Marketing Org and Stack

The Guide

5 key steps synthesized from 5 experts.

1

Diagnose your primary growth bottleneck

Use the Fuel vs Engine framework to decide if you need creators or distributors. This prevents over-hiring for roles that do not address your immediate constraints. Look for versatile generalists in your first hires who can navigate these resource constraints.

Featured guest perspectives

"Forget the product marketing content partner, demand and growth, forget all of it, and just think of marketing as you need a fuel and you need an engine. And goal is like all the things that you're creating. I mean this should be obvious, but it's the content, it's the word, it's the design in some regard. All the things that you're making, all the things that are going to add value."

— Emily Kramer

2

Build your foundational MarTech stack

Use a build and buy strategy where you purchase SaaS for the 90 percent standard infrastructure and build custom logic internally. Ensure you have a formal tracking plan and a tag manager like Segment in place to avoid data silos. Identify pain points where the team cannot move forward because no one understands existing tool setups.

Featured guest perspectives

"Usually around I would call it a hundred to 150 people is the critical mass where you can't just have a village approach to systems and tools much like in the IT org, if it was a village approach to SSO businesses would be in a lot of danger. That's where you typically start to see the question of, all right, we need a systems and tools person. We need somebody to manage these systems and manage that platform."

— Austin Hay

"Everybody thinks that marketing technology is just the third party tools, but actually it's designing, architecting and building that stuff on top of your third party tools. That's how you actually have a lot of velocity is thinking about not just build versus buy. It's build and buy now. So, you buy the tool to get 90% of the way there and then you build the cool thing on top with the other 10%."

— Austin Hay

"Digital tracking is measuring marketing performance through UTM codes or tracking pixels. When tracking is discussed, “last touch” or “last click” attribution is always mentioned as the default form of measurement on the internet."

— Lenny Rachitsky

3

Structure the team based on business model

For B2C companies, embed MarTech in Growth or Product to stay close to the user funnel. For B2B companies, place the role within Rev Ops or Business Ops to align with sales operations. Hire strategic thinkers who can manage models rather than just manual executors.

Featured guest perspectives

"Classically in a B2B business you see it in rev ops or some types of systems role because you have to serve not only users coming into your funnel, but then the businesses that you're serving afterwards. In a B2C business, your user funnel is actually really simple acquiring users and you're getting them into your product and then product is taking them over. There's no additional CRM, so usually your CDP is the source of truth and that's where you might actually see marketing technology fit in with growth a lot more."

— Austin Hay

"We have more people now than we've ever had, but the nature of the work that they do is more strategic. It's more about modeling, validation, asking the right questions, being focused around creative levers. And less so the like trench work of implementation and bid modifiers at the keyword level on Google search, and some of the really hardcore manual analysis we had to do."

— Jonathan Becker

4

Modernize your measurement approach

Transition from deterministic matching to probabilistic modeling to account for privacy changes. Use high quality data from a representative subset to extrapolate total performance across channels. This shift ensures your attribution remains actionable as tracking fades.

Featured guest perspectives

"So, what that means is these ad networks are becoming more complex, sophisticated, and interesting, right at the same time that it's harder for marketers to really understand how they're spending money. And so I am paying a lot of attention to how marketers make decisions with probabilistic data because most of the work that I'm doing now is actually saying, well, given that we don't have determinist data about a per certain audience or where somebody came from, how can I find other information that will create a model for 30% of the population and we can use that to extrapolate to a hundred."

— Austin Hay

5

Scale your content and creative operations

Move from founder led content to a specialized internal team of at least five people to maintain quality and volume. Incorporate AI tools to accelerate visual mockups and production while focusing human effort on strategy. Avoid outsourcing content to writers who do not understand your core product DNA.

Featured guest perspectives

"On our creative group, we can come up with mockups, in literally, 1% of the time that it took. And so you still have to understand what questions to ask of the AI and be capable of iterating, but these rough drafts that you might show the artwork of to a client to say, "Do we like this more or do we like this more?" That's AI generated."

— Jonathan Becker

"The best content will be produced by people who truly care about the product/business/topic—normally, the founders or a passionate full-time employee."

— Lenny Rachitsky

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Guest Perspectives

Deep dive into what 4 podcast guests shared about marketing org and stack.

Austin Hay 4 quotes

Listen to episode →

"Usually around I would call it a hundred to 150 people is the critical mass where you can't just have a village approach to systems and tools much like in the IT org, if it was a village approach to SSO businesses would be in a lot of danger. That's where you typically start to see the question of, all right, we need a systems and tools person. We need somebody to manage these systems and manage that platform."

Tactical:

Identify 'pain points' where the team cannot move forward because no one understands how a specific tool was originally set up.
Monitor for when growth engineers or PMs become overwhelmed by vendor management and system architecture.
Hire a dedicated owner once the legal and liability risks of unmanaged SaaS contracts become a significant business concern.

"Everybody thinks that marketing technology is just the third party tools, but actually it's designing, architecting and building that stuff on top of your third party tools. That's how you actually have a lot of velocity is thinking about not just build versus buy. It's build and buy now. So, you buy the tool to get 90% of the way there and then you build the cool thing on top with the other 10%."

