When our CMO left, I stepped into the interim role and took on scope beyond Product Marketing, which I'd always owned: Creative, Content, and Demand Generation were now mine too. My first instinct was that we needed a positioning refresh. The company was at an inflection point, and I'd spent years doing that kind of work at Twilio after the SendGrid acquisition and at Kustomer repositioning for an AI-native market. That was the lens I brought in.
What I found instead was a team doing good work in four separate directions. Each function had its own goals, its own rhythm, its own version of what marketing was trying to achieve. The work wasn't visibly broken and no one was working against each other, but there was no shared thread. I realized that sharpening the positioning before fixing that would have meant building on an unstable base. The structural work had to come first.
The biggest gains ended up having nothing to do with campaigns or launches.
1. Co-create the framework, surface the ideas underneath it
Each function had its own OKRs when I arrived. All reasonable in isolation. Content was optimizing for traffic and engagement, Demand Gen had pipeline targets, Creative tracked project throughput, PMM had launch and enablement goals. No shared story about what marketing was trying to achieve as an organization.
The fix was to define three strategic priorities that each team's work could ladder into, then build the framework with each team lead rather than handing it down. That process surfaced something I hadn't expected: people had ideas they'd never formally raised because they were focused on executing what they'd been told. When the framework became a two-way conversation, they showed up as problem solvers.
The clearest example was Demand Gen. The manager had long believed ABM was the right motion for our pipeline, but it had never gotten formal traction. Co-creating the OKR framework gave her the opening to make the case. ABM got prioritized and kicked off. When people help design the structure they're accountable to, you find out what they've actually been thinking.
2. Separate the forums, protect the thinking time
The existing meeting structure crammed status updates and strategic discussions into the same weekly slot. Urgent always beat important. The team defaulted to a two-week horizon because the format never gave them permission to look further out.
I split it into two distinct forums: a short weekly standup for execution and blockers, and a biweekly session reserved for cross-functional alignment and longer-horizon thinking. The biweekly included guest speakers from Solutions Consulting, Events, Pricing, and Customer Experience.
What started as a way to give the marketing team more context built durable cross-functional partnerships. Solution Consultants became partners in shaping our demo flow and positioning. Marketers who wanted to speak at events finally got the visibility to make it happen. The Pricing session worked both ways: the team understood how pricing decisions got made, and we got direct voice-of-customer input we hadn't had before. Each marketing team member became a de facto liaison for one of those functions, and those relationships held after the interim period ended.
3. Build the career ladder, make growth a real conversation
Our Employee Engagement Survey flagged growth and development as among the lowest-scoring areas. Lunch-and-learns helped at the margins. The thing that moved the needle was building formal career ladders for each function, with leveling criteria and competency frameworks specific to PMM, Content, Creative, and Demand Gen.
The value showed up immediately in hiring. Before the ladders, our Creative Director couldn't clearly articulate what level she needed. She described it as someone junior to take load off, without further specifics. Once we built out the framework, she could specify what she actually needed: someone who could operate independently on execution, had experience across digital and print, and had either led or been close to a full rebrand. We made the hire at the right level. The framework creates a shared language for what "good" looks like at each level, which makes development conversations more honest and hiring decisions more precise.
4. Make the work visible, let the team own the story
Marketing was producing strong work, but almost none of it was visible outside the function. When other departments don't know what marketing is doing, they fill the gap with assumptions, and those assumptions are rarely generous.
I started a weekly marketing update email with two constraints: authorship rotated across team leads so everyone got reps at executive communication, and each edition included individual recognition. The content mattered less than the consistency, and the fact that it came from the team.
The response changed things. Our COO replied-all and started including his full leadership team on the thread. Sales and customer success leaders started responding directly, asking follow-up questions, engaging with what marketing was actually doing. A function that had been a black box became a two-way conversation. Internally, team morale improved visibly. People could see their work registering outside the walls of marketing.
What the interim period reinforced is that marketing leadership at this level is as much diagnostic as it is strategic. I came in with a positioning thesis, and the positioning work was real. But reading the org first — understanding what the team needed before deciding what to sharpen — is what made everything else possible.
The structural work and the strategic work aren't in tension. You just have to sequence them right. Good positioning doesn't stick when the team executing it is fragmented and invisible to the rest of the company. Getting the foundation right is what gave the strategic work somewhere to go.