Should You Run Marketing Like a Product Team?

Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a quick shout out to Knack for sponsoring today's episode. Knack is a purpose-built email and landing page platform, and they're also one of our longest running sponsors. When I create our newsletter each week, I spend a bunch of time, more recently, with Claude, my friend Claude, as my editor. But once I'm done editing the newsletter, it's not as simple as just getting my copy from a Google Doc and hitting send. If you're a B2B marketer, you know that. So what happens? Someone has to take that output and turn it into an actual email that renders in Outlook follows brand guidelines and ships. You know this story. The last mile still feels slow and manual. Knack has made this a lot shorter. They just launched an MCP server that connects your AI assistant directly to their platform. So now you can describe the email you need in Claude or ChatGPT and draft it like normal, but it automatically starts building in Knack for you. You get an email that comes out following your brand rules automatically. No manual cleanup, no broken HTML, and even better quality than anything your team built by hand. The marketing ops team at OpenAI is actually running this workflow right now. They intake internal campaign requests from Slack, an AI agent structures it into a ticket, Knack MCP generates the email, and a marketer refines and ships. This is the future of marketing. You should go check it out at knack.com. That's K-N-A-K dot com. Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a quick shout out to Vectr for sponsoring today's episode. Vectr is a contact-level ads platform. You probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel, people you can't identify or follow up with, people you can't target with any real precision. So you end up throwing ads at job titles and hoping the right person sees them. Vector fixes that. Instead of targeting job titles and crossing your fingers, Vector lets you build audiences from actual people, the ones on your site that are clicking your ads and checking out your competitors. They're launching an MCP server that lets you connect AI like Claude or ChatGPT directly to their platform. It connects to your LinkedIn ads and site visitor data. So instead of clicking through dashboards, you just ask your AI a question and get an answer. Hey, which ad creatives are fatiguing? Which companies are engaging but not converting? What's actually driving pipeline right now? It turns your data into something you can use in the moment. Go and check them out. It's vector.co. That's V-E-C-T-O-R.co. Vector. You're listening to the Dave Gerhardt Show.

1, 2, 3, 4.

Exit.

5. 1, 2, 3, 4. Exit.

5. Your marketing team is probably busier than ever right now, but are you actually making progress towards the annual goals that you set? Maybe you hired more people, you added more tools, you're in more meetings, and yet somehow the team is burnt out and the CEO is in your DMs asking why nothing is getting done. My guest today says the problem isn't your marketing strategy, it's the marketing operating system, how you do the work. Maria has led marketing at a Series A startup, a $250 million public company, and an education membership org. And now she's a fractional marketing leader teaching B2B marketing teams how to run marketing just like the product team would. In this episode, we get into why your team might be getting less done as it grows, the multitasking exercise that proves context switching is killing your output. She made me go through an exercise and I failed at it miserably, how to build a backlog that actually gets prioritized, why 2-week sprints beat annual planning, and the lightweight tool she uses to kill approval bottlenecks without losing control. She also shows you how to push back on all those random requests you get from across the company without having to say no. I like to think of this episode as spring cleaning for your marketing team. Enjoy my conversation with Maria on how to do better work and be more effective. And run your marketing like a product team. So you can say that again if you want. So you, you said you've been a member of ExitFive for a minute?

Yeah, yeah, probably 2, 3 years now.

Yeah. And you did a brave thing, which is you sent me a good email about coming on this podcast. Yeah. Do you remember what you said?

Yeah, I said, hey Dave, like this is what, like something I'm passionate about and I believe like people in your community really need this. 'Cause I had posted on the community and like those post had had quite a bit of, of likes. So yeah.

Okay. And who are you? People can hear your voice. This is Maria. Maria, how do I say your last name?

Schaeffler.

Maria Schaeffler. She's in Denver, Colorado right now.

I'm in Denver, Colorado. Yes.

Okay. And you have been head of marketing and VP of marketing across a bunch of companies in SaaS. Can you give me your brief backstory?

Yeah. So 15 years leading marketing teams. I started on the agency side. Uh, before going in-house, and that's, um, I joined a Japanese-Korean tech company, competitors with WhatsApp, leading marketing and comms for the European market. I was there when the company IPO'd, and that was back in Spain, 'cause I'm originally from Spain, if you can't tell by my accent. Then I moved to the States and, uh, I joined, um, an education membership organization.

Okay.

To lead their global marketing efforts. And then from there, um, I joined a Series A startup. A CX-based builder marketing foundation from the ground up, and then big, large public organization, $250 million, as VP of global marketing. And today I'm a fractional marketing leader and GTM operator.

There was actually a hot discussion in the community I saw last week about the pros and cons of hiring a fractional marketing leader. Did you see, did you get in the mix on that?

I didn't get, I need to go into it, yeah.

Do you have a strong opinion there?

I mean, since I transitioned into that role, right? Like I do, I think that we bring the experience and especially those companies that can't afford, like you're at the range, like $7 to $30, $50 million in ARR and you just can't afford a full-time CMO or VP of marketing, then that's your solution. I definitely think that.

