Product, brand, and marketing teams will collapse onto themselves

I have had the same conversation over a dozen times in six months. Different companies, different teams. Same exhaustion.

"Design is treated like a service desk." "Nobody can take an idea from start to finish." "I'm blocked by people who don't understand the work." "That team holds the budget but has no vision."

I found myself conducting accidental therapy sessions. Smart people described feeling trapped in a system that no longer works. And then I realized this isn't team dysfunction. It is, in part, a lack of good leadership. But mostly it is an organizational model collapsing in real time.

What's actually dying

For 15 years, tech companies have been running an experiment: bring creative muscle in-house. In 2017 alone, over 70 design firms were acquired by global companies. Twitter bought Ueno. Accenture absorbed Droga5. Today, more than two-thirds of tech companies have internal creative teams.

The thesis seemed sound: why pay agency markups when you can hire the talent directly? But we moved the people without moving the process. More importantly, we never questioned who they would report to.

Who managed those agencies? Marketers. CMOs. So naturally, design folded under marketing. Marketing controlled the budget and owned growth metrics. The structure seemed logical. It wasn't.

Marketing departments were built for a different era, the era of buying ads, when marketing was primarily advertising, and when growth-at-all-costs was the lowest-hanging fruit. The snippet below from Seth Godin's This is Marketing, published in 2018, nails it clearly:

"Marketing has changed, but our understanding of what we're supposed to do next hasn't kept up. When in doubt, we selfishly shout. When in a corner, we play small ball, stealing from our competition instead of broadening the market. Mostly, we remember growing up in a mass market world. As marketers, we seek to repeat the old-fashioned tricks that don't work anymore. For a long time, the most efficient way for a commercial enterprise to make large-scale change was simple: buy ads. For most of my lifetime, marketing was advertising. And then it wasn't true anymore."

Seth Godin, This is Marketing

But the org charts didn't change. Design became a service function, a pixel production factory. Brilliant designers who once had creative autonomy found themselves buried three layers deep, reporting to people who had never hired, managed, or grown designers. This is the equivalent of putting someone who has never held a violin in charge of the Philharmonic.

The result? Campaigns start bold and get diluted to tech word salad by the time they ship. Designers stuck creating whitepapers instead of building brand systems integrated into the product. Marketers providing jobs-to-be-done frameworks instead of clear points of view. The power in the wrong hands.

As someone who started my career in marketing, I believed it was a creative job. Content marketing was beautiful writing and storytelling that helped startups position themselves as leaders. Over time, though, the growth game consumed creativity and transformed marketing into a playbook of shallow tactics, cheap levers, and acronym-filled slides that conveyed almost nothing.

Here's the part nobody says out loud: many marketers are pretending to be Don Draper. They can't write or build anything. They don't understand design. Yet they receive budgets and get to direct designers. But designers are also at fault. Not pushing back. Not asking good questions. Accepting low-value requests and creating a cycle of more of them. Introverted by nature, many designers accept their role as is, rather than find opportunities or teams within the org where they can make a larger impact.

Nearly every rebrand process is set up to fail because the final decision-makers are not designers. It's the board, the executive team, or the CEO, who then asks their friend network for input, and one of their partners has opinions about the colors. This is why, when a brand feels different and authentic, it gets talked about.

Now that the value of design is increasingly apparent, the illusion is beginning to break. Marketing teams are rarely the ones executing good work. They need designers to do it. Or an agency.

What we lost

In 1941, Bill Bernbach met Paul Rand at a small Manhattan ad agency. Before them, writers and designers worked on different floors. They rarely spoke. Writers passed copy down to the art department. Rand changed that. Their collaboration gave birth to the creative team: copywriter and designer as equals, solving problems neither could tackle alone.

The model worked because it eliminated handoffs. Two people owned the idea from start to finish. Experts trusted each other. Those with taste and craft had the final say. No translation layer. No competing priorities. Shared accountability for creating something good. The legendary George Lois recalls of Rand: "Here was an art director who not only wrote and designed his own ads, he also didn't take any nonsense from anybody."

Today's equivalent of writers and designers on different floors? Brand teams not working with product and engineering. Marketing teams that lack any sense of how to collaborate with product teams or engineers. Handoffs everywhere. Ideas diluted at every layer of approval. We forgot what made great work possible: collaboration without coordination. Trust without bureaucracy. Craft with authority.

What's already working

Midjourney generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually, employing roughly 200 people, with no venture capital. Its product became so good that it marketed itself. This isn't an anomaly. It's a preview of the future for those with talent and ambition.

I shipped an AI product in 2022 with a team of six in four weeks, from research to 1,000 beta customers. Not because we cut corners, but because we eliminated handoffs. The researcher talked to customers. I creative directed with one designer. Engineers built the product. I wrote everything for the landing page and launch. Every expert in the room had autonomy and decision-making power.

At a previous company, we created an animated video in-house, work that typically costs six figures from an agency. A team of five completed it in three months. From script to final delivery, the team owned it. No outside feedback. No bureaucracy. No opinions from people who had never done the work. Ideas stayed intact. Execution was clean. Everyone was happy throughout the process.

This is how work should happen. But most organizations can't operate like this. They need 12 meetings about one thing. More managers than makers. They are busy performing work instead of doing it. When you eliminate that friction, you realize something: most of what we call "work" isn't work. It's theater.

What's coming next

Strip away the titles and silos. What's essential?

Story. Articulate what you're building and why it matters. Pixels. Make it beautiful and usable. Code. Make it work. Relationships. Understand customers and market dynamics. That's it. Four capabilities small teams can own end-to-end.

