GLS is one of Europe’s leading parcel logistics companies, serving B2B clients, end customers, parcel shops, and partner networks. The organization was traditionally structured in strong functional silos. With a new international Customer-Centricity strategy, GLS needed an organizational model that could translate customer needs across teams and enable true cross-functional collaboration.

A GLS director suddenly found himself responsible for five departments instead of three. These teams worked independently, each following their own priorities and workflows. The new Customer-Centricity strategy required them to collaborate around shared target groups — something the existing structure simply could not support.

The team lacked:

• transparency about roles and responsibilities

• a shared understanding of how to work across silos

• clarity on leadership capacity in the new setup

• a structure that enabled customer-centric decision-making

It was clear that the organization needed a new way to work.

To create a functioning, target-group-oriented matrix organization that operationalized Customer Centricity in daily work.

Every person and every team needed to understand what Customer Centricity meant for their role and decisions.

Before a new structure could be designed, the real structure had to be understood.

Together, we:

• mapped all people, roles, and responsibilities

• created a matrix to understand leadership capacity and distribution

• identified potential new team leads

• surfaced missing or overlapping roles

• experimented with structure models using simple tools (cards, whiteboards, early prototypes)

This laid the foundation for an organizational model built on clarity.

The core innovation was the creation of four new target-group teams, each with cross-functional representatives:

• B2B Team

• B2C Team

• Parcel Shop Team

• Partnerships Team
  
  

For the first time, GLS had dedicated teams responsible for:

• target-group strategies

• product ideas

• personas

• goals and priorities
  
  

Customer-Centricity became a practical operating model rather than a strategic statement.

The new structure fundamentally changed how the organization worked:

• Target-group teams could finally make decisions that had never been made before.

• Skill teams (the former silos) gained clearer roles and responsibilities.

• Alignment improved through shared strategic focus.

• Collaboration across functions became natural instead of exceptional.

This wasn’t about working faster — it was about finally being able to work together.

One of the new target-group circles — the B2B Circle — didn’t work as intended.
Meetings took place, but no meaningful progress happened.

The team assumed that the new structure was “set in stone.”

During a Campfire session, the director and I demonstrated something fundamentally different:

We opened teamdecoder (in its earliest prototype), navigated to the B2B Circle, and deleted it live.

The room went silent.

For the first time, the team understood:

• structures are not permanent

• they can be changed anytime

• experimentation is allowed

• improvement is continuous

• they have permission to redesign how they work
  
  

Two weeks later, the team proposed a new approach.
We rebuilt the B2B Circle — and this time it worked.

It was the moment GLS learned:
Change is not an exception. Change is a habit.

A fully functioning target-group-oriented matrix organization emerged — one that:

• operationalized Customer Centricity

• improved alignment and collaboration

• reduced silo behavior

• clarified roles and responsibilities

• strengthened the team’s ability to adapt

• built confidence in continuous improvement
  
  

GLS didn’t just implement a new structure.
They learned how to evolve their structure.

GLS was not only a transformation project — it became the origin story of teamdecoder.

During this work, it became clear that no existing tool could:

• represent evolving team structures

• visualize roles and responsibilities

• create transparency

• support continuous change
  
  

So we built our own.

The very first version of teamdecoder was created inside the GLS transformation, and the live deletion of the B2B Circle was one of its earliest defining moments.

What started as a custom internal tool became a B2B SaaS platform now used across industries.