Are you a VP of Marketing who’s a manager or a VP of Marketing who’s an executive?

According to Reid Hoffman, *managers* focus on making sure the work gets done, whereas *executives* design the team, processes, and culture to ensure the right work gets done.

When I take a hard look at the VPs of marketing I encounter, most are executing at the level of managers. Only a handful are operating as executives.

So which one are you?

What Exactly Makes You a CMO?

Directors of Marketing are managers who oversee the day-to-day marketing operations and ensure that things are running smoothly.

CMOs, in contrast, are executives. They aren’t just concerned with ensuring the work gets done. Instead, they design the org structure, the processes, the reporting, and the culture to ensure the right work gets done. By designing the environment, they are able to influence what gets done beyond the people and projects they directly manage. 

As a CMO myself, I think of this as my “Growth Operating System.” 

My “GrowthOS” has five pillars:

• People System

• Process System

• Data System

• Meeting System 

• Project System

Here’s my process.

Create a Growth Model (discrete from Finance Model)

My first step in applying my GrowthOS to a new business is to create a model (a literal spreadsheet). The model will typically have key levers such as Media Spend, Lead to Opportunity Conversion Rate, Sales Team’s Close Rate, and Customer Retention Rate. 

Creating this type of model is an important step, as your key levers will be the main drivers of the company’s growth. I’ve seen even mid-career finance folks employ some pretty reductive “magical thinking” in their models, like assuming that media spend is declining while revenue is dramatically increasing when their models show that there’s actually no link between the two!  

Another great magical thinking example: “user growth is 15% every month, so let’s just carry that forward for all of next year.”  Most folks don’t see clearly that under the hood are several growth levers such as word of mouth, SEO, virality, and paid ads—all of which actually drive user growth to various degrees. 

Once I have this model, I use it to educate the leadership team on what these key growth levers are, and build an understanding of how much a lever needs to move to maintain growth. 

Design the People System

Once I’ve modeled the business and defined the key growth levers, I obsess over how to create pods organized around moving each of these levers. Pods, made famous by Jeff Bezos, are small two-pizza teams who have all the tools and resources to succeed in moving a lever. At an early-stage startup, you’ll likely have such a small team that you can only organize around one or two levers—and that’s alright! 

The thing that Bezos writes about (but almost everyone glosses over) when discussing pods is that these teams should be self-sufficient and should minimize collaboration with outsiders. That’s part of the genesis of AWS: Bezos saw that many teams were competing against each other to get the support of the web server team, each with its own slightly different configuration requirements. So naturally, someone created a queue and started prioritizing requests to configure each of these unique web services. But then teams started lobbying and negotiating, wasting valuable time. Clearly, that won’t do.

So Bezos abstracted away the issue: There would be a Web Services team, a standard way of spinning up a web service, and he’d empower each team to configure their own instance without talking to a human being. 

Now here’s the really hard part: Instead of focusing on getting more things done, which is immediately gratifying and makes me feel like I’m doing my part, I have to steel myself to think longer-term. So I try to focus on helping more teams become self-sufficient in the same way AWS did.

I did this, for example, by ensuring that our email pod has its own freelance designer, freelance copywriter, and its own meeting. This means they’re never negotiating with the Product Marketing team or the Paid Ads team for bandwidth. As long as that pod’s north star metric is headed in the right direction, I don’t need to butt in—and in fact, I haven’t attended that team’s weekly prioritization meeting in over a year. 

Increase Self-Sufficiency

Another tangible example of this is making things like Onboarding and Internal Resources more self-sufficient. For example, multiple teams need to create, read, and update data related to customers. Rather than the Customer Success team having to Slack the product and sales team, we can log all that data in Hubspot, create rules so Sales can’t close Deals without that data, and ask Engineers to push Product data into the CRM so that Customer Success is self-sufficient. 

I recently worked with a small startup that uses Notion for their OKR planning, team meeting agendas and notes, and project plans. I found this incredible. Though I joined as an outsider, I was able to quickly ramp up on every team’s OKRs, review their team meeting minutes for the past 4 weeks, and review project plans for the highest priority projects, all without talking to anyone. 

At a much larger unicorn that heavily relies on Highspot, I was responsible for a key strategic partnership. I was able to dive into Highspot and review every piece of related marketing collateral, sales collateral, customer stories, and webinar recordings. In a few hours, I had essentially become familiar with every campaign we’d ever done with this key partner, and we could now repurpose or refresh these assets rather than start from scratch. 

