From Silos to Symbiosis - The Client Perspective
Act 1 Chapter 7 - When the illusion of 'One Team' unravels
(In our last article, we considered the employee as our central stakeholder. Now let us look outside the organization. The proverbial always right - in matters of taste - Customer. The client. The all important reason that services exist in the first place.)
Let’s walk through a familiar arc…
This is your third meeting with the client.
In the first meeting - Your salesperson (or you) showcased the capabilities that your company has to offer. And the discussion went well. The interest was piqued, obvious with some use cases, but under it all, was the question “Can you really help me get some sleep at night?”. The sensitive salesperson latched on to that, genuinely wanting to help. They promise to return with a preliminary value proposition. Interest established, curiosity seeded.
In the second meeting - The created value proposition is presented. The client is, again, interested. And that leads to deeper questions. The salesperson, the quintessential generalist, knows that it is now time to bring in the real guns. And they promise to bring in the design team face to face with the client. Moment of potential is now real.
And that brings us to today, the third meeting -
Present in this meeting, is the representative from the Design team, usually a salesperson or solutions architect, fluent with the process and capabilities, but distant from the client problems. The salesperson did their best to explain offline, but lost in translation is a definite thing, and the designer, rightly so, wants to explore further. And so the client explains again. The design person gets it. Truly gets it. They are able to hold the conversations, deeply empathetic to the client’s conundrums. And they pull up a presentation to showcase where they have achieved significant results in another project, with another client.
The client looks on, now talking to someone who is speaking a different language, a deck with a design language that they didn’t see in the first two meetings, the logos look different, intro slides have different names, but the story still flows. But when the deck moves from design to execution, the logos jump all over the place, the colour scheme changes, fonts vary randomly. Then there is a verbal handoff to another expert from tech, who waxes eloquent about tech capabilities that can bring the design vision to life, which only serves as confirmation that the client is now speaking to a different entity.
The client is now visibly showing confusion, but in reality, they are annoyed.
Fracture begins. You have successfully moved from piqued interest to peaked patience.
Lets dig deeper into what happens when Tech and IT companies, especially large ones with multiple verticals (design, engineering, infra, CX, analytics), fail to present a unified narrative or team.
The Client doesn’t care about your org chart
Clients come to sales meetings not just as representatives of their companies, but as humans. They have a problem they’d like solved please, thanks. They do have expectations. Professionalism, empathy, knowledge, understanding. But more than anything, cohesion.
Meetings such as the one above, are often voiced over with assurances of cohesion but they really are internal explanations. Org silos (Digital vs. Infra vs. Design vs. Data) might be invisible on the slides, or blurred as a best case, and maybe irrelevant to the client - but it becomes painfully obvious in delivery of the pitch, and worse, in delivery of the service.
Internal frictions within an org will invariably spill over into these meetings. Clients will be able to see through the conflicting priorities, the design vs. delivery debate, the constraints tech has over moonshot designs, and the inevitable will happen.
Client trust will erode.
It might even take a few meetings. In which case the slow turnaround time due to the internal alignment meetings, will add fuel to fire.
Pitch-work is now Patchwork.
And this is best case scenario wherein the OG salesperson actually had the best intentions. I’m afraid that isn’t always the case.
This is a systemic symptom, and more common than is accepted. Or acceptable.
The Cost of Confusion
Let us assume that the sale did go through. Now - as we’ve said a million times in corporate meetings - the rubber hits the road.
Cracks start developing early, when the sold team often doesn’t align with what gets staffed. Why? Because the SOW was a collage of promises - stitched together by different teams who hadn’t worked together before. The excitement of the win masks the gaps in the delivery plan. And when the contract gets signed, everyone rushes to assemble the delivery team. The result is a composite that mirrors internal complexity more than client clarity.
Soon, the timeline begins to slip. Because during initial due diligence, the design team - only now properly looped in - requests more discovery time. Rightly so. They want to ensure they understand the real need before prescribing solutions. But this delay triggers a ripple. And adds a layer to the ever so fragile scope of work.
