Have you ever used a banking app where the "Credit Card" section looked completely different from the "Checking Account" section? Different fonts, different button styles, maybe even a separate login?
That is Conway's Law in action: "Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."
The user doesn't know (and doesn't care) that your Credit Card team sits in a different building than your Checking team. They just see a broken app.
"Your org chart is showing. And it's ugly."
Silos Create Friction
When departments don't talk, their software doesn't integrate. You end up with "handoffs" in the user journey where the customer has to re-enter information or switch contexts because they've effectively crossed a departmental border.
The most successful digital products hide this complexity. They present a unified "Service Layer" that abstracts away the messy internal divisions.
The Role of the Product Owner
A strong Product Owner (or Service Designer) acts as the diplomat between these silos. Their job is to map the user journey horizontally, cutting across the vertical reporting lines of the organization.
If your digital transformation strategy doesn't include a plan for cross-functional data sharing, you aren't transforming anything—you're just digitizing your existing silos.
Unified Design Systems
This is where a robust Design System becomes a political tool, not just a visual one. By enforcing a shared set of components and patterns, you force different teams to speak the same visual language, even if their backends are separate.
It creates the *illusion* of a single team, which is often enough to save the user experience.