Is there a right way to run marketing?

How To Run a Calm Marketing Organization (aka Why You Should Run Marketing Like The Product Team)

I've done over 300 podcast interviews with VPs, CMOs, and marketing leaders over the last four years (weird flex, I know).

But there's something I've noticed about the ones who are on top of their game as marketing leaders. It's not that they're more creative or smarter than everyone else (though most of them are).

It's that they actually have an operating system for marketing.

A rhythm. A cadence. A way of running the function that goes beyond annual planning and quarterly OKRs.

I learned about "Agile Marketing" (I dont know if anyone still calls it this, but I'm using it anyway) way back when I was at Constant Contact, and I've thought about it ever since.

We don't call it that at Exit Five but it's basically what we do — run weekly sprints. We're constantly shipping, and I'm convinced this is one of the most underrated things a marketing leader can get right.

So when Maria Scheifler reached out about coming on my podcast to talk about running marketing like a product team, I said yes immediately. I wanted to have more content on this topic because it's highly underrated.

Maria has been VP of Marketing across a Series A startup, an education membership org, and a $250M public company. Now she's a fractional CMO and she's basically built her whole point of view around this idea: most marketing teams don't have a strategy problem. They have an operating system problem. The work isn't organized, priorities aren't clear, nothing ships on time, and the team is constantly on the verge of burnout — and marketing is not hitting goals, so it's under more pressure from the CEO. Bad bad bad. Let's help fix that.

Here are three things from our conversation that can help you have a stronger point of view on how you should be running marketing beyond "just use Claude" or "we should be on TikTok."

(Sorry, I am extra sassy today. Everything is making me angry lol, ok where was I?)

1. Build a backlog and stop saying yes to everything (!)

A backlog is just a prioritized list of work. Every campaign, every project, every random ask from sales sits in one place, ranked in order. That's it. Sounds simple but few marketing teams actually stick to this and it can make all the difference in having a calm work environment.

Most marketing teams operate from a mix of Slack messages, slide decks, Asana lists nobody updates, and whatever the CEO mentioned in standup last Tuesday. And then they wonder why everything feels chaotic.

Maria's point: when the head of sales walks over and says "we need a one-pager for this deal by Friday," your answer isn't yes and it isn't no. It's "we'll put it on the backlog and prioritize it against everything else we have going on."

Perfect.

That phrase is the unlock. You're not telling sales no. You're saying we have a system, and we're going to weigh this against the work that's already in flight. Nine times out of ten, they back off when they realize what they're displacing.

Maria walked me through a simple Trello board she built where the columns are: long-term initiatives, short-term backlog, sprint backlog, doing, dependencies, done. The "dependencies" column is the sleeper. It's where work goes when you're stuck waiting on a vendor, sales, or product. Making that visible is how the head of marketing actually earns their salary. Your job becomes unblocking your team, not assigning them more stuff.

2. Plan in two-week sprints, not annual marketing plans.

The annual marketing plan is mostly a fiction we all agree to participate in. Use it as your guiding principle from a goals standpoint (but beyond that it's incredibly difficult to plan for).

You build it in November. By February, two competitors have launched something new, you lost your top sales rep, your CEO has a fresh idea from a podcast HE NEEDS YOU TO IMPLEMENT NOW… and half the plan is irrelevant.

Maria's argument: yes, you still need a real strategy on a page. Goals, revenue targets, the big plays for the year. But the actual work should be planned in two-week chunks. You commit to what you're shipping in the next two weeks. You do a quick daily standup (10 minutes, what I did yesterday, what I'm doing today, what's blocked). You review the work at the end of the sprint and invite stakeholders in. Then you do a retro just for the team to talk about what worked, what didn't, and how you're going to operate differently next time.

She told me about running these sprint reviews at her last public company. Twelve people, one hour, everyone presents what they shipped. Recorded. Shared across the org. Suddenly the "what does marketing actually do?" question stops getting asked. Because the receipts are right there in Slack.

3. Start finishing, stop starting.

This is the line I can't stop thinking about. Probably because I am the biggest culprit of this and it was hard to hear…

Most marketing teams have 8, 10, 12 projects in motion at any given time. None of them are close to done. Everyone is busy. Nothing ships. Or the stuff that ships doesn't actually move the needle with sales.

Maria's lesson: start finishing things before you start new things. Kinda like how I make my kids clean up the mess in the kitchen before they want to go start that new activity in the playroom I guess.

I'll give you the example she pulled out of me on the pod. Right now at Exit Five, the big campaign is selling tickets to Drive 2026, our event in September. There's a ton of work that goes into that. Speakers, sessions, run of show, the website, emails, ads, sponsorships, the whole thing.

The instinct for most marketing teams is to wait until it's all ready before launching anything. Maria pushed me on this. What's the minimum viable thing you can ship right now that delivers value?

For us, the answer was: just tell people the event exists and let them buy tickets. We've sold over 250 tickets and we don't even have the full speaker lineup announced yet. That's the move. Shrink it down to the smallest thing you could ship. Get it into the world. My old boss used to tell me you need to give your ideas oxygen. Or as Dan (CEO at Exit Five and my email editor here) loves to say "momentum creates clarity."

If you're sitting on a half-done campaign that's been "almost ready" for three weeks, that's the one to finish this week. Not start something new.

Bonus: Stop Context Switching (You're Making Work Much Harder Than It Needs To Be)

Maria made me do an exercise on the pod that I'm still thinking about because I am on America's Most Wanted List for this one. She had me fill out a grid two different ways: once by jumping between columns (multitasking), once by completing one column at a time (focus).

The multitasking version took me 1 minute and 11 seconds. The focused version took 22 seconds. I am not a math guy but Claude tells me that's about 3.2x faster, or roughly 70% less time.

That's the actual tax of context switching. And it's why marketing teams that are running 12 campaigns at once feel busier and ship less than teams running three campaigns to completion.

Go listen to the full episode if you want to hear me embarrass myself in real time (or, more importantly, get more efficient about how you run marketing).

– Dave

P.S. Is this landing with you? Do you have something like this? What does your marketing operating system actually look like right now? Hit reply and tell me how your team decides what to work on each week, I'd love to hear.

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