What Your Sitemap Says About Your Org Chart

You can tell a lot about a company by its sitemap.

If every page has a different tone, the teams probably work in silos. If navigation labels sound like internal project names, someone forgot who the site is for and no one's asking the obvious question. If “Resources” has become a catch-all drawer of PDFs, it’s a sign no one wanted to make a decision.

The “About” section that’s ten layers deep is usually the comms team fighting for space and narrative. The product pages split by internal business units are sales and ops refusing to compromise. The buried help center is a sign that support was an afterthought—and users and customer service both feel it.

Every link represents a decision, and every decision carries trade-offs. Most sites aren’t designed for users as much as they’re negotiated between departments. What starts as a clean information architecture slowly bends to competing priorities: marketing wants visibility, legal wants disclaimers, product wants to anchor its place in the flow. The result is a structure that mirrors the org chart more than the user experience.

As designers, our job isn’t just to map the content—it’s to navigate the politics behind it. To listen for where tension lives, surface trade-offs early, and keep the structure tied to real user needs. The hard part isn’t making the sitemap; it’s getting everyone to agree on what it should do.

Sometimes the most valuable thing you can create isn’t a wireframe, but shared alignment on priorities.

When a site feels effortless to navigate, it’s usually because someone made the hard calls—about what stays, what goes, and what actually matters.

The way we organize information reflects how we organize ourselves.