In his article for Harvard Business Review, Behnam Tabrizi offers his insights into why so many cross-functional teams struggle. First, it can be difficult to wrangle, let alone lead and create processes for teams that don’t share success metrics. Then there’s the politics of which team is “in charge” and the subsequent irritations and finger-pointing this can cause.

In my experience, identifying dysfunction within cross-functional teams is nowhere more apparent than on your roadmap. If progress along your roadmap is consistently behind, incomplete or blocked, your team is blocked, too.

Here’s how to consistently navigate roadblocks in your roadmap:

Designate a decision maker.

A critical cause of dysfunction across teams is a need for more accountability. Teams unaccustomed to working together often compete within their departments and silo off to focus only on their “parts” of the project, which doesn’t bode well for transformative innovation.

So, I suggest that you start by identifying and acknowledging an active team member as the leader of the overall initiative. This person should be experienced in team and program management while still having the context to go deep into the work and understand how to contextualize that for stakeholders.

If your innovation activity is project-based, leadership candidates could come from any cross-functional team as long as they have the experience and credibility to drive the project forward. But if your innovation initiative is long-term or continuous, that point person should be a product or engineering lead—or even better, a jointly accountable pair representing both product and development.

When current leaders are struggling, or if it would ruffle too many feathers to have someone from one team oversee another, designate an executive sponsor as the leader. Typically, teams will respond well to a higher level of engagement from leadership, regardless of the department they represent. In these cases, the executive sponsor should behave more like the final decision maker and serve as the escalation point for cross-functional teams struggling to learn to work together.

Define quality and how to measure it.

Everyone finds it motivating to see movement on a roadmap and receive reports showing that an innovation project is on time. We all love ticking boxes. But seeing a project as “done” when the quality isn’t there is ultimately deflating and derailing. That’s why product innovation should never be judged through roadmaps alone. If user feedback, production testing and hands-on trials reveal a quality issue, then more likely than not, it’s because the team is misaligned on what “quality” means.

As silly as having to define quality may sound, it is often subjective and measured differently across cross-functional groups. For some, it means no bugs. For others, it’s a seamless experience flow. Others may view quality as “something to be figured out later.” It is critical to have a shared and consistent definition of quality that the whole project group can contribute to and measure themselves against. And it’s entirely possible and appropriate that what quality means for one specific innovation project differs from other projects and routine activities.

When I work with clients, I encourage them to use examples and documentation. This way, each department is able to represent what quality looks like to them, and everyone can be on the same page.

Less meeting, more doing.

Cross-functional teams are particularly guilty of too many informational meetings and not giving enough time to do the work on the project. And it makes sense, given that there are many more invested groups, experts and support teams requiring status updates. But make sure that reporting out does not become “more urgent” than the actual production effort.

Team leaders must view their role as protecting production efforts so no one burns out trying to take everyone’s meetings. Set expectations by turning brief updates into a habit through automated reporting tools. If teams have difficulty keeping up with information, change the process so you’re not sacrificing production focus.

When you hear mixed messages during updates—or if you notice large swings of information presented between one group versus another—it can be a sign that certain groups within a cross-functional team are struggling. If that’s the case, implementing smaller, but more frequent updates will take less time for teams to prepare and can help mitigate those “big scary presentations” that can stress teams out or distract them for weeks at a time. Ultimately, these smaller updates can alleviate significant periods of lost production.

Encouraging teams to perform “retrospectives” can help groups or individuals within a cross-functional team share the challenges and ideas they have for making co-working better and improving their processes. By providing an outlet for folks working together, some perhaps for the first time, they’re more likely to find the methods and answers as a larger team to address their shortcomings.

Cross-functional teams are a highly effective way to bring innovation to market quickly. But the impact of a false start can be derailing. Watch your roadmap for signals to help ensure that your team is aligned and that your project gets to its destination smoothly.