Yeah, I wonder if that's more of a trend. I wonder what that trend will look like because of AI and impacting marketing teams, will we see more, like, could you have a CMO that is working with 2 or 3 other companies and AI? It's interesting.

Right. I mean, my case, I only like to work with 1 or 2 companies at a time as fractional, and then I do advisory and, and other types of engagements. But like, I don't know, I, I've seen and I, I know people who have 4 clients at a time, and I, I'm not sure that is for me right now.

Yeah, right. I have 2 kids. That's what I feel like when I see people that have more than 2 kids. I'm like, I don't know how you—

Yeah, and I only have one and it's enough.

It's plenty. Okay, so you've been a— I've just— I just was doing that to be like, so you've been a— you've been a VP of marketing in the space that a lot of people who listen to this podcast have come from. And then we kind of aligned on— there's almost a theme to the stuff that you're going to talk about today, which is It's, it's a lot around like the, the operating system for the marketing team, internal marketing. So we're gonna talk about, maybe this has happened to you if you're listening, when your team gets bigger and somehow less gets done. I've been there and it's the worst feeling in the world, especially when you hire everyone and the CEO is constantly messaging you being like, we got so many more people now, why are we not doing more? So been through that. The second one is getting the team bought in, why it's important to get the team bought in before you roll out any operational changes. That's a good one. I've it mess that up for sure. And then the third topic is running marketing like a product team. I love that. So we're gonna see where this time takes us, but we're gonna, let's, let's dive in. So first, let's start with this topic number one, Rhea. When your team gets bigger and somehow gets less done, what happens here?

I think it's because you have too many priorities. Like the team gets bigger and then you don't have an intake process that you used to have when you only had like 3, 4 people. You have new layers, new direct reports as you scale, right? And you start having less visibility into the work and you start adding more status meetings. Sometimes like, oh, now you have lots of one-on-ones and like you start discussing more like operational things in a one-on-one. So where's the space for, for that personal growth and/or career growth, things like that. And you end up just being very, very busy, but like what you mentioned like earlier, like You're not shipping as much. Like, you feel like, oh, we were more effective before than we are now.

Well, and just the asks, the asks keep piling up. Like, all of a sudden it would be like, oh, actually, can you, you know, carve out a week of designer's time because you need to like help the HR team with some like recruiting thing that we're doing? It's like, okay.

Right. And I think no one has trained marketing leaders or like, we just like, you go to college, you start working, maybe agency, maybe in-house, and you start learning from your peers, your boss. But no one really taught you how to actually work. Like you go to college for like strategy or like you, you come to this community for, for that strategy and things like that. But no one really tells you, okay, once you start growing, once you're the boss, like this is like you go to leadership courses and things like that. But what's, what's the system underneath, right? Yeah.

Yeah. It's interesting. I've spent, I spent a lot of time like here interviewing CMOs and marketing leaders and It seems like as everyone kind of goes on, if you look at someone who's been really successful and still doing it and maybe has had like a 20 or 30-year career, they very clearly have, it's not a playbook for the marketing tactics, but they very clearly have like a operating system for how they like to run marketing. And it's, and there's, that happens for a reason because you want to try to like have a system for something. I understand more now because everything can be marketing. All of a sudden you're like, You got a podcast, you're posting videos on social, you started a TikTok channel, you're doing events, you're just doing— anything can almost fit under the umbrella of marketing and it just seems to be this becomes more important as you go on.

Right, and I think for teams that are like in SaaS and like those who work close to engineering and things like that, it seems like a little bit more inherent, like trying to bring some of those practices, which is what I'm gonna talk to you about later. Okay, okay. Before we do that, I wanted to, uh, do a practical exercise with you. It's a multitasking exercise to show you like, oh no, because you said earlier like, oh, you got, oh, why don't you do this quick design or this quick sales enablement one-pager? And like, oh, just like the context switch. And like, I wanna show you, okay. It doesn't seem that much, but like this exercise is gonna show you like the damage that it does to you and to your productivity, like context switching, if you're okay with that.

I am okay with that. I, yes, I know the answer, so I'm ready to feel ashamed. Cool.

Do you have the document that, uh, Erin? Okay.

Yeah. Want me to go into that?

So I have a timer next to me here, cuz I'm gonna start timing you.

All right.

So the, the point of this exercise is, like I mentioned earlier, I want you to see the cost of multitasking. So this is a very common exercise and, uh, So the first time, what I'm gonna ask you to do is to fill the rows here. So row number 1, 2, 3, and then sequencing the numbers. So first is number 1, 2, like 1, and then you go number 1 in Roman numerals, then letter A, then 2 would be the row 2 would be 2, then 2, and then B, right? And so I'm gonna time you and I have my timer somewhere here. Wait a second. I'm going to time you.

Why am I nervous right now? My heart rate is up. My heart rate is up.

No, like the— All right, let's go.

