If you’ve ever felt like your marketing team is juggling too many priorities, constantly switching tasks, and struggling to show real results, you’re not alone. The modern marketing landscape is a frantic mix of shifting customer needs, emerging channels, and endless requests from stakeholders. It’s easy to get caught running on a hamster wheel of activity without making any real forward progress.
Getting marketing teams on the same page can feel like an uphill battle. At a high level, everyone agrees that alignment is crucial, but when you dig into the day-to-day work, things get complicated. We ran into this exact problem when we started shifting our own team toward an Agile approach. While the marketing department was excited, the rest of the company was skeptical. They just didn't see how this new way of working would solve anything.
In many companies, the marketing department feels like it’s constantly playing catch-up. A quick-reaction team gets spun up to handle a PR crisis, then another team collaborates with product managers to bake marketing into the launch. The industry shifts, a new competitor emerges with a cheaper model, and marketing is again tasked with leading the response. While the company might thrive, the internal feeling is often one of chaotic reactivity, not proactive strategy.
If you're in marketing, you’ve probably felt it. The endless meetings debating an annual plan that feels irrelevant the day it’s finished. The frustration of working in silos, where your team’s priorities clash with everyone else’s. The big-bang campaigns that take months to plan, months to execute, and are then declared a "success" using whatever vanity metrics look best. It often feels like the entire system of business marketing is designed to slow you down.
It feels like we’re living in a golden age for marketers. We have an explosion of technology at our fingertips—social networks, search engines, and thousands of software tools that give us unlimited reach and innovative ways to connect with customers. Marketing, once seen as the “arts and crafts department,” now often sits at the heart of the business, driving customer experience and delivering valuable insights.