Building a Marketing Team

Should you try Google’s famous “20% time” experiment to encourage innovation? We tried this at Duolingo years ago. It didn’t work. It wasn’t enough time for people to start meaningful projects, and very few people took advantage of it because the framework was pretty vague. I knew there had to be other ways to drive innovation at the company. So, here are 3 other initiatives we’ve tried, what we’ve learned from each, and what we're going to try next. 💡 Innovation Awards: Annual recognition for those who move the needle with boundary-pushing projects. The upside: These awards make our commitment to innovation clear, and offer a well-deserved incentive to those who have done remarkable work. The downside: It’s given to individuals, but we want to incentivize team work. What’s more, it’s not necessarily a framework for coming up with the next big thing. 💻 Hackathon: This is a good framework, and lots of companies do it. Everyone (not just engineers) can take two days to collaborate on and present anything that excites them, as long as it advances our mission or addresses a key business need. The upside: Some of our biggest features grew out of hackathon projects, from the Duolingo English Test (born at our first hackathon in 2013) to our avatar builder. The downside: Other than the time/resource constraint, projects rarely align with our current priorities. The ones that take off hit the elusive combo of right time + a problem that no other team could tackle. 💥 Special Projects: Knowing that ideal equation, we started a new program for fostering innovation, playfully dubbed DARPA (Duolingo Advanced Research Project Agency). The idea: anyone can pitch an idea at any time. If they get consensus on it and if it’s not in the purview of another team, a cross-functional group is formed to bring the project to fruition. The most creative work tends to happen when a problem is not in the clear purview of a particular team; this program creates a path for bringing these kinds of interdisciplinary ideas to life. Our Duo and Lily mascot suits (featured often on our social accounts) came from this, as did our Duo plushie and the merch store. (And if this photo doesn't show why we needed to innovate for new suits, I don't know what will!) The biggest challenge: figuring out how to transition ownership of a successful project after the strike team’s work is done. 👀 What’s next? We’re working on a program that proactively identifies big picture, unassigned problems that we haven’t figured out yet and then incentivizes people to create proposals for solving them. How that will work is still to be determined, but we know there is a lot of fertile ground for it to take root. How does your company create an environment of creativity that encourages true innovation? I'm interested to hear what's worked for you, so please feel free to share in the comments! #duolingo #innovation #hackathon #creativity #bigideas

I am constantly thinking about how to foster innovation in my product organization. Building teams that are experts at execution is the easy part—when there’s a clear problem, product orgs are great at coming up with smart solutions. But it’s impossible to optimize your way into innovation. You can’t only rely on incremental improvement to keep growing. You need to come up with new problem spaces, rather than just finding better solutions to the same old problems. So, how do we come up with those new spaces? Here are a few things I’m trying at Duolingo: 1. Innovation needs a high-energy environment, and a slow process will kill a great idea. So I always ask myself: Can we remove some of the organizational barriers here? Do managers from seven different teams really need to say yes on every project? Seeking consensus across the company—rather than just keeping everyone informed—can be a major deterrent to innovation. 2. Similarly, beware of defaulting to “following up.” If product meetings are on a weekly cadence, every time you do this, you are allocating seven days to a task that might only need two. We try to avoid this and promote a sense of urgency, which is essential for innovative ideas to turn into successes. 3. Figure out the right incentive. Most product orgs reward team members whose ideas have measurable business impact, which works in most contexts. But once you’ve found product-market fit, it is often easiest to generate impact through smaller wins. So, naturally, if your org tends to only reward impact, you have effectively incentivized constant optimization of existing features instead of innovation. In the short term things will look great, but over time your product becomes stale. I try to show my teams that we value and reward bigger ideas. If someone sticks their neck out on a new concept, we should highlight that—even if it didn’t pan out. Big swings should be celebrated, even if we didn’t win, because there are valuable learnings there. 4. Look for innovative thinkers with a history of zero-to-one feature work. There are lots of amazing product managers out there, but not many focus on new problem domains. If a PM has created something new from scratch and done it well, that’s a good sign. An even better sign: if they show excitement about and gravitate toward that kind of work. If that sounds like you—if you’re a product manager who wants to think big picture and try out big ideas in a fast-paced environment with a stellar mission—we want you on our team. We’re hiring a Director of Product Management: https://lnkd.in/dQnWqmDZ #productthoughts #innovation #productmanagement #zerotoone