I'm ready. I'm ready.

Okay, so you do that and then we're going to do the same exercise in the second page and we're going to do it a little bit differently. So, okay, 1, 2, 3, go. No, no, no, no, no.

I can't do that.

You're cheating there.

I was trying to figure out the most efficient way to get it done.

You're good, you're good, you're almost there. And then we'll go to the efficient way, don't worry. There you go, 1 minute. I'm gonna put it here, 1 minute and 11 seconds. Okay, so now I'm gonna—

I wanna— I want— I wish I could tag— wish I could call my whole team in and have them— I want to each go right now and I want this to become a competition.

You can do that, you can do that after this call.

Yeah.

And now we're gonna do the same exercise, but what if I told you that by delivering the first column, you're already delivering value, right? So now you're gonna do column 1, then you're gonna do column 2, then you're gonna do column 3, and I'm gonna time you every time you finish each column. And I'm gonna reset the timer, and I'm gonna— so now you told me I want to do it the efficient way, so go ahead and start. I'll, I'll time you.

Okay, so clear this out. All right, are you ready?

Yeah.

Okay, here we go.

Go. No, I'm not seeing you. Huh? Are you in the second? Oh, you're in this. Okay. You went back to the top one. Can you—

Hold on.

Okay. No, don't worry. Leave it as it was.

No, we need the record of this. Okay.

All right.

Here we go. I'm ready.

Okay. You're in the second one.

Okay.

I'm gonna start. Wait a sec. Okay. Ready, set, go. Okay. You're done. Okay. So look at this. It took you in total 22 seconds versus the other one, it took you 1 minute and 11.

Dang.

Right?

Yeah. That's so great.

And then on top of that, so notice the, the, the round one, you can't skip anything until all the 30 cells are done. And so you're not shipping until all the cells are gone, are done. And you're, it took you 1 minute and 11 and here. See, by second 6, so this is actually seconds, you were already done with this and you were already shipping this, right? And then you were already like second row, 13 seconds. And so, so that was like, it was actually another 6 seconds or 7 seconds to do this one. And, you know, so it took you 3 times less to continue to deliver the whole thing Right? And on top of that, if I told you that by delivering this one, you were already delivering value, like, can you understand the cost of context switching now? Like, does this explain for you?

What do you mean delivering value?

Think about this is a campaign. So, this column, think about this as a campaign. And when you're working on like 3 campaigns at the same time and you wanna deliver them at the same time, like it took you 1 minute and, uh, 30, like 1 minute and 11 seconds to deliver the 3 campaigns. Right.

Versus if I was allowed to just focus on that one.

If you were allowed to focus on the one and deliver a C, and you would have done the 3. Like, it's not about just not doing, because at the end of the day, you do the 3 campaigns, right? But look at that. Like, it's really shitty.

There's also— I can't articulate it perfectly, but there's totally a feeling in my mind of the second one feels so freeing. It feels like a really easy puzzle to solve. It's just open, and you just got to go. I got to go through. It's hard to go this way because your brain is going 1 through 10 and then you just counted 1 through 10. You're like, what's the Roman numeral for 7? Okay, then, then where am I in the alphabet? There's like, you are switching into a different set versus if you're operating within this one lane. This is an awesome way to, to show this.

Yeah. So you can ship 3 times faster and it's not about working faster, not just about working faster. It's about finishing. And what I like to say, and we like to say is start finishing and then stop starting. Because lots of times, like, you start, start, oh, that's a great idea. Let's get started. Like, you start and you start and you start and you just end up with, like, so many things at the same time.

This is a perfect example. So many things in my life I can make an analogy to, to parenting, but my daughter will just start a project and I go nuts because we haven't even finished or cleaned up the other project that we did in the other room, which is half done. And then there's like a half, you know, there's a thing of orange juice half opened on the sink and I'm like, let's just pick, let's clean everything up and let's pick one thing.

Yeah, no, I totally relate with my daughter too. She doesn't like the cleanup and like she's really quick to go on to the next thing.

All right. So, so what's the marketing lesson here?

So, and I think here the, the why behind, so you saw how fa— like you can get things faster and you can deliver value quicker, right? And why is that important? Why should you care as a new head of marketing? And I think this is because you need to adapt to the market without burning out your team, because at the end you just keep dumping things to your team and like you get requests from sales and from product and you just, they start burning out the more work they, they, they get, right? So the pressure to adapt to the market has always been there, but Right now with AI, everything is faster. Like this past year, like I see, I go to LinkedIn and you start seeing like, oh, our product became irrelevant with the last cloud update, right? A SaaS company that was doing, uh, whatever, like customer support or whatever. Oh, our product just became irrelevant. So you need to be quick to adapt and learning the operating system, not only for your marketing team, but for the organization is gonna help you be more adaptable to the market. Right. Does that make sense?

Mm-hmm. Is there a system that you're creating?

