Your Org Chart Is Filtering Out the People You Need Most

"Your background is too broad. We need someone who's been in product design specifically for the last seven years."

That's a recruiter, turning down someone with 13+ years across technology, creative, design leadership, and product strategy. The role required a straight line. The candidate's career wasn't one. If you've worked across disciplines and tried to move into a larger organisation, you've probably heard some version of this.

It's still the default at most medium-to-large companies today, even as the market shifts underneath them.

What the org chart actually optimises for

Most people who end up multidisciplinary don't plan it. They spend years in specialist roles, building depth in one thing, then another, then another. Developer, designer, strategy director. The titles say "specialist." The accumulated experience is already cross-disciplinary. I spent 15 years in agencies (Ogilvy, Sid Lee, de-construct, 180 Amsterdam, Arcade, dentsu) exactly like that.

At startups, that range becomes the asset. Smaller product organisations (Stemly at ING Labs, OnlinePajak) let people use their full range because they have to. Build a design function from scratch, lead activation, shape the product, work directly with engineering and commercial. The multidisciplinary background is the reason these people can move fast and connect problems sitting across teams.

But at larger organisations, the opposite. The structural friction is immediate: job families, compensation bands, career ladders, team budgets, reporting lines. All of it assumes a person belongs to one function. When someone doesn't fit, the operating model has no slot for them.

This isn't a cultural failing. It's architectural. The org chart was inherited from Adam Smith's pin factory model: break work into narrow, repeatable tasks, optimise each one independently. That logic made sense for manufacturing. It even made sense for early knowledge work, when disciplines were distinct enough that deep expertise in one was a genuine edge.

But we don't live in that world anymore. People don't stay in the same job for their entire career. That applies to most knowledge work, and it applies especially to anything involving digital. The expectation that someone spends 15 years going deeper into a single discipline before they're qualified to operate across two is a holdover from an era when careers were linear and the tools didn't change every 18 months.

The result: someone gets hired as a "Senior Product Designer" and spends half their time doing video editing and copywriting nobody asked for. They get labeled a "generalist," which in corporate terms means "not deep enough." They get passed over for promotions because the framework doesn't accommodate what they do. Or they leave and start writing their own job description. That shouldn't be necessary.

Photo by Ryan Quintal on Unsplash

Where the money disappears

This goes beyond product companies. Consulting firms, financial institutions, healthcare providers, government agencies: any organisation where the real problems sit at the intersection of multiple disciplines faces the same structural limitation. McKinsey's research estimates that data silos alone contribute to $3.1 trillion in lost revenue and productivity globally. Not a design problem or an engineering problem. A problem that lives between them.

Think about where the most expensive failures happen. Not inside a discipline. Inside design, things generally work. Inside engineering, things generally work. The failures happen between disciplines. At the handoff from strategy to design. From design to engineering. From engineering to go-to-market. These are the seams where misalignment compounds quietly until someone notices the number isn't moving.

A specialist optimises for their domain. A multidisciplinary person optimises for the outcome. That difference shows up in the gap between a product that's well-designed but commercially irrelevant, and one that moves a number.

We saw this on a recent engagement. Traffic was strong. Conversion wasn't. The easy interpretation was the interface. But the actual problem was upstream: users were arriving with declared intent from ad targeting and landing on a results page that ignored it entirely. Four teams had partial visibility on different parts of that gap. None of them had connected it. That connection was the work. Not the visual execution that followed.

What AI actually changed

AI is compressing the value of single-domain depth fast. The designer with 10 years of visual design experience? AI produces 80% of that output in a fraction of the time. The data analyst who spent years mastering SQL? AI writes those queries. Every specialist is watching the floor of their discipline rise beneath them.

This is not a threat to specialists. It's a redefinition of where human value sits.

AI commoditises execution within a domain. What it cannot do is connect dots across domains. It can't look at a conversion funnel and see that the problem isn't the UI, it's the product positioning, which stems from a go-to-market assumption that originated in a strategy deck nobody in the product team ever read. That requires someone who has operated across those layers. Someone whose instinct is to zoom out, not in.

People who have genuine depth across multiple disciplines, who know the difference between great and good in each one, are the ones extracting the most from AI right now. The breadth that used to be a career penalty is now a force multiplier.

And this is about mindset, not certificates. Singapore alone has seen hundreds of new upskilling programmes appear in the last two years. Courses don't build the judgment that comes from actually operating across disciplines over years. The difference between someone who completed an AI prompt engineering course and someone who's spent a decade working across strategy, design, data, and engineering is the difference between knowing what a tool does and knowing what to build with it.

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

Why smaller companies are pulling ahead

There's a reason agile businesses are adapting this faster. A 20-person startup doesn't have job families and comp bands that force people into a single lane. They have problems that need solving and people who solve them, however they need to. No one asks whether the person diagnosing a conversion problem is "supposed to" be looking at the data pipeline or the product positioning or the ad targeting logic. They just look at whatever needs looking at.

Medium-to-large organisations can't do that. Not because the people aren't capable. Because the structure actively prevents it. Problems get assigned to teams. Teams are organised by discipline. So a problem that spans product, design, data, and commercial gets sliced into four workstreams, each optimising for their own output, and nobody is responsible for the integrated outcome. The result is a lot of well-executed fragments that don't add up to anything coherent.

And the hiring keeps reinforcing it. Same job descriptions as five years ago. Same experience requirements. Same single-discipline ladders. A "Senior Product Designer" posting that requires 7+ years of product design experience, when what they actually need is someone who can think across product, design, and commercial strategy to solve a problem sitting between all three.

Here's a practical thought: put your job descriptions in version control. If your product roadmap changes every quarter and your market shifts every six months, why is the job description for your most critical hires static? Track how roles evolve. Make the expectations explicit. And stop using "years in discipline" as a proxy for capability. It filters out exactly the people you need.

What I'd tell the C-suite

Most leaders already know their org chart creates blind spots. They know the hardest problems sit between teams, not within them. They know the people who consistently surprise them with insight are the ones who refuse to stay in their lane.

But restructuring is expensive and politically complex. It requires admitting that the current operating model, the one they built and got promoted within, has a design flaw.

So instead they add another Slack channel for "cross-functional alignment." They run an offsite about breaking down silos. They hire a consulting firm to produce a deck about organisational agility that nobody reads past slide 12.

The organisations that figure this out first won't just move faster. They'll see problems their competitors can't even name. The ones that don't will end up hiring the multidisciplinary people they filtered out, later, as consultants, at three times the cost.

It's not quite as simple as "hire generalists." These aren't generalists. They're people with real depth across multiple disciplines who can operate at the seams where most value disappears. "Generalist" implies breadth without depth, and that's not what we're talking about.

I don't have a clean framework for how organisations should restructure around this. What I do know is that the current model, the one that asks people to pick a lane and stay in it, is producing worse outcomes every year. And the tools now available make it possible for fewer people to cover more ground, if you let them.

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If the problems that matter most in your organisation sit between teams and nobody owns the outcome end-to-end, that's the kind of problem we work on. Let's look at it together.

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