The ability to develop and understand customer new product preferences in response to changing market trends is shown to be as a key to new product success. Given the significance of developing customer preferences and the increasing use of cross-functional new product teams in the NPD process, the authors examine how customer knowledge development is affected by characteristics of cross-functional new product teams in a market-oriented organizational context. On the basis of a study of 228 new product project managers in the R&D or marketing area, the authors find that customer knowledge development is positively influenced by customer orientation, competitor orientation, and cross-functional integration. Interestingly, lead users' involvement has a positive quadratic effect on customer knowledge development in terms of marketing respondents. However, cross-functional integration weakens the positive effects of both customer orientation and competitor orientation on customer knowledge development. Our results also reveal a clear R&D–marketing split on the main effect of the proposed antecedents.

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