I mean, so I'm taking the basis of like an agile methodology to bring it to— I adapted that to the marketing team. And so you already see that your product team or your engineering team work that way. And that's what we're going to talk about later, a little bit of those practices.

Okay. So, so the whole— the big takeaway here is like one of them is the multitasking thing. The other piece is you should be running marketing like an agile development organization. Can you explain that? That's worth talking about. I think people will want to hear. She keeps talking about this operating system you need to have. Okay, okay, so what is that? How does it work? Why do it? What does it look like?

So, it looks like delivering value quickly to your customers and to your stakeholders so that you can adapt and you can move quickly and when you plan, you don't have to plan for the full year. Like, and we all know this, right? Like, you want to plan for, like, shorter streams. It's, it's not just your immediate 2 weeks, but you got to think short-term and long-term. But you got to— you don't need to plan with all the details because you got to be able to adapt because the market is going to change. You know that. And there's going to be a new competitor. And then all the work you put into your positioning, into your narrative, Like, it's gonna— you're gonna need to pivot anyway. So you need to build a team that is adaptable.

Yeah, this is good. This topic comes up a lot, a topic around like planning. And so what you're offering up is a way to think about strategy and a way to think about planning, because it's common for— I gotta work on the marketing plan for the year. And what I'm hearing from you and hear from others also is like, so much changes over the course of a year. That's just an exercise in— that's setting us ourselves up to fail. Maybe we can have goals directionally that we're trying to achieve over the course of the year. But like, what are we going to be working on next month? I don't know yet. We're in the middle of a 2-week sprint right now. I love this because it is paralyzing. There's so many different things to do. I love the idea of like, let's just— what if we had everyone rallied around this, like this idea of like 2-week sprints? What's important? What are we working on right now?

Right. And so I'm not saying you don't need to plan because absolutely you need to have your business goals. You need to plan with your go-to-market team, like where's the revenue going to come from? What are your plays? And what are going to be your marketing goals and your strategies, but then your tactics might vary, right? And those can vary throughout the year and you will know more like the closer to you are, the— you're planning for your quarter and not necessarily for the full year of everything that you're going to do.

How do you like to structure the work here? Like what gets bucketed if you're doing these kind of 2-week sprints in marketing?

So I, first of all, I want to talk about the actual mindset because I've heard so many people tell me, no, that doesn't work for me. I've tried that. I've tried having a backlog. I've tried doing a standup. Like, that doesn't work for a company, for an industry, for a product. No, that doesn't work. And it doesn't work because you don't have the right mindset, because you're not building the right culture for your team. And it starts with the leader, right? What I mentioned earlier, why do you care? You want to adapt quickly to changes in the market, so you want to be able to experiment, and you want build a culture of trust in your team so that you can experiment quickly and you focus on that over perfection. And you focus on shipping over, oh, we need to have all these 3 columns done before we ship, right? And so to build that trust, you need to do certain things with your team. Like, I, I like to talk about like getting it right versus being right from Brené Brown. Like, that was an eye-opener, right? Like, you keep working towards the getting it right. And so, there's certain things that I like to do with my team. For example, a working agreement. You, you bring in your team and you all create a document, and it's a shared document where you align on the expectations on how the team operates. How do you communicate? How do you make decisions? You know, like, so you document everything and you have the conversation. What does that mean? And you keep digging, and you all end up agreeing. Because, uh, some people like to Slack or sometimes some people like to, you know, send a calendar invites or like whatever that is for communication or email. Like, let's agree on what that is for our team because that's gonna make us more effective and more efficient and we are starting to build trust. Uh, so that, that's one of the, the tools.

I just like to say, this is how I work and you have to figure out how to work with me. That seems like too much voting on with, no, we, we, I know, I know it's not up to you. We're using this tool.

Well, I, I like to be the type of leader that is a little bit more like, okay, let's like, we're a team, right?

Yeah.

Yes.

To each their own. Maybe, you know, we, we each have our own flavor.

Yeah. But I mean, maybe there's, there's a common ground and if, if all your team, like you do a better job and maybe it turns out all your team likes to communicate in Slack and do everything, but let's, and, and as this team, team starts growing, like, oh, now we start putting things in Google Drive and in the whatever other tool, right? And things get just wild as you grow.

They do for sure.

So having those agreements. And another thing is, uh, a, a tool that I, uh, call the experiment— Experimentation Guardrail Template. This is kind of a lightweight, racy tool that empowers people to, to have that freedom to experiment. So, you know, where can you just do things by yourself? Where do you need someone's buy-in? Right. And I can show you that too, if you want, or we can look at it.

Yeah. What does that mean? Light, lightweight, racy. Can you explain that?