The tech team, in parallel, now wants to do its own discovery. Which means parallel tracks, more dependencies, and a creeping misalignment in how the problem is framed.
Design starts strong, often with high empathy and sharp insights. But once discovery is done, the design bandwidth begins to taper off. “Expensive Resources” are reshuffled, faces change, and just like that, context starts leaking. Knowledge gets dropped between handoffs. By the time the build phase begins, the emotional thread of the project - the why behind the what - has already thinned out.
And the Client?
They’re now spending more time managing you than being served by you. Clarifying miscommunications. Repeating earlier inputs. Wondering why they’re briefing a new team member every two weeks. Wondering why they got into this mess in the first place.
Slowly, trust becomes transactional. The sense of partnership erodes. The very thing they hoped would give them peace of mind becomes another moving part they now need to manage.
I don’t think these are unique, nor are they intentional. But they aren’t random either. There are recurring patterns if you care to pull back the curtain and really look.
Why This Keeps Happening
I can only begin to scratch the surface here. But I will go into what, in my experience, I have found to be the most recurring fault lines.
Incredible urgency: In competitive deals, proposals get stitched under time pressure. What gets pitched is a stitched quilt of best-case scenarios and not a deeply integrated delivery plan. By the time the project begins, the plan is already out of sync with reality.
Org charts are inherited: Especially true as most tech services firms weren’t built as unified, cross-functional systems. They grew through acquisitions. Design, data, engineering, infra - all came in with their own identities, tools, and cadences. The seams still show.
Ownership fog: Who owns the relationship? Who leads? Who’s accountable? The Client Partner isn’t a unicorn that can be omni-present. They own the client relationship and are the face of the company, but they cannot physically hold everything together. A one-person orchestra can only play so many instruments. With lack of a practical governance structure, where the Client Partner is the conductor, it will invariably become a blame game.
But the one that irked me the most?
Cultural Misalignment: Expectation of professionalism by the management layer is often met by the delivery teams with the 3D framework.
Defer, Dodge, Delay.
It is a coping mechanism. Requests for thought leadership are answered with canned slides - A 1998 slide in all its WordArt glory still makes its way into the deck. Requests for proposals are met with initial resistance, and then hastily copy pasted from another where the problem statement was similar - meaning that a couple of keywords that the pre-sales analyst caught in the hurried conversation, match. Energy Industry? Analytics? Here.
Symbiosis is a Way of Working
True story:
We once had a client meeting where Design, Engineering, and Data teams each presented a POV that looked like it was trying to solve the same problem. Apparently it wasn’t because midway, the client said: ‘You guys should talk to each other. Why am I in this meeting?’
If we want clients to experience cohesion, we have to build it into our ways of working—not just our slides.
We have tried enforcing uniformity, centralizing every function, and nothing has worked so far. Maybe it is time we align on the essentials:
Shared Discovery: Design, tech, analytics—all in the room early. Not in sequence. Together. This is paramount.
—Service blueprint design
Narrative Crafting: Every pitch is a story. It needs one spine. One voice. Even if many hands shape it. And I firmly believe this needs to be led by Design every time.
Fluid Ownership: We tried moving from handoffs to handshakes, it is time to move from handshakes to Friday Socials - unstructured shared spaces for an extended period of time. Replacing the baton passing with overlapping commitment zones.
Visible Governance: Don’t wait for escalation. Design a visible operating rhythm that gives the client confidence someone’s steering.
Overlaps tech who understands design
I don’t think it looks like a call for radical reinvention. It’s a return to something simpler, a return to innocence: making it easier for the client to trust you.
And that begins by making it easier for your own teams to trust each other.
I would love to hear from you - what could some solutions be that keep
The Bottom Line
You may have the best thinkers in each silo, but if the client has to do the synthesis, you’re far from being a team. You are another problem. Being “interdisciplinary”, “cross functional”, “cross cultural” isn’t enough. The perception of unity matters.
Here is the question we have to answer, long before the first cold call -
Who are we together?
And how do we make that seamless to the client?