Org charts are vertical. The customer experience, horizontal.
I once heard Jeff Gothelf borrow a scene from Goodfellas to describe what misaligned product organizations look like. In the film, Joe Pesci looks at a painting—a man in a boat, two dogs facing opposite directions—and says, “One dog's going one way. One dog's going the other way. And this guy's saying, ‘Hey, what do you want from me?’”
I've never forgotten it. Because I've lived it.
Teams build vertically. One team owns the dashboard. Another owns checkout. Another owns account settings. Each optimizes its slice, moves fast, and measures success on its own terms.
But customers move horizontally—completing jobs that cut across every one of those boundaries without knowing or caring who owns what.
Vertical teams
Vertical teams move fast. That's the point. Their autonomy keeps decisions close to the work and gives teams room to learn.
But autonomy over shared operating systems can make horizontal work harder to see and plan. Running Jira differently across every vertical team without a meaningful reason deprives the organization of shared metrics, cross-team planning, and a reliable view of work that spans teams. Designing the same workflow differently across the product adds duplicate design, build, and support costs. That freedom has a cost—and your customers pay it in fragmented journeys, unpredictable experiences, and eroded trust.
Fragmented journeys cost both sides
What customers experience
- The product works differently depending on where they are
- They repeat themselves or re-enter information as they move between areas
- Handoffs cost time and create frustration
ResultMore effort, less confidence, and lower satisfaction.
The business absorbs
- Duplicate design, engineering, QA, and support work
- Slower cross-team delivery and avoidable rework
- Standards, data, security, and compliance gaps
ResultHigher cost, slower delivery, and greater operational risk.
The answer: balance vertical and horizontal
Delivering cohesive brand and product journeys requires organizations to structure for horizontal outcomes, not just vertical ones.
Vertical teams are good at owning and delivering their part. But the customer experience also needs standards, systems, measures, and decision-making that work horizontally across those teams.
Vertical teams own delivery
They need room to learn, make delivery decisions, and solve customer problems in their area.
Horizontal systems connect the experience
Shared standards, operating systems, measures, and decision rights keep the whole product working together across team boundaries.
Streamline standards and governance
The teams responsible for horizontal standards and systems should treat vertical teams as their users. Clear, easy-to-use standards give teams more agency to succeed and greater accountability for working within them.
Standards and systems teams cannot scale through white-glove review and goodwill alone. The best systems are self-serve: teams can find the current answer, apply it, and keep moving without waiting for a review meeting. The leverage comes from making the right path easier to find and easier to use:
- SSOTOne current, self-serve source for standards, decisions, and guidance—not several documents teams have to reconcile.
- Roles and responsibilitiesClear boundaries across design, content, brand, data, security, and technical standards.
- Self-serve systemsReusable patterns, guidance, and tooling teams can apply without waiting for one-on-one support.
- ExceptionsA visible path for work that genuinely needs a different answer, with a feedback loop that turns recurring exceptions into additions to the shared system.
Create horizontal accountability
Horizontal accountability is not one role or org structure. It makes the end-to-end customer experience a real commitment alongside each team's vertical goals. Depending on the organization, that can mean:
- Horizontal KPIsMeasure leaders against customer or product outcomes that cross team boundaries.
- Shared OKRsMake horizontal outcomes a collective commitment, with explicit sign-on from every team they depend on.
- Journey ownershipAssign an owner when a specific experience needs sustained cross-team leadership.
- Decision rightsGive cross-functional governance the authority to resolve conflicts when vertical team roadmaps collide.
Vertical teams need horizontal systems and accountability. Without them, every team can meet its goals while the product becomes harder for customers to use and more expensive for the business to operate.
Remember the guy in the boat? “What do you want from me?” Your customers have an answer: recognize how they actually use your product—horizontally, across every team boundary you've drawn.
Stop letting your org chart ship your product. Your customers will notice. And so will your bottom line.