I mean, you know, like a racy, that's kind of a more robust thing where you decide like how the team works with other teams and what are the responsibilities, right? And here it's just more of a lightweight thing where here, let me show you my document here. So here, for example, and I created this a while ago, so don't take all these examples as like, this is what it needs to be like. You need to adapt it, adapt it to your team, right? But basically you have on the left side, the types of projects and on the top, you have the, the types of approval. So more individual, something that is more like you need to have team buy-in versus director, VP, other teams, or CEO, for example. When you're writing articles for your blog, eventually, like, at least me as a leader, I always want the individual to have, like, we've set the, the guardrails, we know where we're going, so just go ahead and publish it. You don't need—

Yeah, this is helpful, 'cause it's like death by— for me, it was always like death by a million approvals, and it's like, this person needs to approve this thing, this person needs to approve this thing. They're saying like, hey, for this, for this thing, like, you have the freedom to be able to ship it. If it's, If it's this, if we're deciding on the venue for our event, of which we're gonna spend a million dollars on it, like these three people need to be involved in that decision.

100%. So here, this is like that lightweight decision-making tool. And so for example, here, byline article for the CEO, like you said, finding an event location. Of course the CEO's gonna have the final approval, but for, for things like adver— some ads or some social media posts or. Or an ad campaign. So maybe here you want to have that decision in the individual. You enable them to make that decision. Or, hey, this actually needs to go to the team, or these, you know, event selection, these needs, you need to have the VP involved in these ones. Or actually, for these buyer enablement, you will need feedback from the director of product or from the director of engineering. But this is something that you can decide, and as a team, everybody agrees. And this is a living document. So this, you create this now, but in 3 months from now, actually, you know, these people have grown. Like, we've, we don't see the need for this approval. Let's change it, right? But it, it allows them to experiment quickly without those bottlenecks.

Got it. Okay, cool. Helpful.

Nice. And so this is, uh, like I said, I call it the Experimentation Guardrail Template because I like to, you know, have the experimentation side there. So that's another tool to build that culture. And, um, you need to avoid those unnecessary layers, like, you know, that when the team grows, like, this is another thing. You started as head of marketing, you hire 2, 3 people, then the company starts to scale. Oh, now I need more PMMs, or I need, oh, we're starting to do channel marketing. And so now I need to hire these people. and it starts to grow. So when do you start having layers underneath? In my opinion, or the way I like to build my teams is like, let's try to break the layers and have just the one until it becomes like too large of a team that you can't do that, that you can no longer do that. But these, uh, mindset and the practices that we're gonna talk about later will help you have a lean team.

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Okay. I think those are like the basics for building that mindset. And the—

do you want to— well, I think we're kind of— we've, we've talked around it a little bit, but later in our notes we have this idea of like running marketing like a product team. But that's kind of the wrapper for everything that we talk about. Let's talk about that.

Yes, to build your, to run your team as a product team or engineering team, you need that mindset. And now that's where you start using some of the practices. First of all, you need a backlog. What does that mean? A prioritized list of work. Prioritized is a keyword here because all the work is going to be in order. And for that, you're going to start building, and I can show you another, a backlog, what it looks like. Here's an example. I posted this, I think, 2 years ago in the ExitFive community as an example. When you start a new job as head of marketing, this is how you, you build, um, your backlog and you have different columns here. So on the left side, you see long-term initiatives and you focus here 3 to 12 months. So this, this is a back burner of your ideas, projects, tactics. It can be big as an epic or smaller as a task. It doesn't matter because this is hasn't been refined, right? And they're not necessarily in order. Then you build another column here that is more short-term backlog. So this column has epics. So epics mean big projects and tasks that are smaller pieces of work. And this is constantly being reviewed and ordered by the marketing manager or the person who's in charge of the marketing department. Here in, in Agile terms, it would be the product owner.

Got it. So much of marketing is kind of like always on, like you're always running, there's an SEO, you're trying to rank for certain keywords to grow traffic, or you're always running ads. Like where does that, I've always wondered where does that fit in something like this?

So here, if, if you go another column to the right, that would be the sprint backlog and that's what you're doing for your next 2 weeks. And here it's a lot more refined. It's been ordered. The team has agreed on what that this is what they're going to do and finish. And here we would add the most like the, those lights on type of campaigns in for some teams, depending on how much of that is part of this, you can label it differently. Like, you know, that is an always on campaign. So you can play, this is a Trello board, but you can do this in Jira, like all the other project management tools. And here you can see how I. Created some tags for different types of campaigns, like demand generation versus partner marketing versus product marketing more, but you can build those like tags with whatever you want.

Yep.

The important thing is to have that visible because those things that are your lights on, they take time from your team and maybe that's 20% of your time or whatever amount. It needs to be visible because you, when you prioritize, you need to decide, okay, what are we doing versus not doing?

Is there someone, does someone on the team own this or it's like the team the team is like, hey, we need to manage all of our work in here. Here's the system. Everyone's responsible for updating this. And then each, you know, each week you're looking at what work is coming in.

