When the Organization Had to Follow the Customer
They came with
“We need to organize around Category Management.”
The question became
Can categories and channels be managed as one organization?
A well-established fashion retailer had already made a significant investment in Category Management. Its product lifecycle processes had been extensively redesigned, and the next step seemed straightforward: build the organization and define the roles needed to make the new model work.
We started somewhere else.
Understanding the change
Before designing the organization, we asked what Category Management was expected to make possible — and what had changed in the business to make that capability necessary.
Research across retailers with very different strategies and business models revealed a common challenge: the way customers make buying decisions was changing — and changing frequently.
Customers were moving between physical and digital channels, carrying expectations from one into another. Data was changing how alternatives could be evaluated. Personalization could reduce uncertainty before purchase. Returns and after-sales experiences could influence the original buying decision. The distinction between channels made sense to the organization, but increasingly less to the customer.
The organizations responding well shared several characteristics: faster decision-making, greater operational agility, cross-functional working, stronger use of data and much tighter coordination between design, production and distribution.
That changed the context of the original assignment.
Finding the real design question
The retailer was also carrying more than one business logic under the same roof.
Its ready-to-wear business was moving toward greater speed and responsiveness, while its made-to-measure and bespoke heritage served differently segmented customers through a different experience. Category Management provided a powerful way to organize around products, but it raised another question: Who would organize around the customer?
Separating every category, channel and business model into its own structure would create duplication and new silos. Organizing only around categories risked losing the customer and channel dimension altogether.
Can we create an organization in which categories and channels can be managed together without sacrificing specialist expertise?
Designing for more than one dimension
The answer was not another hierarchy.
We designed an organization with Categories as the horizontal integrating dimension and Expertise Centres as the vertical capability dimension.
Category leadership carried responsibility for coordinating outcomes across the value chain. Specialist functions retained responsibility for professional expertise, standards and capability development. Channel-specific capability was introduced where the work genuinely required it rather than duplicated throughout the organization.
But structure alone could not make the model work.
Strategy and business-model choices were translated into season, brand, category and channel objectives before entering operational planning. A Category Strategy Coordination Team brought the relevant functions and channels together around category strategy, operating plans and budgets.
Execution then moved into smaller, purpose-specific cross-functional teams for Category Management, Design, Sourcing, Delivery and Customer/Channel Experience.
The existing product lifecycle processes — designed before ALIGN entered the project — remained the foundation. ALIGN's organizational design defined how people, accountability, expertise and decision-making would come together around them.
What changed
What began as a request to design roles for Category Management became the design of a broader operating system connecting Strategy → Customer → Category → Channel → Expertise → Process → Execution.
The project did not begin by asking what the new organization should look like.
Categories
Expertise centres
It began by asking what the organization needed to make possible.
Instead of asking the organization to choose between product expertise and customer responsiveness, the design created different mechanisms for managing both.