Break Down The Wall
Most large organisations separate the people who make promises to customers from the people who keep them. Customers notice, even if the org chart does not.
Good organisations, like good cities, are shaped by how people actually move through them. So it is worth paying attention when a building tells you something its strategy deck isn't.
On a recent visit to one of Australia's big banks, I walked a floor where the architecture said the quiet bit out loud. Marketing sat on one side. Product and design sat on the other. Between them stood a wall.
Office walls are rarely metaphors. This one was.
Both functions serve the same customer. Marketing makes the promise; product and design build the thing that keeps it. They are two halves of a single experience. Yet in most enterprises they report to different executives, run on different budgets and are judged on different numbers. The one place they reliably meet is the chief executive's diary, which is not, as a rule, where customer experience gets designed.
What the wall costs
The price is continuity. Consider energy retail. The advertising says switching is simple: a few taps, a few minutes. Behind the sign-up form sit hundreds of plans. The promise is made by one department and broken, quite sincerely, by another. The gap between them becomes a drop-off point, and each side has a dashboard explaining why it was the other side's fault.
What tearing it down looks like
The alternative is not hypothetical. In its strongest years, Nike, the brand that could make a running shoe feel like a gift from the gods, treated marketing and design as a single discipline, organised around a shared and almost obsessive understanding of the athlete. Marketing was not handed a finished product to describe; it helped decide what the product would be. The results were exceptional. Nike's more recent difficulties, I would argue, trace back in large part to letting that partnership being untied.
Why the wall stays up
If the case is this clear, why do so few organisations act on it? Because the wall is load-bearing, just not for customers. It holds up reporting lines, headcount, budgets and executive territory. Joining promise and delivery means someone cedes control, and few restructures are designed to make powerful people smaller.
Where leaders can start
Give one executive the whole journey. Someone should own the customer's experience from first advertisement to first bill.
Measure both sides on the same outcome. Completed sign-ups, not campaign clicks on one side and features shipped on the other.
Swap seats early. Bring marketers into product discovery, and designers into the brief. Proximity is underrated; the best ideas still tend to start as a conversation across a desk.
The organisations that do this build experiences their walled-off competitors struggle to match, and they tend to be rather nicer places to work. The wall on that floor was plasterboard. The one on the org chart is harder to knock down, and considerably more expensive to leave standing.
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