the traditional marketing team structure is killing your results. most leaders think the answer is hiring more specialists or chasing every new channel. they're wrong. the difference? successful organizations are dismantling their channel-focused teams and rebuilding around customer behaviors and outcomes. think about it: your customers don't care about your org chart. they move fluidly between channels, loop back through stages, and make decisions in ways that defy our linear models. here's what's working instead: ↳exploration teams own discovery and understanding, not channels ↳validation teams drive confidence, not engagement metrics ↳trust-building teams create advocacy across every touchpoint specialists (paid, SEO, social) work across all teams, focused on outcomes bottom line: the future belongs to organizations built to thrive on change, not fight it. your marketing team isn't just due for an update - it needs a complete rebuild. remember: success isn't about having the largest team. it's about having the right structure that empowers people to own outcomes that matter. just published a deep dive on this transformation. curious to hear your thoughts. #MarketingLeadership #MarketingStrategy #OrganizationalChange #MarketingTransformation

“Our budget was slashed again,” exclaimed a frustrated CMO from a $75mil SaaS company. “The remaining staff is depressed, and those who can are jumping ship--anyone have any ideas for me?” the CMO asked. And so began another CMO Huddle in the “hidden recession” of 2024. Before breaking down the potential solutions to this common challenge for many B2B CMOs, let’s reflect on the economic realities our recent research revealed: ⚡ 69% of B2B marketing leaders believe their industry is in a recession ⚡ 50% noted their company experienced layoffs ⚡ 69% were asked to do more with less budget ⚡ 76% are experiencing more pressure to deliver pipeline results [Note: The complete report will be released on 6/18/24. Ping me for a copy.] Now let’s tackle this CMO’s leadership challenge after layoffs and budget cuts. Most of the time, layoffs do not end up with the optimal mix of talent based on the reduced budget. Sure, you eliminated some weak performers. That’s always helpful. But the critical question is, given your new budget, do you have the right mix of talent? If you had started from scratch, is this the team you would have put in place? Rather than fretting about staffers jumping ship, think of that as an opportunity to right-size and rebuild with a team unburdened by what happened before. Look for “utility players” eager to tackle multiple roles and “Impact Players” as outlined in Liz Wiseman’s great book. These more flexible individuals will be invaluable as you look to stretch every penny. Now, on to allocating your smaller budget. The biggest mistake you can make is to cut each area equally. Instead, take a step back. Restart your strategic process. The budget will follow. A smaller budget requires more focus. First, your smaller staff won’t be able to cover the same ground they did before. Second, your overall reach is likely to drop or your dollars will be spread too thin to make an impact. But again, you need to tackle your go-to-market strategy before deciding on budget allocation. Here are some questions to help drive a more focused strategy: 🐧 Can you eliminate one or more products/services in your portfolio?   🐧 Can you drop a vertical market or two or refine your ICP? 🐧 Can you fixate on one vulnerable competitor and win more of those deals? 🐧 Can you reposition your product/service to make it more appealing to a specific target? 🐧 Can we adopt a more distinctive personality to help us cut through?  This exercise is about differentiation. Narrowing the target and finding your unique position, your most compelling point of difference. Once you have this, allocating your reduced marketing budget will almost be fun. Ultimately, a budget cut is a leadership opportunity for CMOs. Force the big-picture discussion. Remind your leadership team, “We can’t keep doing what we did before with fewer resources and expect better results.”  You can also promise them that a tighter strategy is the fastest path to innovation. 

The best way to kill your team's innovative spirit is to punish failure. If you want to stay competitive, create a culture that doesn't penalize setbacks. Innovation, by definition, will yield "failures." That's part of the process. What's important is setting the expectation that while failure is okay, you are expected to learn from it. Part of that is having blame-free retrospectives that help identify faulty assumptions without unfairly punishing team members. It's also good to remind your team that even misfires can be additive. A great example is when Amazon's Fire smartphone bombed, but the technology was eventually used to develop the Alexa smart home service. Ultimately, creating an environment that encourages risk-taking isn't just a nice-to-have, it's a competitive advantage that all companies need to have.

