Why brands and product lines get trapped in a cycle that swings between centralized and decentralized management—and how to escape it.
A disorienting swing
When we worked with a large global manufacturer a few years ago, its product teams were buzzing with energy. Each was developing features and products that grew directly from customer feedback—or more accurately, sales team feedback, since customer listening meant competing with other teams for scarce time with customer panels. Still, the product teams pushed ahead to implement everything their budgets would allow.
Then came a shock—an external financial impact, though it could as easily have been a different-thinking leader or a serious regulatory hit. This shock led leadership to look closely at what the teams were doing. What they saw was constructive chaos. Each brand had its own marketing lead, design budget, and customer channels. The company’s portfolio was vibrant, but messy—similar products under different banners, digital experiences like parallel realities, and internal systems that didn’t speak the same language.
Next came a sweeping restructuring to centralize product decisions under a single strategy. The pendulum had swung hard in the other direction. Within a year, innovation slowed, local teams grew frustrated, and customers noticed that product offerings felt less responsive. The company’s managers could see what was happening—but they had seen it before.
What we mean by the product pendulum
This “product pendulum” describes the recurring cycle in which large organizations shift control of brands and product lines back and forth between centralization and decentralization. When control is centralized, companies gain efficiency, consistency, and brand coherence. When it’s decentralized, they gain responsiveness, creativity, and relevance to customers. Every swing resets decision rights, alters who owns the P&L, and changes where investment and authority sit. For teams living inside the system, it can feel like the floor moves every few years—because it does.
Why it happens
The pendulum swings for understandable reasons. When the market demands agility—new competitors, new technologies, or rapidly shifting customer expectations—companies tend to loosen the reins. Product leaders push decision-making down so teams can innovate and move faster. Over time, however, that freedom breeds inconsistency. Redundant platforms, overlapping product lines, confusing brand architectures. Leadership sees inefficiency and re-centralizes to restore order.
Then the opposite problem emerges. The centralized structure, designed for control, leads to “coordination drag”—oversight and alignment that’s simply expensive to maintain. Teams begin to perceive that local insights are being missed, innovation slowed, customers allowed to drift. They begin to push back, and the cycle repeats.
The phenomenon takes place across all industries. Over the last two decades, Proctor & Gamble and Unilever have traced opposite dynamics, each seeking in turn to correct inefficiencies or regain agility. Steve Ballmer introduced “One Microsoft,” a re-centralization to fix silo issues, later rebalanced to spur innovation under Satya Nadella. GE, Toyota, and many others have followed similar paths.
Each move made sense in context. Logic drove each swing: when things get too fragmented, centralize for scale and coherence; when things get too bureaucratic, decentralize for agility and customer proximity.
The cost of the cycle
Every structural swing consumes resources and morale. Teams must relearn reporting lines, rebuild budgets, and rejustify initiatives. The organization loses institutional knowledge in the churn, and cultural fatigue sets in. The organization can become inwardly focused, more concerned with adjusting itself than serving customers. The irony is that both centralization and decentralization aim to serve the same end—creating stronger products. But the oscillation between them undermines continuity and momentum.
So how can a company escape this cycle and achieve a dynamic balance?
Breaking the cycle
Some organizations have found ways to avoid extreme swings toward centralized or decentralized product management and realize the benefits of both. Let’s take three examples.
Nestlé operates in 180+ countries with a huge portfolio from Nescafé to Purina pet food. Nestlé’s matrix structure combines global business functions with geographic divisions. Headquarters sets strategic decisions, major brand positioning, and core policies, while regional management takes day-to-day operational decisions, adapting to local tastes, cultures, and regulations. Crucially, Nestlé fosters cross-unit collaboration through global R&D centers and innovation teams that partner with regional units—creating an internal network that spreads best practices without formal central mandates.
Johnson & Johnson, known for medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and consumer health products, is structured as a “family” of over 200 operating companies across sectors and countries. J&J keeps a light, lean corporate center for oversight and resource allocation, and empowers front-line business units with the autonomy to run their strategy and operations, enabling agile, market-focused decision-making. J&J knits the organization together through a strong central culture and shared values expressed in a credo that has not changed in 80 years.
Amazon’s “two-pizza team” model—small, autonomous groups that each own a specific product, service, or feature end-to-end—allows rapid experimentation and local optimization without waiting for approval. Yet these teams adhere to company-wide mechanisms that ensure consistency: narrative memos (replacing PowerPoint with written analysis), standardized APIs requiring data and services to be interoperable, leadership principles that codify Amazon’s DNA, and periodic “Business Reviews” with senior executives as alignment checkpoints.
Lessons to apply
Each of these companies has developed structures and methods over decades to mitigate the effects of the product pendulum. That’s an enviable position, but do their examples contain insights that can be applied by product leaders in the shorter term?
We see four tactical moves that may help teams insulate product lines from the pendulum effect, if not reduce its swing:
Differentiate brand from product. Often, product autonomy stands in direct relationship to brand fidelity—especially in times of change. Advocate for and support a strong, centralized enterprise brand narrative, with shared design systems and platform standards. At the same time, insist on localized market sensing, product experimentation, and customer relationship management. This approach supports both centralization and decentralization, where each makes the most sense.
Simplify and clarify offering architecture. The more hierarchical layers in a product offering structure, the more brittle and vulnerable it becomes in the face of organizational change. Aim for no more than one layer of product groupings. This places a high premium on having discrete products each with a clear definition and purpose, with a non-overlapping relationship to adjacent offerings.
Work toward a market-logical product line structure. In many organizations, the organization of product lines reflect the organization of the groups responsible for them, which is not the most logical structure from a customer’s point of view. While it can be challenging to coordinate across internal groups, coordinating even basic things like nomenclature can yield a more coherent and defensible position.
Strengthen interoperability. When it comes to the coherence of a product line, actions (or inter-actions) speak louder than words. Do products talk to each other without translation, operate together seamlessly, report data in consistent and compatible ways? Interoperability is the glue that can hold a product line together in the face of change.
Where to begin
How can product teams begin to pendulum-proof their product lines? Start with these few things:
Find an ally. Working across team silos gives you an immediate advantage in terms of not only a broader perspective and a deeper reach into enterprise networks, but also added credibility to drive change without it seeming entirely self-serving.
Map it out. The evolution you need depends on a clear view of where things currently stand. Assemble all your product collateral in one place to see where the complexity and inconsistency lies. This once involved a lot of bulletin boards, but. it’s much easier now with whiteboarding tools like Miro and Mural.
Borrow an objective eye. Untangling and “change-proofing” product lines is a complex undertaking. The fresh eye and additional hands of an experienced, specialized consultant can speed the process and improve your success.
No product leader gets up in the morning looking forward to toiling through organizational churn and change. That doesn’t have much to do with the real work: planning and developing strong products that solve customer problems and succeed in the marketplace.
But by understanding how the product pendulum works and how to shield products from its worst effects, product leaders can spend more time in work that is meaningful and profitable.