When several teams share responsibility for a business or service website, navigation often grows unevenly. One team adds a page under a menu label that made sense for their project, another team buries a frequently needed page three levels deep because no one agreed where it belonged. The result is a structure that no single person fully understands. A useful first step is to map the current navigation as it actually exists, not as anyone remembers it. Print or sketch the full tree, note which team last touched each section, and flag pages that no one currently claims. This gives the group a shared starting point before any redesign begins.
A common source of confusion during handoffs is that menu labels carry different meanings for different teams. One group might call a section "Support" meaning technical documentation, while another uses the same word for customer contact options. To reduce this friction, teams can agree on a short naming convention document that pairs each top-level label with a one-sentence definition and lists the types of content that belong under it. This document does not need to be exhaustive. It works best when it covers only the labels that have caused disputes or duplication in the past, and when it is kept where contributors actually look before adding pages.
Information hierarchy also breaks down when teams add pages to solve an immediate need without checking whether a similar page already exists elsewhere in the site. Before publishing, a contributor can search the current structure for overlapping content and either consolidate or link instead of duplicating. If the site is large, assigning one person per section as a review contact gives contributors a specific person to ask before they create something new. This role does not require full-time attention; it simply means that person has agreed to check whether a proposed page fits the existing structure or warrants a new branch.
Finally, teams benefit from recording why a navigation decision was made, not just what the decision was. When a page is moved, merged, or retired, a brief note with the date, the reason, and who approved the change helps future contributors understand the logic without having to ask someone who may have left the organization. These notes can live in a shared document, a wiki page, or even a comment field in the content management system. The format matters less than the habit of writing the reason down at the time the change happens, because that context is hardest to reconstruct later.