Halli Thorleifsson: How to Break Down Silos Between Creative Teams
Halli Thorleifsson says the most important thing about org design is that you know who does what. Image: c/o Halli Thorleifsson.
When he’s not being amusing on Twitter—“I have two beautiful children, out of three total—not a bad ratio. #blessed”—Halli Thorleifsson leads Ueno, the creative agency he founded in 2014.
Over the years, Ueno has worked with Google, Airbnb, Apple, Uber, Facebook, Slack, Red Bull, and Dropbox, among others. From this vantage point, Thorleifsson has a unique perspective on corporation hierarchies, where tension occurs between teams, and how companies can reimagine their design orgs.
Lately, he’s noticed that mega corporations aren’t organized in the most effective way. They silo the product design, brand, and marketing teams, even though all three should seamlessly work together. This results in wasted effort, ineffective collaboration, and decisions being made to appease everyone involved. It ends in a disjointed customer experience whereupon the skies darken, clouds roll in, and customers flee amid a driving rain, never to return. Or something of that nature.
Below, Thorleifsson shares how to break down silos between these creative teams.
Can you give us a sense of what you’ve seen when large companies have product design, brand, and marketing teams working together but reporting to different executives?
Product designers are very good at solving product problems. In the Bay Area, these are typically the biggest design departments. These are tech companies, so it makes sense there are huge product teams and design departments. But it’s a young profession and most product designers have no or limited experience in brand or marketing. They often design functional things that have no emotional, brand component, or they don’t understand how it is going to be marketed.
The branding department is usually people who have started off in more traditional branding. They love working on a big canvas, but they have a hard time understanding how they can work within a mobile screen in a way that doesn’t take away from the functionality.
Then you have the marketing departments, which are similar to the brand designers. They want a big canvas, but they maybe don’t understand the product side. Or don’t want to.
You have three pretty different types of people. They are disconnected. One team finishes their job, another team takes over.
Where do you notice the tension? Or are there tension points you see time and again?
It starts at the beginning. There is a new product being worked on, and it gets divvied up so the product team starts working on their thing, the brand team starts working on their thing, and they don’t talk that often. When the branding is done, they chuck their work over the fence to the product designers, and the product designers are forced to think how they work the brand into the product. Then the marketing team is usually the last person invited. They get to see something that is pretty much finished, have little input in it, and are told to sell it.
If you had the ear of the CEO, what would you recommend doing?
To merge these three departments, because they are all ultimately doing the same thing. Pair a few product designers with the branding designer and marketing people. Have a small cross disciplinary team, rather than everyone siloed. I would recommend that the product, branding, and marketing teams are all involved from day one.
When a company has a VP Product Design, VP Brand, and VP Marketing, do you run the other way?
No, no, no. Just because they have these different teams, they can still work well together. Often, they don’t, but sometimes they do. Airbnb understands branding really well. It flows through everything, not just the branding team. Apple is maybe the most famous case. At their best, they have a brand where everything you touch feels like Apple. These companies have a cohesive experience.
What ends up happening in many of these cases is that there is an insider view, and the brand team says, The brand is great, but the product sucks. Or vice versa. But the customer never thinks about it that way. They just have one perception and think, This thing sucks. Or This thing is great. Or maybe the worst case, they don’t think about you at all.
Is that a reflection of companies structuring themselves in a way that makes sense internally, rather than in a way that suits the needs of their customers?
Yes. One way to see if a company thinks about themselves first or their customers first is to look at the company website. You can often see their organization chart is almost directly mapped onto the website. It’s not tailored to fit user needs; it’s tailored fit the internal teams, This is the part of the website the finance team owns; this is the part of the website that another team owns; and this part of the website was created because everyone needed a place to put their sh*t.
It’s a problem with the web, because, in theory, it’s limitless. If you were making a pamphlet, you wouldn’t think that way. You’d cut down, cut down, cut down, because there is a limit to the space. With the web, you get these areas where people at companies think internally, It’s not worth the fight. Give them what they want. There is no prioritization.
On the flip side, a company that puts the customer first would create their website totally differently. They would put the customer experience number one and everything that confuses it or makes it worse gets cut or changed.
How would you quantify the business loss from companies that have siloed teams?
There is a lot of churn and wasted effort. But much more importantly, there is loss in terms of customer experience. Customers don’t get the best possible version of what this could be when they get the siloed approach. I would focus on that type of loss, the customers you lose, or the customers that could have been more loyal to you.
Our job when we work with our clients is to help them improve that relationship, to help our clients create a long-term relationship with their customers. A relationship that’s built on mutual understanding and mutual gain.
We are all looking for those types of connections and when we find them we tend to become very loyal. And the only way to create that relationship is if the entire experience is created like it comes from a singular vision, a singular voice, even though hundreds or thousands of people may have worked on creating that experience.
The brands that connect with you emotionally and are able to fulfill some kind of need are the ones that people go to again and again.
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