Jeff Gothelf once borrowed a scene from Goodfellas to describe what misaligned product organizations look like. In the film, Joe Pesci looks at a painting — a man in a boat, two dogs facing opposite directions — and says: "One dog's going one way. One dog's going the other way. And this guy's saying, 'Hey, what do you want from me?'" Gothelf used it to describe teams all moving in different directions while leadership stands in the middle, helpless.
I've never forgotten it. Because I've lived it.
Teams build vertically. One team owns the dashboard. Another owns checkout. Another owns account settings. Each optimized for their slice, each moving fast, each measuring success on their own terms. But users move horizontally — completing jobs that cut across every one of those boundaries without knowing or caring who owns what. The seams between teams are invisible to the org chart and completely visible to the customer.
Product teams move fast. That's the point. But speed without shared infrastructure has a cost — and your customers pay it in fragmented journeys, inconsistent experiences, and eroded trust. Your business pays it in risk: design standards ignored, data standards bypassed, security and compliance gaps that nobody owned because everyone was heads-down on their own roadmap.
How do multiple agile teams, each with their own ways of working, deliver cohesive cross-team experiences at speed and scale?
Most organizations don't have a good answer. They have a standards team. A shared services function. A design systems group. Well-meaning governance bodies staffed by talented people with no structural authority to enforce anything. And the math is brutal — a governance team of five trying to align fifty product designers across ten teams isn't a process problem. It isn't a talent problem. It's a numbers problem.
The fix
As is so often the case, the problem defines the solution. Delivering coherent horizontal experiences requires organizations to structure for horizontal outcomes, not just vertical ones. Standards and systems teams can still own their domains — design, content, brand, technical — but they need to deliver those standards as a unified experience for the project teams consuming them, not as separate silos each publishing their own way.
In practice that comes down to two things:
Streamline standards and governance
Clear ownership boundaries so standards domains don't overlap, contradict, or create confusion about who governs what — this alone reduces noise significantly. Reducing the number of places project teams have to look for guidance — and keeping those sources current and consistent — is itself a win, even before full consolidation is achievable. Well-maintained sources of truth also enable async guidance and self-service support, which is critical — standards and systems teams don't have the numbers for white-glove, one-on-one service at scale.
Shared governance models that streamline project team involvement and approvals, reducing the cost of compliance without sacrificing accountability.
Leadership support and measurement
Leadership voice and enforcement leverage given to standards and systems teams — because goodwill and documentation alone don't move fast-moving autonomous project teams.
Shared OKRs that make horizontal outcomes a collective commitment — critically, horizontal OKRs need explicit sign-on from every team whose participation is required to achieve them, since most project teams are naturally oriented toward vertical delivery and won't default to horizontal thinking on their own.
Remember the guy in the boat? "What do you want from me?" Your customers have an answer: recognize how they actually use your product — horizontally, across every team boundary you've drawn.
Stop letting your org chart ship your product. Your customers will notice. And so will your bottom line.