At Amazon, two of my top engineers had a shouting match that ended in tears. This could be a sign of a toxic workplace or a sign of passion and motivation. Whether it becomes toxic or not all comes down to how management deals with conflict. In order to deal with conflict in your team, it is first essential to understand it. A Harvard study has identified that there are 4 types of conflict that are common in teams: 1. The Boxing Match: Two people within a team disagree 2. The Solo Dissenter: Conflict surrounds one individual 3. Warring Factions: Two subgroups within a team disagree 4. The Blame Game: The whole team is in disagreement My engineers shouting at each other is an example of the boxing match. They were both passionate and dedicated to the project, but their visions were different. This type of passion is a great driver for a healthy team, but if the conflict were to escalate it could quickly become toxic and counterproductive. In order to de-escalate the shouting, I brought them into a private mediation. This is where one of the engineers started to cry because he was so passionate about his vision for the project. The important elements of managing this conflict in a healthy and productive way were: 1) Giving space for each of the engineers to explain their vision 2) Mediating their discussion so that they could arrive at a productive conclusion 3) Not killing either of their passion by making them feel unheard or misunderstood Ultimately, we were able to arrive at a productive path forward with both engineers feeling heard and respected. They both continued to be top performers. In today’s newsletter, I go more deeply into how to address “Boxing Match” conflicts as both a manager and an IC. I also explain how to identify and address the other 3 common types of team conflict. You can read the newsletter here https://lnkd.in/gXYr9T3r Readers- How have you seen team member conflict handled well in your careers?

Conflict is inevitable. How we manage it is both an art and a science. In my work with executives, I often discuss Thomas Kilmann's five types of conflict managers: (1) The Competitor – Focuses on winning, sometimes forgetting there’s another human on the other side. (2) The Avoider – Pretends conflict doesn’t exist, hoping it disappears (spoiler: it doesn’t). (3) The Compromiser – Splits the difference, often leaving both sides feeling like nobody really wins. (4) The Accommodator – Prioritizes relationships over their own needs, sometimes at their own expense. (5) The Collaborator – Works hard to find a win-win, but it takes effort. The style we use during conflict depends on how we manage the tension between empathy and assertiveness. (a) Assertiveness: The ability to express your needs, boundaries, and interests clearly and confidently. It’s standing your ground—without steamrolling others. Competitors do this naturally, sometimes too much. Avoiders and accommodators? Not so much. (b) Empathy: The ability to recognize and consider the other person’s perspective, emotions, and needs. It’s stepping into their shoes before taking a step forward. Accommodators thrive here, sometimes at their own expense. Competitors? They might need a reminder that the other side has feelings too. Balancing both is the key to successful negotiation. Here’s how: - Know your default mode. Are you more likely to fight, flee, or fold? Self-awareness is step one. - Swap 'but' for 'and' – “I hear your concerns, and I’d like to explore a solution that works for both of us.” This keeps both voices in the conversation. - Be clear, not combative. Assertiveness isn’t aggression; it’s clarity. Replace “You’re wrong” with “I see it differently—here’s why.” - Make space for emotions. Negotiations aren’t just about logic. Acknowledge emotions (yours and theirs) so they don’t hijack the conversation. - Negotiate the process, not just the outcome. If you’re dealing with a competitor, set ground rules upfront. If it’s an avoider, create a low-stakes way to engage. Great negotiators don’t just stick to their natural style—they adapt. Which conflict style do you tend to default to? And how do you balance empathy with assertiveness? #ConflictResolution #Negotiation #Leadership #Empathy #Assertiveness #Leadership #DecisionMaking

While the characteristics that make a marketing team high-performing are context-dependent, I’ve observed some commonalities among the teams I’d deem ‘elite.’ In those cases, marketing was viewed across the broader organization as a critical, if not the principal, component of success: - Beyond merely having regular touchpoints with the product team, marketing has the agency to request, if not directly implement, prioritized product experiments. This goes beyond signal engineering to aspects such as funnel design and early monetization. Without this, the marketing team has little control over outcomes. - Self-serve reporting with an extensible data pipeline that can easily accommodate new channels / tools / methods of assessing performance. Changes to the pipeline can be accomplished without waiting on engineering resources to be granted. - A creative production workflow that is process-oriented rather than focused, qualitatively, on outputs. Higher volumes of "winners" are associated with process changes rather than stumbling upon resonant themes by chance. - A competitor analysis function (ideally, automated) that provides a regular overview of not just creative, but also of onboarding and monetization. This can be monthly or even quarterly, but it should serve as a regular checkpoint on how the market is evolving. - Measurement that has been socialized across relevant stakeholder teams (eg., Finance, Executive, Product) and, critically, is trusted by those teams rather than viewed skeptically. The various components of the measurement stack, such as cohort-level pLTV projection, should be fine-tuned regularly, and a broad, portfolio-wide solution should be applied that allows the marketing team to optimize toward incrementality. This is more of a wish-list than a set of prerequisites. But in my experience, when a successful company's marketing team possesses these characteristics, that marketing team is viewed internally as indispensable to the company's mission.

