The season plan used to reach me in pieces. The cost wasn't my time. It was every decision made in the gap between functions.
Why the margin is often decided between teams, not inside them.
Four rooms
This was the boardshorts business. Design sat in one room. Production in another. The merchants had their own office. Marketing was in a different building.
Each function had its own plan and its own targets. That was how it had always worked.
How the plan was built
The merchant had objectives. To fund them, marketing had to sign off the investment. Development needed to know what was being built before they could commit. Sourcing needed the costings.
Every choice depended on someone else's. Design shaped what marketing could sell. Marketing shaped the merchant's plan. The merchant's calls hit sourcing and development through the costings.
But each choice was made in a different room. So each function brought me its part, and I joined it up.
Nobody was doing anything wrong. The business was set up so that my desk was the only place the pieces met.
What that costs
When a plan is joined up at one desk, the trade-offs get made late, and they get made by default.
The costing arrives after the range is set, so the margin is whatever the range allows. The marketing budget is signed off against a plan that is still moving. Lead times that should have shaped the range end up cutting it instead.
Each function can hit its own number while the plan as a whole loses value. Nobody's target shows it, because nobody's target covers the space between them.
One table
The idea came from my boss. He used Pixar as an example: one team around one project.
I wanted the head of product, the head of marketing, the head of development and the head of design around one table. All the time.
Three of them reported to me. Marketing didn't. And marketing signed off the investment, which made it the seat that mattered most.
So I went to the marketing head's boss and asked. He agreed. Our brand lead agreed. That was it.
Not persuasion. I found the person who could say yes, and asked them.
They hated it
All four of them, including the three who worked for me. They wanted to be with their teams. That was fair.
I didn't have a clever answer. I asked them to give it a go.
Two weeks in, they stopped emailing each other. They were in the same room, so they talked.
The day it changed
One day the four of them came to me together. This is the season. Range, investment, costings, timing. Already agreed between them.
The trade-offs had been made at the table, early, by the people who owned them. Not at my desk, late, by me.
The division grew. And my job changed: less time joining pieces, more time on the direction of the business.
What actually moved
No new authority. No new process. No restructure.
What moved was where the decisions met. Before, they met on my desk. After, they met at the table.
In most consumer businesses I've worked in, the biggest losses aren't inside a function. They sit between product, marketing, sourcing and planning, where each team's plan is right on its own terms and wrong for the business.
Sometimes the fix is a model or a process. Sometimes it's four chairs.
If this looks like your business, the first step is forty-five minutes with both of us.