In the early days of a startup, information flows freely like water. You are likely sitting in the same room or on a single text thread. Everyone knows everything. But as you hire your twentieth or fiftieth employee, you start to organize into departments. Marketing sits here. Engineering sits there. Sales sits over there. Slowly, the water stops flowing. It gets trapped in buckets.
This is a Silo. A silo is a system, process, or department that operates in isolation from others. It creates a vertical structure where information flows up and down within the department but rarely moves sideways across the organization.
For a founder, silos are dangerous because they create a fractured reality. The product team believes they are building the perfect feature, while the sales team knows customers hate it. Because they are not talking, the company drives off a cliff while both teams think they are doing a great job.
The Natural Drift Toward Isolation
#Silos are rarely created on purpose. No founder sets out to block communication. They happen as a natural side effect of specialization.
As you hire experts, they naturally congregate with people who speak their language. Developers want to talk to developers about code. They do not want to talk to marketers about brand sentiment. This tribalism is human nature.
Over time, these tribes develop their own cultures, their own goals, and their own truths. The barrier between them hardens. Eventually, handing work from one team to another feels like throwing it over a wall. You hope someone catches it, but you do not really care if they do.
Silos vs. Autonomy
#It is vital to distinguish between a silo and an autonomous team. They can look similar from the outside, but the internal mechanics are opposite.
Autonomy is the ability to make decisions without asking for permission. An autonomous squad has all the skills required to solve a problem—perhaps a designer, an engineer, and a product manager working together. They are self sufficient, but they are highly aligned with the rest of the company.
A Silo is defined by blindness. A siloed team might be autonomous, but they are disconnected. They make decisions that optimize for their specific metric even if it hurts the broader company.
For example, a siloed support team might reduce call times to hit their efficiency goal, even if it infuriates customers and increases churn. They won the battle but the company lost the war.
The Cost of Disconnection
#The primary tax of a silo is duplication and rework.
If your marketing team does not talk to your product team, they might spend months building a campaign for a feature that is being deprecated next quarter. That is wasted capital.
Even worse is the cultural cost. Silos create an “Us vs. Them” mentality. When things go wrong, the engineering team blames the sales team for overpromising, and the sales team blames engineering for underdelivering. Instead of fighting the competition, you spend your energy fighting each other.
Structuring for Flow
#Breaking down silos requires intentional structure. You cannot just tell people to “collaborate more.”
You have to change the incentives. If the sales manager is paid solely on revenue and the product manager is paid solely on user retention, they have opposing goals. You need to create shared OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) that force them to work together.
You must also ask hard questions about your physical or digital architecture. Do your Slack channels encourage cross pollination? Do you hold cross functional meetings? If you do not force the collision of ideas, the silos will return.