I thought my marketing team was slow. I was wrong.
3 team models for speed, 4 small rituals that build trust, and the moment I realized I was the bottleneck
It started with a Slack message.
“The campaign is live!”
I stared at it for a second longer than I should have. Which campaign?
I scrolled up. Searched the channel. Opened an old planning doc. The name barely rang a bell. It had been four months since we’d first talked about it. Back then it had felt electric. The idea that would change the quarter. The thing we’d ship at lightning speed.
You know how it goes when you’re planning and that idea feels like the most game-changing thing for the quarter, and then you get to the end of the first month and realize it’s not even going to impact the quarter because it won’t be ready. Or it silently dies off in favor of other flashy objects.
Now it was live, and I could hardly remember why we were doing it. The moment had passed.
Because we were too slow.
The hardest part wasn’t the meetings. It was the mornings.
That morning the house was quiet. Too quiet. I was in my home office, trees swaying outside the window, Slack open, tabs scattered across my screen. Silence deafening.
Everything felt slow. Sticky. Like we were wading through mud.
I had a talented team. Thoughtful. Skilled. People who cared deeply about the work.
And yet our meetings felt like deja vu. Didn’t we talk about this last week? And the week before that?
The hardest part of that season wasn’t the meetings. It was the mornings.
The quiet, silent mornings where it just started feeling heavy. I’d stare out the window, wishing for even a damn crisis just to spark things up.
When I saw that Slack message, I felt annoyed. And embarrassed. And strangely numb.
Something is broken here, I thought. And if it’s broken, it’s probably me.
And if I was feeling that way, how must the rest of the team be feeling?
I wondered if this was just what happened as teams grew. Is this the inevitable tax of scale? Does everything slow down once you move beyond five scrappy people in a room?
The temptation was immediate.
I could fix this. I could sit in every meeting. Assign every task. Rewrite the briefs. Set all the deadlines. Wrap it up neatly in a project management system where I could see exactly who was slipping.
I could be the engine.
It would work. And it would limit the ceiling of my leadership forever.
My pride was blocking me
A few days later, I brought it to my executive coach.
“I don’t want to be the one with all the answers,” I told him. “I don’t want to be the only one driving.”
He asked me something simple.
“Is your team better than you at those things?”
I answered yes immediately.
Writing the copy. Planning campaigns. Coming up with creative ideas. Executing on deadlines. Making sure output would land with the buyer.
They were absolutely better.
“But do you believe that?” he asked.
Intellectually, yes. Emotionally, no.
And that’s when it hit.
Somewhere underneath, I believed I was better. That if I didn’t keep my hands on everything, quality would slip. That speed required my direct intervention.
My pride was blocking me.
It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t arrogant. It was subtle. A quiet conviction that I could do it faster, cleaner, better.
And with that mindset, we were going nowhere.
The relief was physical. Like a wall crumbled in my mind. I felt humbled. Slightly embarrassed. But clear.
The problem wasn’t talent. It was structure.
And it was me.
Speed isn’t urgency. It’s clarity.
I don’t glorify speed for speed’s sake.
Life isn’t a fire drill. More often than not, we’re in a marathon, not a sprint. Urgency is not a virtue in and of itself.
But in most industries, you need speed to stay relevant. And being part of a team that’s learning, growing, and shipping is, to be honest, way more fun and fulfilling.
Marketing is a contact sport. You don’t know if something works until it’s in the world. You have to put it out there and see how people respond before you learn anything.
If you spend months planning the perfect thing and then launch it all at once and it flops, you haven’t protected quality. You’ve wasted time.
I read this article a while back and have probably read it 50 times over the years: Your Marketing Org is Slow. Here’s a Framework to Move Faster. Jaleh Rezaei wrote:
“If speed is the yin, the yang is prioritization. You can’t be fast if you don’t know what’s important.”
We weren’t slow because we were lazy. We were slow because we weren’t clear.
Too many handoffs. Too many priorities. Too many projects floating between people who didn’t fully own them.
It was conveyor belt marketing. Imagine twenty conveyor belts running at once, each person running around to various projects to do their part.
Copy to design. Design to dev. Dev to campaigns. Campaigns to analytics.
Every week it was, “We sent that over.” Next week, “We’re waiting on feedback.” The week after, “Let me check in.”
Four months later, the campaign was live. And the moment had passed.
That rock bottom moment sparked a journey for me on how to set up marketing teams that move fast, stay relevant, and build things they’re proud of.
Over the years, I’ve experimented with a few different team models. All for relatively small teams. I’ve managed up to 50 people before, but on average it’s usually closer to 5-15.
Model 1: The Squad Model
I’ve only run this one successfully with reasonably sized teams. I think my team was about 15 when I did this.
The squad model attempts to solve the handoff problem. The handoff problem was the reason that four-month campaign took so long.
Every time I asked about it, it was like, “Oh, we sent that messaging to design a week ago… let me check in with them.” Next week it was, “Oh, design sent it over to dev a week ago… let me check in with them.”
