Why Your Org Chart Should Reflect Your Strategy — Not Your History

Most companies treat the org chart like a formality. It’s that slide in the onboarding deck. A tidy chart that gets updated once a year. Something you show to investors — but rarely use to run the business. The truth? If your org chart doesn’t reflect your strategy, your strategy will fail — no matter how good it looks in PowerPoint.

And this is just as true for young, fast-moving startups as it is for mature companies with 200 people and a long history.

Let’s unpack that.

Young companies: speed without structure

Picture a 20-person B2B startup.

The founder has big plans: scale sales, break into international markets, launch partnerships. On paper, it sounds exciting.

But inside? The founder is running everything — sales, marketing, product. Marketing is two people hustling on social media and email. Sales has a few reps closing whatever deals they can grab. There’s no head of sales, no partnerships lead, no one focused on new markets.

Marketing ends up as the “get things done” department. Sales leans entirely on the founder’s network. And expansion plans stay just that: plans.

The result is familiar: everyone’s busy, nothing scales, and growth hits a ceiling fast.

The problem isn’t ambition. It’s structure.

Mature companies: growth blocked by old habits

Now shift to a 100-person B2B company.

They’re chasing customer retention, bigger upsells, and a reputation for being “customer first.”

But the org chart hasn’t caught up.

Sales has a clear leader and team. Marketing, meanwhile, is treated as the promo department — great for campaigns, but never in the room when strategy’s shaped. Customer success is buried under operations, handling post-sale chaos but with no authority to influence product or revenue.

So, even though the company says it wants to focus on the customer, no one truly owns that experience. Marketing and CS are stuck executing instead of leading. Sales stays focused on new deals, and upsells rarely happen.

Again, the issue isn’t the talent or the ambition. It’s the fact that the org chart was built for yesterday’s challenges — not today’s goals.

Why this matters

Strategy is what you want to achieve.
Your org chart is how you get there.

When the two are out of sync, you get teams working hard on the wrong things, leaders overloaded with the wrong responsibilities, and frustrated employees trying to meet goals they’re not set up to deliver.

And here’s the overlooked truth: if you want marketing to drive growth, you have to give it a voice, not just a to-do list.
If you want sales to scale, it needs leadership and process — not just heroic effort.
If you want to retain customers, CS needs authority, not just clean-up duties.

What to rethink

Start by looking at your top three goals over the next year.
Who owns them today?
Do they have the people, the budget, and the authority to get them done? Or are they acting more as consultants, and trying to find their way out of yesterday's structure?

If the answer is “kind of,” “sort of,” or “it’s shared across five people,” you’ve just found your next bottleneck.

And remember: your org chart is not carved in stone. It’s a living tool that should evolve as your strategy evolves.

And just for the record...

Your org chart isn’t just an HR document.
It’s the skeleton of your strategy.

Get it right, and your teams align, your priorities sharpen, and your company moves faster.
Get it wrong, and even the best strategy will stay stuck in theory, not action.

No matter if you’re a young startup or a scaling SME, it’s not just what you want to do — it’s who you’ve set up to do it.

If you want help aligning your org to your growth goals, let’s connect.
Because strategy on paper is easy — real execution takes design.