So the marketing director, VP, whatever, like the person, the head of marketing here needs to own this. And that's that the PO role and they need to be on this and the team can add their, add their, their work like there, they need to be adding the work. And with AI, there's a lot, like there's a lot of automations that you can create after, a call, you can automate, you know, the summary and creating tasks in, in these tools. But at the end of the day, you need to have the director, like, making the calls, like, okay, no, this needs to go higher up, this needs to go lower up, lower. And you can have that conversation with the team, right? And so the sprint backlog, that's what you've committed to do for the next 2 weeks. Then here's the doing, and this is where we go back to the exercise we did earlier. It's essential to limit work in progress. Because if you're doing 10 things here, too many things here, then you're not completing. So don't have more depending on the size of the team, but don't have more than 3 to 5 to 10 things in a like card.

I think it's really helpful to just like, I like how I usually rotate against this stuff. I'm more like just ideas are going to win and let's execute. But I do make a mistake of like, there's just so much stuff going on and I often unintentionally send people in lots of different directions because I'm just like a fountain of ideas, good and bad, and it all seems important. I like this idea of like the head of marketing, really the job is to like manage the work of the marketing organization. And so it's not, you know, you, you run this and then it's really helpful to be like, yeah, actually wait, we're— look at how much stuff is on our board. Look at how much stuff we're doing right now that's in progress. Everyone's burnt out, everyone's stressed, and we're not hitting our goals. Like, this can't be right. Like, we gotta move this around. It, it must be, it creates a calmer way of working also when you can see like, here are the two big things we're working on right now. Here's what's coming up next. I, I can, I can get around to this.

Absolutely. And this is the best tool to kind of not push back on, on your sales team or anything, but like someone comes to you, someone who outranks you comes to you and is asking for, hey, can you do this quick one-pager for me? Oh, we really need to do this. Like, okay, we're going to put it on the backlog and we're going to prioritize it against the rest of the things we have going on, right? And that was the tool. Like, I was talking to a CMO of the 36-people marketing team, and this is the tool they used. Oh, we're going to put it in the backlog and then prioritize it against the rest of the work. And so you're not telling them, no, we're not doing this. We're telling them, okay, we need to see how this compares to the other work we're doing, to the other priorities.

Yep.

And so besides this doing column here, let me continue. We have the dependencies column. And here, this is a new one that I've introduced for my teams, especially when you work with other, with other teams, like with sales, with product, like depending, or, and you're, or with even with vendors, like when you work with vendors, and you're depending on them sending you something. So this is where you, you want to let the team know that, hey, I can't move forward with this project. Because I'm waiting on the approval from someone, right? Like from the head of sales or from the product or from the vendor. And so if it's visual, the head of marketing can come here and like, okay, every day once we have, and I'm going to tell you, tell you about the standup, but it's going to come here and you're going to raise the concern. Okay, I'm going to go talk to that person and tell them we can't move forward because of this, right? Like, and the more you have this, the more like that the role of the head of marketing becomes like, Removing those impediments that the team, like, maybe they didn't know until you have the one-on-one and the person tells you about it, or maybe they send you a, an email, it gets buried, you know, this is the space to really like focus on, we need to deliver this quickly and we can't because it's blocked by this.

I want you to talk more about the, like, you know, standups and the run, like how we run this. But before we, I think I understand all this. This is good. One thing that keeps coming to my mind when I see this though is like, is there, there, there needs to be another thing, which is like, here are the main goals for our company and team right now, right? Yes. Because then that, that's how you would rank these accordingly, which is like, we're doing this because this maps back to this bigger goal. Can you just briefly touch on how you do that?

100%. So what I do is you create the, your strategy on a page with your business goals and revenue goals, right? Then your marketing goals, then your strategies and your tactics. So here, every time you're going to have, for example, for the sprint backlog, um, you're going to have your, what the goals are for those, that specific sprint, but that is connected to a kind of bigger epic. I don't know if I have it here. Here you'll have a bigger epic that explains this is connected to these corporate strategy and these goals, and this is why. And then you have that big one and then the smaller cards that connect to that one.

Got it. Okay.

This is the backlog. And then there's different things that you do, like the concept that I mentioned earlier, you want to limit work in progress, similar to what we said with that exercise that we did, right?

Yep.

So you don't want to have too many cards in this, uh, and this column. And you want to, when you're chunking up the work, you want to chunk as a minimum viable increment of, of value. So think about, okay, a campaign, for example. Tell me, give me an example of your, in your company, Dave, like a campaign that you're running, uh, some, some type of work that someone in your team is doing.

Sure. Right now a big campaign would be selling tickets for Drive 2026, which is our event in September.

Okay. So for selling that, you're doing certain things, right? Like you're certainly like, what, what are you doing, for example?

Yeah, everything that would fall under there would be like finalizing the speakers, getting the content, the run of show, like the, the what, the packaging. People need to know the packaging for the product all the way through, like the website, the landing pages, the emails, the ads, the offer, the promotional strategy. All of those things would fall under that.

Okay, so think about the minimum amount of value that you could deliver. Like, do you need to have all the speakers set up for you to promote the event? For example, or do you need to have all the emails and all the, like, everything done before you start, like, moving forward? What is the minimum thing that you could do for that campaign that you would create those little, those smaller tasks that when you move them to done in 2 weeks, you've already delivered value, you've already, uh, gotten approval, like, from, from some sponsors, like, and it's different in, in each company and for each even within the company for different types of work.

