How to "un-silo" your company

Every founder and operator says their teams collaborate. Then a simple customer request touches product, design, compliance, and sales, and the handoffs stall. Tickets bounce. Slack threads multiply. The monthly target still gets hit, so leaders convince themselves that friction is a people issue. It is not. Silos form when the system rewards local wins more than end to end outcomes. If you want speed and compounding value, you have to rebuild the system that created the separation in the first place.

A useful place to start is with language. Teams ship what they can name. If the organization only names functions and departments, it will defend those units. If it names flows, like lead to activation or incident to resolution, it will defend outcomes. The fastest way to make silos visible is to map flows and then ask which budget, metric, and manager actually owns each one. The gaps you find are where work slows down, quality decays, and politics fills the space.

Founders often throw culture at the problem. They run an offsite, rotate seating, and declare a no versions of us and them policy. That buys a month of goodwill and then the system snaps back. Silos are produced by three forces that culture cannot fix on its own. Incentives, interfaces, and information. Incentives define what managers protect. Interfaces define how teams transact. Information defines what reality people think they are operating in. If you reset those three, collaboration stops being a motivational talk and becomes the path of least resistance.

Begin with incentives. Managers respond to how their success is measured. If engineering leaders win on velocity and stability alone, and sales leaders win on bookings alone, you have designed a stalemate. The fix is not to drown managers in more goals. The fix is to align each manager to one local metric they control and one shared metric that forces collaboration. For product, pair adoption with time to value. For sales, pair net new revenue with ninety day retained value. For engineering, pair reliability with cycle time to customer impact. It is not the specific metric that matters as much as the rule that every leader owns at least one outcome that another team can block. That mutual dependence is an honest incentive to collaborate.

Interfaces come next. Most cross functional work is run through meetings and inboxes. That is a slow market. The solution is to define clean contracts for the most frequent handoffs. A contract is not a policy deck. It is a living artifact that states the inputs, outputs, and service levels for a transaction. Growth provides a qualified lead with fields A through F complete within a set time. Sales accepts or rejects within a set time and returns structured reasons. Product provides a decision doc with problem definition, constraints, and success measures by a set stage. Engineering responds with feasibility, risks, and effort bands within a set window. Once you make these contracts explicit, performance conversations shift from personality and vibe to throughput and quality. The noise drops because the rules are clear.

Then repair information. Silos thrive when each team holds a different version of the truth. One dashboard shows a spike in churn, another shows steady retention. One forecast says runway is safe, another warns of a cash crunch next quarter. The fix is a single operating view for the company that is useful at three levels. There is an executive board for decisions, a manager board for coaching and resource tradeoffs, and a team board for day to day execution. Each view draws from the same warehouse and the same definitions. You can keep role based filters, but you cannot keep private math. If people cannot argue about the same numbers, they will argue about each other.

The quickest diagnostic for whether any of this will stick is your calendar and your backlog. If you spend more time adjudicating priority fights than reviewing customer outcomes, your incentives are off. If your backlog is function first and every team runs its own queue, your interfaces are missing. If your weekly business review starts with slides built by each department, your information is fragmented. Un-Silo Your Organization is not a slogan. It is a commitment to refactor the system so work has a default path where collaboration is cheaper than conflict.

Now that the foundations are clear, sequence the rebuild. Start by choosing one end to end flow that actually matters this quarter. Customer onboarding is a strong candidate because it exposes sales promises, product reality, data quality, and support readiness. Put one leader in charge of the flow itself, not the functions inside it. This leader does not replace functional managers. They have authority to set the target and escalate tradeoffs for the flow. Their job is to move the whole, which forces each team to see where local excellence is hurting global performance. Expect pushback the first month. Managers will hear a threat to their turf. Keep the message precise. No one is losing authority. You are removing dead zones where no one owns the outcome.

Once the flow owner is set, rewrite the interfaces at the two or three most painful handoffs in that journey. Do not boil the ocean. For onboarding, formalize the data contract for what a qualified deal must include before provisioning. Define the timeline and format for the first value milestone that product and customer success will deliver. Write down the acceptance criteria that triggers billing start or a free to paid conversion. Embed these contracts in the tools, not a wiki that no one reads. If the CRM cannot block a deal that violates the contract, you have documentation, not an interface.