Design the Data System 

Peter Drucker famously said that measurement is the key to improvement—so it’s disappointing that a lot of organizations still underestimate the importance of having a working data system.

Research has shown that information workers are highly motivated by the acceptance of their tribe, so what you choose to measure in meetings is critical to driving how much the tribe accepts you. 

Let’s take our email pod example again. It boggles my mind how many email teams, even at ostensibly data-driven unicorn success stories, primarily report on open rates and click-through rates—though I’m not exactly surprised. It’s a matter of convenience: Those data points are available out of the box in email tools.

But what’s the objective of sending more emails? At the top of the funnel, it might be to convert Leads to MQLs. And at the middle of the funnel, it might be to push MQLs to become Qualified Opportunities. That’s why I’m adamant about putting the right infrastructure into place so my email team can report on exactly that.

Here’s a mockup of how our email report is structured:

The details here are important. We group campaigns together that target the same Audience Segment and that have the same Objective. We also include a column for the number of conversions to each Objective—in this case, the objective for most of these emails was Book a Call with Sales, so we included a column for the number of Meetings Booked. This allows us to understand how each email is driving toward our broader company objective: Driving more meetings for the Sales Team. It also allows the whole team to quickly see that the campaigns highlighted in green were the top performers. 

It’s also important to include the Owner column: Now that we know which emails were our top performers, we can easily trace why. We can congratulate the driver, Brian, in public, and ask him to teach the team how he created our top-performing emails. 

Getting to this level of data across all our email sends took months of work, but it paid off: More than just opens and clicks, which are easy to measure but don’t really matter, this report connects each IC on the email pod to the company’s broader goals. If they’re doing well on this report, they’re moving the north star metric for their pod, which means they’re driving a leading indicator for revenue. And if they’re doing well on this report, they’ll find acceptance within their tribe—which, at our core, is what we as humans truly desire. 

Designing the Process System

As the team grows and evolves, the meetings required must evolve as well and become more specialized.

I recently worked with a startup whose marketing team grew from 5 a year ago to 12 today. We typically met for a 30-minute check-in twice a week, where the VP of Marketing would make announcements and we’d review the team’s Asana boards together. 

When the team was small, this schedule was sufficient: it provided transparency for the whole team into what was getting worked on, and created a space to connect on any burning issues.

But as we grew, this meeting started to break down. Any time a burning issue was uncovered, any discussion, however necessary, was shut down for the sake of time. But there was no other place for these discussions to happen. I started to feel that the team was missing a space where we could have these necessary discussions.

The problem, I realized, is that the team had grown to the point that we were actually three unique pods, and each pod needed to have its own workstream with its own smaller meeting for deeper discussions. The VP was using this meeting to get the information he needed to move forward, but he forgot that the meeting isn’t just for him—it’s for the team as well. We needed to create a space where a small team had the time to workshop deeper problems. 

Fast-forward to a few months later. We now have an hour-long marketing department meeting for our team of 15. We use the time to review data together, have team members present show—and-tells on what’s working, and do team shoutouts. 

We also have smaller pod meetings for email marketing, demand gen, and product marketing. This is where the deeper discussions are happening and where project updates can be discussed in more detail with a group that shares enough context and domain expertise for a deeper conversation to be fruitful.

Designing the Project System

Helping prioritize and sequence projects is probably one of the highest-leverage things a startup exec can do. Darius Contractor, the former head of growth at Airtable, has built a solid Airtable template for his flavor of this same approach. Enjoy!

So Are You CMO Material?

In the past, a functional marketing org would spend a quarter to ship just 1 (one!!!) campaign. These days are long over: Today’s marketing orgs should be organized around moving key metrics, and they should work in an agile way, shipping funnel improvements every week or two.  

Marketing, in my view, is best positioned to be out-in-front, leading the way for less-data-driven disciplines like sales and product. Marketing deals in leading indicators rather than lagging indicators, so when it comes to data, marketing should be out-in-front of finance as well.

This brings us back to the beginning of this discussion: A good CMO should be a unifier who can nurture a collaborative, cross-functional environment across the C-suite.

“These CMOs are masters at fostering cross-functional collaboration,” states this McKinsey report. “They ensure that marketing has a clearly defined role in the eyes of C-suite peers; they adopt the language and mindset of other C-suite executives; and they articulate how marketing can help meet the C-suite’s needs. They also establish mutual accountability and a shared vision with other executives.”

And if these traits fit you, then don’t wait for that title bump. Instead, start operating at the level of a CMO and watch your business thrive.