When a product organisation is failing, the instinct is to look at the product manager, the strategy, or the engineering execution. Rarely does anyone look at the design of the organisation itself: the way teams are structured, how information flows, and where decision-making authority actually lives versus where it is supposed to live.
Hannes D'Hulster, Lead Designer at Smooth Sailing, brought a refreshingly different perspective to PR_D_CT DAY 2023. As a designer who has spent years embedded in product organisations across Belgium and Europe, he has seen the same dysfunctional patterns repeat across companies of different sizes, industries, and maturity levels. His talk was a diagnostic framework for identifying what is actually broken when a product organisation is underperforming.
The audience, predominantly product managers and product leaders, was challenged to think about their organisations as designed systems that can be redesigned, rather than as organic structures that simply evolve over time.
Original Presentation Slides
Download the slides from this talk as presented at the gathering.
