Eighty-plus parallel cells, ten stages, one team. The trick is to split the work along its own grain: per-cell at the ends where the narrative is bespoke, program-wide in the middle where the craft is repeatable. This page is the picture of that split.
Some work travels with the cell. The Design intent, the insights, the conversation with the client team — these are bespoke per market and per brand. They want a single human who carries the whole arc and shows up in the room at the end. That's the Cell Lead.
Other work is the craft. Pulling and aligning data, fitting MMM and PnP models, running optimizations, validating priors — these are repeatable techniques where one good operator beats four part-time ones. That's the Stage Lead.
The mistake is treating both as the same problem. Pure pods stall on craft; pure horizontals lose the cell's voice. The bookend split is how we get both.
The Team Structure View lays cells along the rows and stages along the columns. Reading down a column tells you who owns that stage across the program — and whether the load is concentrated in one or two names.
Reading across a row tells you the full chain of accountability for one cell — who walked it through Design, who's holding it now, and who will carry it into the client room.
Empty cells in the middle stages are early-life — work hasn't reached craft yet. Empty bookends are the real flag: a cell with no Cell Lead is a cell with no narrative.