The marketing org problem.

Most internal marketing teams fragment around the org chart. The companies whose marketing works share two structural traits.

The first trait is owned outcomes, not owned channels. In a fragmented team, each marketer owns a channel. The paid social manager owns paid social. The SEO manager owns SEO. The email manager owns email. The metrics for each role are channel metrics. The team optimizes the channel rather than the outcome the channel is supposed to produce. By month nine, the channels are all healthy and the company is missing its target.

The teams that work invert the model. Each senior marketer owns an outcome. Pipeline qualified leads in segment X. Retention in cohort Y. Revenue from accounts onboarded in the last twelve months. The marketer pulls whichever channels are needed to produce the outcome. The paid social manager and the email manager are resources, not silos. The decision rights live with the outcome owner.

The second trait is short feedback loops. The fragmented team’s feedback loop is the quarterly review. The metrics get pulled, the team presents, the executives nod, the next quarter starts. By the time a problem is visible in the quarterly review, the quarter is over. The next quarter inherits the problem.

The teams that work run feedback at the cadence of the data. Weekly for paid acquisition. Monthly for retention cohorts. Daily for the small subset of metrics that move fast enough to matter. The pace is not anxiety-inducing. It is calibrated. The team knows what to look at and how often to look at it. Decisions get made closer to the moment the problem appears.

A team with channel ownership and quarterly cadence will fragment regardless of the talent on it. A team with outcome ownership and right-paced cadence will compound regardless of the size of it.

The org chart predicts the work.

If the work is fragmented, the chart is fragmented.

Fix the chart.

The work follows.