There’s a phrase UX professionals use among ourselves when we’re reviewing a company’s website, and once you hear it you can’t unsee it. We call it shipping the org chart.
Inside a company — especially a big one — there are politics.
Departments. Relationships. Who reports to whom, who got the budget this year, who’s owed a favor.
All of that internal weather has a way of leaking onto the company’s website. The navigation mirrors the departments. The homepage carves out real estate for whichever team shouted loudest. The site ends up being a map of the company’s insides instead of a door for the person standing outside trying to get in.
The customer doesn’t care about your org chart.
They’ve never seen it and they never want to.
When someone lands on a page, they’ve usually got one or two very specific jobs they need that page to do. Most of my work over the past decade has been narrowing a client company down to what those jobs actually are, and then building the page around that list — not around who inside the building wanted their pet project featured.
You can spot the pattern most clearly in press releases. Celebrating your people is a good thing. I mean that. But your customer didn’t show up wondering who runs your regional sales team. A client of mine has a line I’ve started borrowing: *that’s what LinkedIn is for.*
There’s nothing wrong with having a channel of formal press releases aimed at professional journalists, written in the language they’re used to seeing. We actually recommend that, but in a different area of your site where it doesn’t get in the way of your messaging to customers.
Your primary website needs to talk straight to your audience, in the way they actually want to be spoken to, about the things they actually came to find out. The format barely matters. Your site can include product pages, landing pages, blog posts, whatever. just meeting your prospects where they are is the whole game.
And this is where your platform stops being a website problem and becomes a survival problem.
Because if your audience can’t get a straight answer from you, they’re not giving up. They’re asking an AI. And the AI is going to stitch together an answer from whatever sources it can find — which might be your competitors, your critics, or even a tense exchange someone posted from a town council meeting.
You don’t want that fight happening on public-access TV, where any journalist can pick it up and reshape it. You want to have already answered it, clearly, in your own words, on ground you own.
So the pattern, plainly: stop broadcasting your org chart. Start answering the questions your audience is actually asking — before they go ask a machine instead.
