Bill W:
Chad G:
#6 of 10 in a series: Why Obvious App Improvements Don’t Get Made
Story Idea #079 – Organizational silos / information getting lost
A user experiences a problem as a story. A large company may receive it as a number.
This piece will trace how information travels through an organization: user to support agent, support to ticketing system, ticket to product team, product team to management. At each handoff, useful context can disappear.
A driver may explain that a particular screen is dangerous because it appears while the vehicle is moving. The support record may become “difficulty accepting order.” Ten similar cases may become a count in a category. A management report may show that category represents only a small percentage of contacts. The original safety context is gone.
We want research and real company examples that show where this happens and what organizations do to prevent it. Do product managers listen to calls? Can frontline agents escalate unusual patterns? Are raw comments sampled alongside metrics? Who decides the taxonomy used to categorize complaints?
Silos can also work in the other direction. Engineering may know a limitation that support is never told about. Policy teams may change a rule without giving product teams enough context. Marketing may promise a workflow that operations cannot consistently deliver.
The point is not that large organizations are uniquely incompetent. Scale requires systems. The question is whether those systems preserve the information that matters.
For SOAPSzone, this is a central theme because many user frustrations seem almost impossible to miss from outside the company. One explanation may be that the people who could fix them are seeing a very different representation of the problem.
We want to follow that transformation step by step—and find the places where a detailed human experience turns into a statistic that no longer explains why anybody was angry in the first place.
