing/Growth teams must “learn to speak Finance’s language, work together on forecast and investment cases and make them part of the subscription team’s DNA. If they understand the flow of revenues – and most importantly, the fact that profit is mainly driven from retention than immediately at acquisition – Finance can be incredible partners in business growth.”
“Reducing churn is a team sport”
Atlas Membership Partner Steve Price shared a slide (below) showing how teamwork can reduce churn. He explains, “Reducing churn is a team sport because it involves all teams and departments within a subscription-focused business. It doesn’t matter who owns the P&L; the team involves everyone who can impact the numbers.
“The Marketing team need to use subscriber data – engagement, behavioural and contract – to develop communications and journeys that impact onboarding, early life- and in-life KPIs. However, they need the support and ideas from MarTech and data teams to help identify subscribers who are likely to churn.
“Product develops what the subscribers receive to increase satisfaction and value. Content, in the media context, is essential for engagement and developing subscriber relationships. Customer Service is the eyes and ears because they can provide real-time feedback on why subscribers are cancelling.
“I worked at The Telegraph when digital subscriptions were crucial to the transformation of the business and every project had members of all teams involved in the planning, development and delivery. Over time, team boundaries blurred, and the common goals of reducing churn and growing subscriptions were adopted by everyone. And it worked so well.”
Technology as the collaboration multiplier
Finally, the role of technology in collaboration is worthy of an article in its own right. But, briefly, as this MIT Sloan Management Review article explains, “The most digitally advanced companies — those successfully deploying digital technologies and capabilities to improve processes, engage talent across the organisation, and drive new value-generating business models — are far more likely to perform cross-functional collaboration.”
It matters:
Some further reading suggestions:
Final thoughts
Subscription businesses have a far better chance of success if they create and enable cross-functional teams that work together smoothly, striving towards shared goals. Aligned teams multiply each other’s impact. That sets them and their subscription businesses apart.
Cobus Heyl
Heyl is a Content Partner at Atlas and Founder of That Coalition, a fractional event services and content provider.
Heyl has worked with third-party clients such as Chartbeat, Lineup Systems, and Tubular Labs in Europe and the US, Prospect in the UK, and industry bodies such as PRCA (Communications and Public Affairs) in the UK, MVFP (German Publishers Association) and the Association of Indian Media (AIM).
Subscribe!
Our editor carefully curates two InternetRetailing newsletters a week filled with up-to-date news, analysis and research. In addition to this, there is a dedictaed mailer focusing on the subscription economy with detailed commentary from Heyl every second Wednesday – click here to subscribe to the FREE newsletter.
And why not follow us on LinkedIn to receive the latest updates on our research and analysis.
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