Your Org Chart Was Inherited, Not Designed

Summary

Most org charts weren't designed on purpose, they were inherited: a hire made during a crunch, a team folded into another when a manager left, a function nobody questioned even after the work behind it changed. This post looks at where that kind of structural drift costs teams the most…in duplicated work, stalled decisions, and handoffs that break, and offers a few concrete questions leadership can ask to start closing the gap between the org chart they have and the one they need.

By Lisa Heay, Vice President of Business Operations at Heinz Marketing

Ask someone why their team is set up the way it is, and you rarely get a strategy; you get a story. Someone left two years ago, and their reports got folded into a manager who already had a full plate, because nobody had time to figure out where they belonged instead. A role got invented because one person happened to be great at a specific thing, and now two other people report through a function that only sort of makes sense anymore. A team still exists because it used to support a product line that got shelved a while back.

None of that was designed. It was inherited, one reasonable decision at a time, until the org chart stopped matching how the work gets done.

The Org Chart Nobody Sat Down and Built

Each individual call along the way probably made sense in the moment. A fast hire during a crunch; a quick fix when someone left; a new function added to solve one specific problem. None of those decisions were wrong on their own, but nobody ever went back and asked whether the sum of all of them still held together. So, the structure keeps growing sideways instead of getting redesigned, and everyone just works around whatever shape it ends up in.

The Job Description Problem, One Level Up

I wrote a while back about how individual job descriptions drift away from the real work someone does, especially once AI starts absorbing pieces of a role that never get formally removed from the write-up. The same drift happens at the structural level, and team boundaries stop matching how work flows between people. Reporting lines stop matching who really needs to talk to who to get something done. It’s the same problem, just zoomed out from one seat to an entire organization.

How the Friction Shows Up

It rarely announces itself. Friction tends to show up as two teams separately do overlapping work because nobody has clarified where one team’s job ends and the other’s begins. It shows up as a decision stuck for two weeks because the person with authority to approve it isn’t the person who understands the context anymore— that context moved to someone else during a reorg that never really got finished. It shows up as a handoff that used to be simple now routes through three people, because each of them inherited a piece of a job that used to belong to someone who left.

An Example

Picture a demand generation function that started as one person handling email and web forms. Over a few years, that person picked up lead scoring, then event follow-up, then some sales enablement content because no one else had bandwidth. None of those additions came with a conversation about whether demand gen was the right home for them. They landed there because someone competent happened to already be there.

Now that function reports through a director who was hired to run brand, not lifecycle marketing, and half the team’s real day-to-day stakeholders sit in sales ops, a group they don’t formally work with at all. Every quarter, a piece of that work gets reprioritized based on whichever manager pushes hardest, not on what drives pipeline. Nobody planned any of it. It’s just what happens when growth outpaces anyone’s willingness to stop and redraw the boundaries.

AI Doesn’t Fix This, It Exposes It Faster

Layer AI tools on top of a structure like that and the cracks show up faster. AI can speed up a first draft or a first pass at pretty much anything. But if the approval chain behind it is still routing through people whose role in that chain doesn’t make sense anymore, faster inputs just pile up at the same broken bottleneck. Speed doesn’t fix a structure that was never designed for the work it’s doing now.

A Better Starting Question

Instead of asking who currently owns this, ask a harder question: if you were building this function from scratch today, knowing what the work requires now, would you build it this way? Most of the time, the honest answer is no. That gap between the honest answer and the current chart is the real problem worth solving.

Start by mapping outcomes to teams, not people to boxes. Once you know which result each team is responsible for, the shape it needs to take gets a lot more obvious, and so does where the current version isn’t working.

This Isn’t About Blame

None of this means someone screwed up. Structures drift because businesses move fast and nobody schedules time to sit down and question something that mostly works, until it doesn’t. There are higher priorities.

It also doesn’t have to mean a full reorg to fix it. Sometimes it’s one messy handoff between two teams, or one function that has outgrown the box it started in. Either way, it’s worth an honest look before you build anything new on top of it, especially if it involves AI.

Where to Start

Pick the one function that feels the most tangled right now and ask three questions:

1. What outcome is this team accountable for today? Not what its name on the chart says.
2. Who else touches that same outcome from a different reporting line, and why did that happen?
3. And if that overlap disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice? Or would the work just move somewhere else with less friction attached?

Those three questions tend to surface the same pattern every time: work that outgrew a boundary drawn a long time ago, by someone solving a different problem. That’s the real starting point…not a full org chart rebuild, just an honest look at where the current shape stopped matching the work being done.

If your team structure feels more inherited than intentional, we’d be glad to help you take an honest look at it. Email us at acceleration@heinzmarketing.com and we’ll set up time to talk through where you’re seeing the most friction.