Your Analytics Pillars Are Wearing Blinders at the Blackjack Table
TL;DR Organizing analytics teams around business pillars (Finance, CX, Operations, etc.) creates information asymmetry by design. Your product managers see the whole game, cross-functional opportunities, competitive moves, but can't act on them because analytics resources are locked in silos controlled by coaches who can only see one hand at a time. This isn't alignment; it's organizational malpractice that destroys value, kills innovation, and drives your best talent away.
In the modern enterprise, there's a seductive logic to organizing your analytics resources around specific business functions. You create dedicated teams for Direct-to-Consumer (DTC), for Operations, for Customer Experience (CX), and so on. It seems clean, accountable, and aligned. Each business pillar gets its own dedicated analytics muscle. The problem is, you haven't created alignment; you've built silos. You've created a blackjack table where your best players—your product managers—are being coached by advisors wearing blinders who can only see two cards at a time, forcing them to miss the winning plays right in front of them.
This strategy of dedicating analytics resources to functional pillars is sold as a way to ensure focus and domain expertise. In reality, it's a relic of industrial-age thinking that creates bottlenecks, stifles innovation, and actively prevents your organization from unlocking its greatest sources of value. It's corporate bullshit, and it's costing you dearly.
The Blackjack Table
To understand why this pillar-based structure is so fundamentally flawed, let's walk onto the casino floor. In blackjack, every player at the table is playing against the dealer, but they are all doing so with a significant amount of shared information. You can see the dealer's up-card, and you can see the cards in every other player's hand. This shared context is critical to making smart decisions.
Your enterprise is this blackjack table. Your product managers are the players, and their goal is to beat the dealer—to win in the market. The analytics resources are their chips, the currency they use to place their bets.
Now imagine that for every player at the table, there is a "coach" standing directly behind them. This coach represents the leadership of a specific functional analytics team—the CX Analytics Lead, the DTC Analytics Lead, and so on. The catch is that this coach is wearing a set of high-tech blinders. They can only see the two cards in their own player's hand and nothing else. They can't see the dealer's up-card, the other players' hands, or the cards coming out of the shoe. Their advice is pure, unadulterated tunnel vision.
Role in the GameRole in the EnterpriseThe PlayerThe Product Manager, who has a full, contextual view of the market, competitors, and internal capabilitiesThe CoachThe Functional Analytics Lead (e.g., CX Analytics Lead), who has a siloed view limited to their own team's roadmap and resourcesThe Player's HandA specific project or initiative within one functional pillar (e.g., a new feature for the DTC website)The Dealer's Up-CardA clear and present market threat or opportunity (e.g., a competitor's major launch)Other Players' HandsCross-functional opportunities and internal capabilities in other business units (e.g., a new logistics capability from the Operations team)The BetThe strategic allocation of finite analytics resources
Information Asymmetry by Design
Let's play a hand. Your product manager is at the table, holding a hard 16. Their pillar coach, the CX Analytics Lead, is standing behind them. Seeing only the 16, the coach's advice is rigid and by-the-book: "The manual says never hit on a hard 16 if the dealer is showing a six or less." It's technically correct, in a vacuum.
But the product manager isn't in a vacuum. They can see the whole table. They see the dealer isn't showing a six; they're showing an Ace—a massive threat. They also see the player next to them, representing the Operations pillar, has just been dealt a hand that perfectly complements their own. The PM realizes that by taking a calculated risk—hitting the 16 or, more importantly, pooling their chips with the Operations player—they could together create a much stronger position against the dealer's threatening Ace.
This is the moment of truth. The product manager sees the game-changing, cross-functional opportunity to combine a CX initiative with an operational capability to crush a competitive threat. But the CX Analytics Lead, blind to the dealer's Ace and the other player's hand, forbids it. "That's not on our roadmap," the coach insists. "You have to use your analytics resources on the CX-approved plan. Don't hit. Protect our budget."
The product manager is left paralyzed. The person with the most information is disempowered by the person with the least. The optimal strategy for the company is sacrificed for the suboptimal, siloed strategy of a single pillar.
This is the core failure of the pillar-based resource model: it creates information asymmetry by design. The people with the most context (the product managers) are disempowered by the organizational structure, while the people with the least context (the functional pillar heads) control the resources. The result is a company full of smart people who are structurally forbidden from making the smartest decisions.
The House Always Loses
When you hard-wire your analytics resources to specific business functions, you aren't just slowing things down; you are systematically destroying value. You are forcing your teams to focus on local optimizations while ignoring the massive opportunities that lie at the seams of your organization. This isn't just bad gameplay; it's organizational malpractice, and it happens every single day in businesses that cling to this outdated model.
This model consistently leads to several predictable failures:
Resource Inefficiency: You have analysts sitting idle in one pillar while another is starving for talent, because the resources are not fungible. It's the definition of inefficiency, hidden under the guise of "dedicated support."
Missed Opportunities: The most valuable insights and innovations often come from combining capabilities across different parts of the business. By siloing your analytics teams, you make these cross-functional bets nearly impossible to place. The biggest pots go unclaimed because no single coach can see them.
Political Gridlock: Instead of collaborating, your pillar heads are now forced to compete for resources and protect their turf. Product managers have to spend their time negotiating and horse-trading for analysts instead of building data-driven products that win in the market.
Eroding Morale: Your best product managers will leave. They are hired to be expert players, to see the whole board and make strategic moves. Forcing them to beg for resources from blind coaches is a recipe for frustration and talent drain.
A Better Game
Your product managers are at the table to read the game, manage risk, and make the bold, informed bets that drive the company forward. Stop forcing them to play with one hand tied behind their back. Break down the resource silos, give your product managers a flexible pool of analytics resources, and empower them to make the cross-functional bets that will actually win the game.
The answer isn't more sophisticated pillar management or better "collaboration frameworks." The answer is to stop organizing around the wrong axis entirely.
Design your analytics organization around the flow of value, not the org chart. Give your players the chips they need to win.