The ceiling of your outbound success is your company’s marketing engine. The future of outbound is... Drumroll...wait for it... Getting back to basics: sales & marketing alignment. My clients who experience the best outbound results have world-class marketing teams. And here's how they work better together to massively increase outbound success. 👇 ✅ 1) Customer snippet bank Create a bank of 2-3 sentence customer story snippets with: - Customer name - Industry and size of business - Personas - Problem statement - Result/outcome - The transformation Reps will LOVE marketing for this. This can be repurposed for cold emails, talk tracks, discovery conversations, demos, etc. ✅ 2) “The offer you can’t refuse” Increase the value prospects get in return for their time. Make prospects feel silly for turning a meeting down. My best clients lead with free website audits. They secret shop the prospect. They share world-class industry reports. They experience the brand. Teach don't take. ✅ 3) Collaboration with customers and prospective customers Create world-class content with your customers (AKA your prospect's peers). Get them on webinars, create ebooks, share short video snippets, etc. Don't make the content a big pitch about you. Make it valuable in and of itself. Then have reps send tailored, 1:1 outreach to check out the content. Adam Robinson calls this Inbound-Led Outbound. ✅ 4) Marketing: Ride shotgun with sales for a day It can work in the opposite way as well with sales. One of my best clients had 3-5 folks from the marketing team in the oubound workshops I led. Marketers...that's right...marketers...were learning how to cold call, handle objections, and had to role play with reps. Make sure both parties understand what it takes to do their job. ✅ 5) Build a messaging team Last but not least—assemble a team of 5-10 of the best reps, marketers, and sales leaders. Folks that really know the personas inside and out. Involving both marketing and sales punches up marketing messaging by making it "sales-ready." Instead of slide deck on new messaging, you get ready-made sequences, talk tracks, sales collateral, etc. ~~~ Want more ideas like these? Join me, Jen Allen-Knuth, Will Aitken, Sarah Reece 🥇, Doug Davidoff & Todd Clouser next Wednesday IN-PERSON at Outbound@Inbound in Boston. Register here: https://lnkd.in/eUv5gFBt

If I were a CMO of $50M ARR SAAS business trying to hit 2025 targets I would turn my marketing org inside out by re-structuring the team. The old way: most marketing teams are structured vertically by channel— you have someone for paid you have someone for SEO you have someone for social you have someone for events But buyers don’t think in channels. They think about problems they need to solve. This org structure is broken. It leads to disjointed handoffs, misaligned KPIs, and a lack of ownership over revenue. Here’s what happens: The ads team wants to get a great ROAS, and doesn’t want to share credit with the SDR org. The content team is focused on engagement metrics, not pipeline acceleration. The events team is optimizing for booth scans, not revenue influence. No one admits to multi-channel attribution The result: marketing celebrates success in their vertical while sales struggles to hit quota. The new way: Move from channel-based silos → to a funnel-stage structure. 💡Idea: Turn your marketing organization from vertical into horizontal. Here's how I would do it: 1/ TOFU (Top of Funnel) Squad: - Team → Owns awareness and audience growth on Cold Leads - Content, brand, paid, SEO, social → all focused on capturing attention and demand - Title: AI Awareness Marketer (I like Cold Marketer but I don’t think that will fly) - Goal: Maximize problem & market awareness. 2/ MOFU (Middle of Funnel) Squad: - Team → Owns signal-stacking plays on Warm Leads - Marketing-led outbound with Automated Email, LinkedIn, targeted micro campaigns - Title: GTM Engineer (Probably better than Warm Marketer) - Goal: Turn interest into website visits omni-channel 3/ BOFU (Bottom of Funnel) Squad: - Team → Owns conversion & pipeline acceleration on Hot Leads Directing SDR teams where to focus, live chat conversations - Title: Demand Marketer (c’mon Hot Marketer would be a killer title) Goal: Book meetings that are qualified pipeline - Proof: Gong saw a 3X increase in pipeline velocity by aligning content, sales enablement, and demand gen under one mid-funnel team. I don't think this shift is theoretical. It’s happening. Mostly in startups though for now. Companies that win in the next 5 years won’t be the ones with the best ad strategy. They’ll be the ones who own the entire buyer journey, not just parts of it. Warmly, Max