Silos in Product Development: How Context Gets Lost

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Silos Are the Natural Enemy of Good Context

3 min read · Deutsch

Everyone did their job. Nobody talked to each other.

This pharmacy sign explains itself in seconds: someone designed a lovely family - mother, child, father, hand in hand beneath the protective red cross. Someone else fabricated the figures. And a third person had to mount the whole thing on the facade - with rods that now run straight through the heads. Everyone did their part properly. The result is unsettling all the same.

The picture is more than a curiosity. It may be the most compact illustration of what happens in organizations when departments, teams, or disciplines work in strict separation: silos are the natural enemy of good context. The most important quality of a well-thought-out product gets lost - its wholeness.

In a siloed environment, something emerges that you could call organizational fragmentation: the end product mirrors the company's internal structure one-to-one, not the needs of the user. This pattern is so reliable that it has a name - Conway's Law.

Silos destroy context on three levels.

1. Losing the User Journey

Each silo optimizes only its own small domain: marketing wants shiny promises, design wants aesthetics, engineering wants clean code, and legal wants cover.

The problem: when nobody ever leaves their silo, design builds a beautiful interface that doesn't perform. Or engineering builds highly functional logic that no human understands. The product breaks apart at the seams, because the overall context - the user's journey from start to finish - is no longer overseen by anyone.

2. The Handover Problem

In silos, people don't work together - they work in sequence. One team finishes something and throws it "over the wall" to the next team.

In that handover, the implicit intent almost always gets lost. The designer knows how the interface is supposed to feel. But the developer only sees static pixels in a ticket and builds it the way that seems logical to them. Without the context of the why, the result is almost always a sterile, error-prone copy of the original idea.

3. No Empathy for the Other Discipline

When designers only talk to designers and developers only talk to developers, a filter bubble forms. You lose the feel for the other side's constraints.

A designer who never talks to manufacturing doesn't know that a particular edge is impossible to cast cleanly. A software architect who has never sat in on a user test doesn't understand why their perfectly logical database structure produces a confusing UI in practice.

The Fix: Context Comes from Friction and Exchange

Modern, agile product development tries to break silos apart by forming cross-functional teams. When designers, developers, and product owners sit at the same table from day one, the bracket for the pharmacy sign never gets drilled through the stick figure's head as an afterthought - because the metalworker would have spoken up at the first draft: "Folks, I can't hang it like this!"

The sign is up, by the way. It works. It meets every single requirement any stakeholder ever wrote down. That's exactly what makes silo products so insidious: they are rarely broken. They are just never as good as they could have been - and anyone looking at them from the outside sees it immediately.

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