With incentives, keep it simple and visible. Add one shared metric to each manager scorecard and review it weekly in a single forum. When a team misses because another team did not deliver an agreed input, log it, not to shame, but to capture friction that the flow owner must remove. The point is not perfect fairness. The point is shared accountability that nudges managers to solve together rather than escalate around each other.

As the system settles, move to cadence. Meetings do not fix silos, but the wrong rhythm amplifies them. Replace status updates with two weekly forums. One is a flow room that examines the end to end journey with the owner in the chair and cross functional leaders in the room. The other is a decision room that forces tradeoffs on the record. Keep both short and focused on facts, not forecasts. If a decision requires data you do not have, create the experiment, assign an owner, and time box the answer. That is how you replace opinion politics with learning speed.

Beware of two myths that will slow this work. The first is the hiring myth. Leaders say the solution is to find more collaborative people. Talent matters, but posture cannot overcome a system that pays for local wins. The second is the reorg myth. Leaders redraw boxes and hope the chart will do the work. It rarely does. If you retain the same incentives, interfaces, and information, the new chart will perform like the old one. Use reorgs as the last step once you have proven the new flow logic and have clear reasons to move teams.

There is also a financial angle that operators ignore until it bites. Silos tend to hide margin leaks because costs are allocated locally. A unit can look healthy while the system bleeds through handoff friction and rework. To expose this, calculate net cash contribution by flow rather than by function. Attach the cost of delay, defect, and duplication to the flow. You will find that some high revenue functions are subsidized by teams they fight with. When the numbers make the subsidy visible, managers stop debating in the abstract and start fixing the path that burns cash.

Technology can either harden walls or soften them. Use your stack to make the new behavior cheaper than the old one. For example, create shared objects for customers and journeys that every tool references. Teach your CRM to enforce the sales to success contract. Teach your data platform to compute the shared metrics and surface them in every team view. Teach your workflow tool to open tickets only when the required fields satisfy the contract. You are not building bureaucracy. You are reducing variance. Variance is where silos breed.

Expect culture to change after the system does. When incentives align, interfaces are clear, and information is shared, trust rises because it no longer depends on heroics. People stop hoarding tasks and start trading outcomes. You will see fewer meetings and shorter emails because the work moves on rails. Hiring becomes easier because candidates can feel the operating rhythm during interviews. Investors notice faster because the story is grounded in operations, not slogans. None of that requires slogans about family or hustle. It requires design.

If you want a fast proof that this approach works, run a ninety day experiment. Choose one flow, assign an owner, define two handoff contracts, add one shared metric per manager, and consolidate your weekly reviews into one flow room and one decision room. Protect the experiment from scope creep. At day thirty, review where the contracts are breaking and tighten them. At day sixty, move a backlog item from a local queue into the shared flow and watch the friction curve. At day ninety, compare time to value, retained value, and cycle time to baseline. If you do not see improvement, the problem is not the idea. The problem is that your contracts are decorative or your shared metric is toothless. Fix that and try again.

There is one more thing to name. Some silos are not accidental. They exist because power concentrates in uncertainty. If you remove ambiguity, you reduce someone’s influence. That is a real political cost. Handle it with transparency. Tell your leaders what you are doing and why. Share the data that supports the shift. Invite dissent in the decision room, then decide. When people see a fair process, they adapt. When they see surprise moves, they resist. Un-Silo Your Organization requires courage and design. You cannot outsource either.

The payoff is compounding. Work moves faster because decisions are made where information lives. Quality rises because feedback loops close in days instead of quarters. Morale improves because people can win without lobbying. The company stops celebrating hero saves and starts celebrating clean runs. That is what you wanted at the beginning. Not a nicer vibe. A system that delivers.

You do not need a transformation office to begin. You need a single flow owner, a couple of real interfaces, a shared metric with teeth, and a weekly cadence that honors facts over theater. Build that scaffolding and silos become expensive to maintain. Tear down the walls by making the open road cheaper. That is how operators actually un-silo an organization.