I recently came across a fascinating story from HousingWire about how DRB Group, one of the nation's largest privately held homebuilders, is rethinking the way different departments work together. Their senior vice president of sales and marketing, Char Kurihara, is leading an approach that breaks down the traditional walls between functions like land, product development, purchasing, and customer experience. What caught my attention is that she's not just managing sales and marketing in the old sense. Her work touches everything from strategic research and brand strategy through the entire customer journey, and she has significant input on product development, architecture, and purchasing decisions.
The core insight here, according to HousingWire's reporting, is that the homebuilding industry has fundamentally changed since the financial crisis. Decisions made in one department now directly affect outcomes in others. A choice about land becomes a choice about product. A product decision becomes an affordability decision. Marketing dollars have to work smarter because the cost of error across the organization is just too high. Kurihara describes this as creating "interwoven workflows" where information and accountability flow across what used to be separate silos.
What impressed me about her philosophy is how she's developing her team. Rather than keeping people locked into narrow specialties, she's cross training them so an operations marketing professional also leads sales training, or a digital experience leader can explain the business to the sales organization. This isn't about erasing expertise. It's about building enough fluency across functions so that people understand how their decisions ripple through the business. At DRB's scale, operating across twenty divisions, this kind of shared understanding becomes critical because information can get trapped at organizational boundaries.
The organizing principle pulling all of this together is the customer. Kurihara uses customer intelligence as a common source of information that shapes decisions about which land to pursue, which products belong in which locations, and how to position everything to the market. Her research team includes data analysts and a data scientist who translate market information into actionable insights. None of this works unless the information is truly portable across the organization and the various teams actually use it to inform their decisions.
What I am seeing locally here in the Bay Area and across the East Bay is that the most successful builders are operating much the way Kurihara describes. Our market is competitive, affordability is constrained, and land is expensive, which means every decision carries real weight. The builders who are winning are the ones where the product team understands what customers can actually afford, where land decisions are informed by market research, and where sales and marketing teams have input into how homes are built and priced. That integration isn't a luxury anymore. It's how you survive in a market like ours where margins are tight and there's no room for one part of the organization to operate as if another part's work doesn't matter.