Tactical:

Purchase best-in-class tools like CDPs or analytics platforms to handle 90% of the standard infrastructure.
Reserve engineering resources to build the final 10% of custom functionality that is unique to your business stack.
Appoint a single owner responsible for the data schema and the logic of how data flows between different third-party systems.

"So, what that means is these ad networks are becoming more complex, sophisticated, and interesting, right at the same time that it's harder for marketers to really understand how they're spending money. And so I am paying a lot of attention to how marketers make decisions with probabilistic data because most of the work that I'm doing now is actually saying, well, given that we don't have determinist data about a per certain audience or where somebody came from, how can I find other information that will create a model for 30% of the population and we can use that to extrapolate to a hundred."

Tactical:

Shift from relying solely on deterministic matching to developing probabilistic models for ad performance.
Use high-quality data from a subset of your audience to create predictive models for the entire population.
Closely monitor how ad networks are evolving their matching algorithms to adapt to the loss of IDFAs and other identifiers.

"Classically in a B2B business you see it in rev ops or some types of systems role because you have to serve not only users coming into your funnel, but then the businesses that you're serving afterwards. In a B2C business, your user funnel is actually really simple acquiring users and you're getting them into your product and then product is taking them over. There's no additional CRM, so usually your CDP is the source of truth and that's where you might actually see marketing technology fit in with growth a lot more."

Tactical:

Embed MarTech within the Growth function for B2C models to keep tools closely aligned with user acquisition.
Place the role within Rev Ops or Business Technology for B2B models to ensure end-to-end data flow between marketing and sales.
Consider a 'Marketing Product' (MarProd) structure in massive organizations to serve marketing as an internal product customer.

View all skills from Austin Hay →

Elena Verna 3.0 1 quote

"Never ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of UK marketing site produce good performance results. New CMO comes in designing their website or designing the brand as if it was reflection of their personal taste, and oftentimes it's promised with our acquisition is going to go up and it never materializes into anything meaningful."

Tactical:

Prioritize data-driven product experiments over aesthetic rebrands or website overhauls.
Be skeptical of growth promises tied to redesigns that reflect personal taste rather than customer needs.
Focus roadmap items on core growth levers rather than marketing site cosmetic changes.

View all skills from Elena Verna 3.0 →

Emily Kramer 3 quotes

Listen to episode →

"Forget the product marketing content partner, demand and growth, forget all of it, and just think of marketing as you need a fuel and you need an engine. And goal is like all the things that you're creating. I mean this should be obvious, but it's the content, it's the word, it's the design in some regard. All the things that you're making, all the things that are going to add value."

Tactical:

Evaluate whether the company would grow faster with more high-quality content or better distribution of existing content.
Avoid building an expensive distribution engine before you have high-quality fuel to put into it.
Hire for fuel first if you have an existing outbound engine (like SDRs) that lacks a compelling or valuable message.

"And there's such a range of being a deep specialist. You have people that are just deep SEO specialists or deep paid search specialists or writers and they love to write and they write long form content and that's definitely a part of what marketing does, but it's a specialty for sure. And then you have people that are just very much generalists and can handle all areas of marketing."

Tactical:

Prioritize business model experience over industry or audience familiarity during the hiring process.
Look for generalists for early roles who can handle multiple marketing functions rather than deep specialists.
Screen for marketers who can learn the specific product and audience quickly through a fresh set of eyes.

"Or you see the flip side where they're making a whole bunch of things, they're writing a bunch of blog quotes or making a bunch of content and they're like, this content doesn't work. It's like, we'll, have you tried distributing it? Because if you're not distributing that and getting mileage out of it's a waste of time."

Tactical:

Assess if marketing assets are failing because of poor quality or simply a lack of distribution 'mileage.'
Evaluate performance by checking if the marketing team is addressing the company's biggest current lever for growth.
Watch for red flags where high volumes of content are produced but conversion rates and funnel metrics remain stagnant.

View all skills from Emily Kramer →

Jonathan Becker 2 quotes

Listen to episode →

"On our creative group, we can come up with mockups, in literally, 1% of the time that it took. And so you still have to understand what questions to ask of the AI and be capable of iterating, but these rough drafts that you might show the artwork of to a client to say, "Do we like this more or do we like this more?" That's AI generated."

Tactical:

Use generative AI tools to rapidly produce visual mockups for client feedback.
Focus human effort on defining the strategic questions and prompts used to guide AI outputs.
Iterate on AI-generated rough drafts to reach final versions faster.

"We have more people now than we've ever had, but the nature of the work that they do is more strategic. It's more about modeling, validation, asking the right questions, being focused around creative levers. And less so the like trench work of implementation and bid modifiers at the keyword level on Google search, and some of the really hardcore manual analysis we had to do."

Tactical:

Hire for strategic modeling and validation skills rather than manual implementation expertise.
Evaluate candidates based on their ability to ask the right questions of AI and automation tools.
Prioritize problem-solving aptitude over experience with keyword-level manual bid modifiers.

View all skills from Jonathan Becker →