AI is collapsing the expectations of every job. A recent project of mine was an internal tool that gives teams clarity on problems that matter, validated through customer voice, research insights, and company documents. I built it with five people. I sketched how it could behave. Another designer built the identity. A researcher coded a database. Two colleagues coded it with me. When we involved a backend engineer, the idea opened up further.

Small teams of experts. This is the future. Now imagine this structure across a company. The manager's job: ensure these teams are resourced and accountable, that ideas stay intact. Then get out of their way.

Brand design and product design

Software development costs have collapsed. Designers and engineers can ship features in days that used to take months. Every product is at risk of being commoditized by competitors who move faster. The feature wars are over before they begin. The only moats left are brand, craft, taste, technical advantages, and imagination.

Most companies are stuck in a destructive pattern: they see a competitor ship a feature and immediately add it to their own roadmap. Playing catch-up in a race with no finish line. The stages every company goes through:

• Stage 1: Product-market fit.
• Stage 2: Investing in features.
• Stage 3: Building an experience.

Companies reside in stage 2 forever, competing on features their competitors can copy in weeks. Breakout companies invest in stage 3, where brand design becomes essential. At its core, brand design is about differentiation and communicating value. It translates abstract concepts, such as efficiency or security, and makes them tangible. It's about symbols, stories, and systems.

But here's what matters: brand is behavior. Not your logo or illustration style. It's how your product behaves and feels when using it. The decisions you make about what to build and what to ignore. How your company shows up in a crisis. The personality that emerges from a thousand small choices. A brand must answer two questions: What do you believe? How will you behave? Patagonia has clear beliefs and behaviors. So do Stripe, Shopify, and Linear. You see it in their products, marketing, and how leaders present themselves publicly.

Brand isn't decoration applied after the product is built. Brand is the product's operating system. When a brand truly influences product decisions, you invest in advancing your mission rather than chasing competitors. You differentiate yourself through authenticity. Anyone who copies you digs their own grave.

Marketing might get you known. Product earns trust. Brand is how people fall in love. Product is merit. Brand is distribution. Every role should fit under those two teams, and they're forced to work together. Two sides of the same coin, not 12 silos each with their own executives and roadmaps.

In most tech companies, brand teams live under marketing and rarely work with product. This is wasted talent. This is how you end up with talented designers stuck making whitepapers and event booths, rather than making the product, the thing customers pay money for, genuinely great. Every designer I've spoken to can do a marketer's job, but a marketer cannot do their job without a designer.

Brand teams are the chefs. They determine what the brand looks and sounds like, as well as what the product feels like. This team works horizontally across the organization, creating systems, guidelines, assets, templates, and, with the aid of AI, internal tooling that lets others create on-brand materials. When brand teams align with product, you have a chance to create something memorable.

Here's the reality: people don't trust marketing claims anymore. They trust the experience and how people talk about you on social. AI search now ranks brands based on user-generated sentiment, the Reddit threads, community chatter, and reviews, not the marketing copy on your site. Your product reputation surfaces before any campaign you run. People talk about products that feel different. They don't talk about products that work the same as everything else. Rosetta Stone is a utility. Duolingo is an experience. Everyone wants, and remembers, the latter.

The new structure

Think of building blocks. You have people with unique strengths. They don't fit into a box. Top talent is not one-sided. What are the top business outcomes? What is one opportunity that solves a dozen problems at once? Assemble a small team of experts to own it. Julie Zhuo said something on Lenny's podcast that resonated with me:

"We need to dissolve the boundaries of these traditional roles. We can drop all of these different role distinctions and call ourselves builders. We can all be builders."

Julie Zhuo

For exceptionally talented people, AI will blur the lines further. A brand designer who can prototype, code, and do motion design. An engineer who can write copy or build brand systems. A researcher who understands customers deeply and translates that into compelling copy. With small teams and powerful tools, these pods work fluidly. Point them at any business outcome, a broken funnel, a new product, a major campaign, and get out of their way.

Here's the absurdity of the current model: companies conduct end-of-year planning exercises, only for those plans to flip within months. They fail to understand that the world and culture are changing faster than before, so your roadmaps have the shelf life of a banana. This is where dysfunction breeds, where leaders are not held accountable, and why good talent quits.

The companies that win won't have hundred-person marketing departments with mostly managers making meetings about work. They'll work with an entirely new structure and metabolism for making an impact. Too many companies have beautiful but hollow marketing, and a product that looks like something from 20 years ago. This immediately erodes trust. There was a time when you could get away with this. Now the marketplace is different, and people know better.

Final thoughts

In those dozens of conversations, I noticed something: people weren't complaining about their work. They were mourning the work they couldn't do. They want to do more and be more, but the structure restricts them.

In the last year, I've never seen my industry change so quickly. A year ago, everyone said designers were finished, that our jobs would be replaced. That turned out to be wrong. If anything, the power of a designer increased. Their ability to code and create, their natural inclination toward learning new tools and expressing ideas. For a long time, I heard leaders complain that design never had a seat at the table. Now we're inventing our own table, our own rooms, and deciding who belongs.

Bill Bernbach saw bloat growing at his company in 1947 and wrote to the executives: "I'm worried that we're going to worship techniques instead of substance, that we're going to follow history instead of making it. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion, and persuasion is not a science, but an art." He was right then. He's right now.

The power belongs to those who can make things work end-to-end, collaborate seamlessly, and bring bold ideas to life. Teams that get this won't just work faster. They'll work with an entirely different metabolism, creating products and experiences compelling enough to spread themselves. That's not just better business. That's better work. That's work worth doing.