Many organizations come to us with familiar symptoms: slow decisions, scattered priorities, and delivery timelines that never seem to hold. These aren’t isolated issues—they’re systemic signals. Underneath it all, the root cause is often the same: inefficient organizational structures that are not built for flow.
At Xodiac, our Portfolio Design work focuses on building the conditions for agility, alignment, and throughput. Conscious organizational design isn’t just an org chart—it’s a lever. And when it’s misaligned, it gets in the way of delivering value.
Why structures matter more than you think
Poorly designed structures create friction instead of flow. Priorities compete. Approval chains stretch simple decisions into weeks-long debates. What’s really happening is that the structure is forcing people to work against the system instead of with it.
We’ve seen these symptoms firsthand:
- Strategic intent gets lost in translation.
- Agility gets buried under coordination overhead.
- Leaders lose trust because the system resists change.
These issues compound over time despite the heroic efforts of managers and teams alike.
Focus gets diluted when structure doesn’t support it
One of the clearest signals that structure is out of sync is the erosion of focus. When teams are stretched across too many goals—or stuck trying to satisfy competing mandates—they default to reactive behavior. Progress slows, and no one’s quite sure what “done” looks like anymore.
It’s not a productivity issue. It’s a design issue.
Functional silos, for example, might seem efficient on paper, but they often fragment accountability. Without clear ownership of outcomes, work drifts. Priorities multiply. And what should be a straight line from idea to value becomes a maze of dependencies and status updates.
One organization we worked with felt that there were so many layers/approvals/processes slowing things down that they hired for a new position. The new person’s sole job was to “Get Stuff Done” and they were tasked with helping teams cut through bureaucratic red tape.
Why Delivery Is Always Behind Schedule
We hear it all the time: “Why can’t we ship faster?” More often than not, the answer lies in how teams are structured and how they interact.
Conway’s Law tells us that the systems we build reflect the way we communicate. So if our communication pathways are siloed or fragmented, the software (and services) we build will be too.
It’s not just a clever theory—it’s a design constraint. And ignoring it comes at a cost.
“Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” – Melvin Conway
Designing for better flow with team topologies
Team Topologies offers a practical, systems-thinking lens for reshaping organizational structure. It shifts the conversation from “how do we organize people?” to “how do we optimize for flow?”
It’s not about flattening org charts. It’s about building purpose-driven teams, each with a clear role in the value stream:
- Stream-Aligned Teams – aligned to a flow of work from a segment of the business domain.
- Enabling Teams – help others overcome obstacles, often by providing missing capabilities.
- Complicated Subsystem Teams – handle areas requiring deep specialist knowledge.
- Platform Teams – provide internal services that reduce complexity for stream-aligned teams.
This structure encourages bounded contexts, where teams are focused, autonomous, and accountable for delivering business value. Instead of coordinating endlessly with other departments, stream-aligned teams can execute quickly and independently—enabling agility, focus, and timely delivery. It’s a pattern we return to frequently in our Portfolio Design work when helping clients untangle complexity.
Aligning Structure with Conway’s Law
If your structure is preventing you from seeing the results you’d like then you’ll find yourself constantly battling it. Instead of asking how to make the current system produce better, ask:
What kind of system do we need to deliver the outcomes our customers expect?”etter, ask:
“What kind of system do we need to deliver the outcomes our customers expect?”
The key is to design your organization for the system you want to build—not the other way around. This might mean organizing around product verticals or customer journeys rather than functions like marketing or engineering.
By creating cross-functional stream-aligned teams and limiting inter-team dependencies, you align your delivery pipeline with the goals of the business. This makes it possible to iterate faster, respond to change, and maintain focus on what matters most.
Mapping common pains to structural solutions
Here’s how we often connect the dots between client pain points and structural interventions:
| Problem | Structural Cause | Structural Solution |
|---|---|---|
| Inefficiency | Functional silos, redundant processes | Stream-aligned teams with clear domains |
| Lack of focus | Competing priorities, unclear mandates | Team objectives clearly laddering up/down with company objectives |
| Delayed delivery | Inter-team dependencies, handoffs | Minimize dependencies, use platform teams to offload complexity |
| Lost agility | Overloaded teams, unclear decision rights | Reduce cognitive load through enabling teams and well-defined interfaces |
It’s not about heroics or top-down mandates. It’s about making agility the default—baked into the design of the system itself.
Getting started with the first few practical steps
If you’re seeing these symptoms in your organization, here’s where we usually start:
- Audit how work flows today – Where does it stall? Who’s involved? What’s the real path from idea to delivery?
- Identify your value streams – These are the customer-centered flows of value. Structure teams around them.
- Define support teams intentionally – Platform and enabling teams should make life easier for delivery teams—not add layers.
- Rethink your communication architecture – Team boundaries should match service boundaries to avoid accidental complexity.
- Design for evolution – Structure is not fixed. As your strategy evolves, your teams should too.
Organization structure is your strategy in action
Most organizations inherit their structure. Few intentionally design it. But when structure becomes a strategic choice—aligned to outcomes, flow, and adaptability—it becomes one of your biggest levers for change.
At Xodiac, we help organizations turn structure from a blocker into an enabler. We do this not with static org charts, but through a Portfolio Design approach that evolves with your business.
Because the truth is, your structure isn’t just how you work—it is your strategy, operationalized.