Well, it's funny. It's funny. This is literally— I was raised by product founders, and so I guess I've unintentionally— this is how we operate always. So it's interesting to hear you teach this back. And I do think people need a dose of this, which is like my brain always goes to what's the minimum viable thing here. For example, like in the Drive example, we could have waited for all that, but we just said, hey, people know this exists. We've sold like 150 tickets with no content. Already, which is amazing, right? And when I worked for— this was at Drift when I worked with the two founders, Dave and Elias, our product guys. Everything was always— I was the first marketing person there. And so everything was always like pushing back on me. If I'm like, okay, we're going to— we need a new website. Like, well, yeah, it's going to be like 90 days. Like, yeah, no, but you could literally just get a Squarespace account and change the homepage tonight, couldn't you? And I'm like, yeah, okay. And that was such an— that's such an amazing way to build because marketing like should be it taught me that marketing needs to be just iterative like that. So, and I was thinking when you were saying that in my head, it's very easy to just have all the objections in the world. Well, well, well, the, the, we don't want to do the minimum viable thing here because, you know, we need this and we need this. And I think those are all just usually excuses. There's almost always like everything builds on each other and you get, you get product feedback that way. We used to say that like you need to give your ideas oxygen. And so if just like all this stuff is just sitting in your Trello board in, in, in marketing, like I love your, your idea of like taking it back to like what's the, quickest thing, what's the quickest time to value?

Yeah, absolutely. Because yeah, it goes back to the example of earlier, like you're already delivering value and the way you do this. So some of the examples, like you have the backlog, right? It's prioritized and you have the head of marketing that has gone through that. Like everybody has access to this and you even want to give access to other people outside of marketing so that they see what you're working on, right? So, but you, uh, you start planning for 2 weeks and you do 2-week sprints. First you do a refinement depending on how big your team is and depending on how many, like, specializations you, you might have. You might do refinement individual, like individually or smaller groups, like, but everybody needs to know what they want to achieve in the next month and they have like the big epic and then start reducing that into those smaller chunks of work. And then once you bring them to the, to the planning, you have everyone together and you want to guide them. Okay, this is the goal. This is how it's connected to their larger company goals. And this is what needs to get done. And then you start adding the, um, the cards to your sprint. And then the team starts saying, well, actually, if I want to do this, I'm going to need a designer. Okay. So the designer knows that he's going to be doing that and the writer and the whatever, you know, like all the people involved. And with AI, things change, right? Because you might, the smaller the company is, the more like you do everything, but as you grow, you're going to have to rely on other people in your team, right? So you need to commit here. And then the other person is going to say, no, actually, I have all these other things to do. I can't, I can't do that. Okay. And the head of marketing comes in there and like, we have the conversation. Okay. You're right. Then we're going to, we're going to have to, to not do this or actually, no, this is the most important thing. So let's look at the other things that you're going, you have going on, then what do you think can be dropped? Right? So. It forces that conversation and the transparency around the whole team. So everybody knows what everyone else has to do and it's accountable for it.

I think it's also just healthy because it's like the more frequently you check in on the work that's going on, there's so many things. It's like recurring credit card charges that you don't even know that you're paying for and you don't go audit it and you're like, oh, I'm not paying. I'm still paying for this app. We just, we take on so much work in marketing that it's healthy to revisit like, what are we actually doing?

Right. And so you plan and then you start working and then you have daily standups. And here, like, I'm not telling you, you have to do this, like, because some teams do it like every day, 10 minutes on video call, especially if you're remote or if you're in person, you just do it in person in front of the board, or you could do it in Slack, or if someone can't join, they can just send their update in Slack, but basically In your daily standup, you tell them what you did yesterday, what I'm going to do today, and any blockers. And that's where that dependencies column that I was telling you about is really, um, yeah, but this is supposed to be super quick, like 1, 2 minutes per person. So don't start explaining the history of everything that you're doing, right?

It should be a meeting that everyone can go to because it's like you could, you just join it from anywhere and in 5, 10 minutes you're done.

Exactly. Exactly. So you do that and then by the end of the sprint, you do a review. And here I've done it in different ways and depending on how big the company is, for example, at a Series A startup, I had 4 people. I did the review with, with my team and I invited stakeholders. I invited the CRO and the head of sales, right? And, and customer success. And so we would review the work, the outcomes, and we always start with a why, how every campaign is connected to your goal so that everybody understands the, the value. And you explain and you review, and then you let your, your team, like your sales team, like ask you questions. So, why didn't you do that? And, and so, they're involved in what you're doing, right? And you're involved in what they're doing as well, right? I've done this in my last company, public company, like 500 people. I didn't invite the sales team, but we did record the session. So, we had a 1-hour session with 12 people, and we were all explaining what we were doing, and then we had a summary, but we packaged it, send it to everyone in the organization could have access to it. And so you could see what is marketing actually doing. We tell you what we're gonna do and we, we tell you what we've done every other week.

