Early-stage start-ups may not have well-defined product teams. Everyone does everything and there are no clear boundaries on roles or responsibilities. However, as the business grows, there is a need to focus on specific areas. This is where streamlining begins. Specialist roles become necessary. This also leads to silos getting created, where each specialization takes off on its own path, which can result in less coordination. When there is less coordination between different streams, shared business context is also compromised.
This can be quite hard to see happening, since each specialization is often tuned to work efficiently. Their efficiency breaks down only when they have to coordinate with other teams. For instance, marketing teams may have great synergies amongst themselves, but when they require assistance from engineering, they may find that the response is slow. This is because the engineering team has set its own priorities...