Yeah, it's just like the— that's why the engine— engineers are— engineers are great because they want to be able to track all the things that they're doing to show that we did, we did them. In marketing, if you— this gives you just a better paper trail for all the stuff that, that you're doing and also forces you to organize it in, in the right way, right? Okay, so there's Daily standup, you do these 2-week sprints. We talked about the board, we talked about the dependencies.

Yes.

Planning. What else?

What else? So the retrospective, and this is only exclusive, this is an exclusive session for the team to review how they've worked and what has worked, what hasn't worked. So you do like, there's different ways of running a retrospective, but basically it's about like what has worked, what hasn't worked, what do we need to start doing?

Yeah. Oh, that's good. It gives you like a space to kind of talk honestly about like how things are going in more real time and take some of the emotions out of it also, right?

Yeah. And here you talk about the actual campaign, but you also talk about the team dynamics. Like, hey, it just didn't work. Like, this person was out all week. And so that really hurt us. Like, we need to plan better if we know that someone is going to be out.

Or like, we, we shipped, we shipped this thing, but it was like such an insanely stressful and busy week and everyone's pissed off at each other now. And like, clearly there's something that's broken.

Yeah. And this helps like build again that trust in the team, like going back to the mindset that I mentioned earlier, it's just, you reinforce that constantly with all these little events and these little things that you do. This seems so obvious to you, David, because you've, like you mentioned earlier, you've been in close to product teams, engineering teams, and SaaS team, like SaaS companies, they're inherently like more savvy. That's maybe what, one-third or one-fourth of all the marketing teams out there?

Oh, for sure.

There's so many other marketers in Exit 5 that just don't, hadn't even heard about this, right?

Not in Exit 5, but other places probably. Yeah.

Okay.

No, I'm just being silly. Yeah.

Okay.

No, I think, I think, I think it's true. There's a lot of, this is what, uh, this is what's frustrating for a lot of people who like marketing as a, as a job. It's like, so sometimes the work, the internal work gets in the way of doing the actual stuff you like to do, you know?

Right, right. I guess my take, and here Dave, we can go move to the kind of the last part of the episode where it's just like, what is the one recommendation? What can these heads of marketing do when they go back to work on Monday? They've been thinking about this on the weekend. They're like, oh, I love this. How do I do this?

Like, yeah.

So my recommendation is like, just stop, start thinking, reflect on, okay, if you could actually focus on 3 to 5 things that have the most impact for your organization in the next couple of weeks, what would that be? So think about that and say, okay, why, why is that? And then, could I do something even smaller than that that could get me closer to those goals? And so start thinking through how can you start making things smaller, those smaller increments of value. And if you're ready to kind of start bringing that, um, transparency to your teams, yeah, create a board, start adding some of these chunks, start like, start small. These will help you just understand that there's a better way of working that is going to make your life easier and your team's life easier.

Yeah, this is like, this is good timing for this. Let's, let's position this as this is like spring cleaning for your marketing team. Like you need to listen to this episode, think about some of the things that Maria's talking about. And the takeaway is like pausing and being like, huh, does my team, do we know what the 2 or 3 big goals are right now? Do we have our work planned out? Should we be trying to operate in 2-week sprints? Like, Is there value in running retrospectives? Like those types of questions, that would be, that's a huge victory for me if someone listens to this episode and does that and now take the time. And then I love what Maria just said there, which is like, instead of being paralyzed by the whole planning of it, even just going back to our multitasking exercise, like most likely there's one or two things. Dan and I in our company, we call them big rocks. There's like one or two things that if you just nailed that thing, would that make the rest of the other things like not matter so much? You know, when you like smash that big thing on your to-do list and it's like, all the other little notes you made yourself are like, oh, that's, that's not really important. I accomplished my big thing and that's where 80% of the value comes from, you know?

Right. Yeah. So if, if you're able to do that and also keep in mind, like, at the end of the day, why do you wanna do this? Because you want, you don't wanna burn out. You wanna be able to adapt. You want to be able to move quickly, right? So keep always that in mind because otherwise this just can be like a bunch of tactics that you're like, why am I even doing this? This doesn't work for me. But always keep in mind the why, right?

Yeah, this is great. All right, look, okay, so you can find, find Maria on LinkedIn, connect with her, send her a message, or find her in ExitFive and tell her that you listen to this episode and you got inspired to like go clean up your marketing work. And she has a bunch of resources and tips. I'm sure if you, you know, connect with her or DM her, she'll be happy to answer your questions. Maria, thanks for reaching out. Thanks for doing this episode. We definitely needed to do an episode on this topic of organizing your work and why you should think about running a marketing team like a product team. So I'm glad you did it and it was good to see you and connect with you here on the pod.

Thank you, Dave.

This is great.

Thanks.

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