The squad model was simple. I organized the team into small cross-functional squads focused on a major area. ABM. SEO. Website testing. Lifecycle conversion optimization. A major content initiative.
The squads weren’t exhaustive to all marketing aspects. They were specifically focused on areas where we really wanted to move the needle that quarter.
Most important: each squad was self-sufficient.
They had everyone in there that they needed to get that project done. There were still some handoffs within the squad, but teams weren’t lobbing things over to other teams that had totally different remits.
Each squad had an owner, a squad leader, who was responsible for:
Showing up to quarterly planning with a plan they’d already prepared
Setting up the execution plan for that project
Running a weekly meeting with their squad to drive toward the outcome
Setting their goals
Reporting weekly on those goals
When I switched to this model, I saw the team move what felt like 5x as fast. I’m not exaggerating.
And there was an aliveness to it. Structure. Clarity. Creativity came up because they could test and learn.
Honestly, I think people finally felt like they had a sense of ownership. That they could ship something and be like, “Wow, I did that.” They got to learn and build together but still in an agile way. They got to be a mini CEO of their area.
Speed returned because clarity returned.
Model 2: Tastemakers and Operators
This one works well for smaller teams or those really looking to take advantage of AI but not in an AI-slop kind of way.
It’s the hypothesis that most marketers will fall into two buckets: tastemakers and operators.
The Tastemaker
This person lives and breathes quality. They have the creative spark to make something magnetic, but it’s not ego-driven. It comes from a deep desire to understand the customer.
They’re obsessed with stories. They listen before they write. They might come from film, journalism, or content, but their real edge is their intuition. They know how to turn insights into emotion.
They know what good looks like. And they won’t ship anything less.
The Operator
This person loves systems. They’ll automate what others overlook. They’re the kind of person who starts to learn Python over the weekend, builds a Zapier workflow to automate their personal life, gets excited about it.
They build infrastructure so great ideas don’t die in a backlog. They learn fast, tinker constantly, and know how to turn chaos into a workflow.
Give them a pile of disconnected tools, and they’ll turn it into an engine.
One brings the spark. The other builds the engine. Both are essential.
On my team today, I see people naturally gravitating toward one or the other. And it’s incredible to see what happens when they pair up.
I’ve seen a lot of success with creating buddy pairs where you pair a tastemaker and operator together. The tastemaker drives the creative. The operator drives the engine.
In an AI-enabled era, this pairing is even more potent. AI can amplify both roles. But without someone guarding quality and someone building the workflow, you end up with noise.
Model 3: The One Thing Model
Ok, this is one I haven’t tried yet, but I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.
I was listening to a podcast (I think it was Simon Sinek’s A Bit of Optimism), and they were talking about how the greatest rarity in our lives is the ability to focus on just one thing for an extended period of time.
That switching between a bunch of things as we’re working gives us the illusion of making progress but is actually a very slow way to work.
So what’s the ideal setup?
All tasks go into a shared backlog. Everyone sees it. Every day, each person looks at the shared backlog and picks one thing. Just one thing for that day.
Not five. Not three. One.
The illusion of progress comes from switching between tasks. Real progress comes from depth.
The result is you’re constantly revisiting the most important things, not just each person doing it on their own but doing it together.
In my mind, this model would include dedicated deep work days. Before the deep work day starts, everyone looks at the shared backlog and chooses the most important thing. End of week, you have a show and tell where the team shares what they learned, what they built, what failed.
A place to share AI learnings but also show off what you created and how and why, and share what might help others.
The goal isn’t busyness. It’s momentum. And momentum is built on focus.
Other fun things you can do
Beyond structure, there are small rituals that build connection and clarity.
Personal and Professional Win
I used to start every marketing team meeting with everyone going around and sharing a personal and professional win from the previous week. Sometimes people would use their win to shout out someone else.
I had people years later come and tell me how much they loved that. You really get to know so much about people.
Weekly Top 5
I used to do this for my boss and have my team do the same for me. Every Monday, simple email. Just numbered bullet points 1 to 5, nothing else. What is the focus for the week?
We also did this as a Slackbot that everyone would respond to in thread, which I liked even more. We could see what others were focused on.
Quarterly Planning Ownership
Have others own sessions during planning. If you’re owning all the sessions, it’s not good. Let people step up and lead.
Vulnerability
Seems like a weird thing to put on a team list, but one of the most successful times I had with my team was when we had a giant goal, a super scary one. I opened up about how nervous I was. And it gave everyone else permission to be honest too.
None of these models matter if the leader doesn’t change first
After that conversation with my coach, the shift wasn’t dramatic.
It was 100 tiny moments.
Instead of saying, “A is better than B,” I would say, “What do you think?”
Instead of joining every meeting, I would say, “I trust you to run with this.”
Instead of answering a question in Slack, I would tag the person closest to it and let them respond.
At first, it felt unnatural. Restraint can be harder than control.
But slowly, the energy shifted. People stepped up. Not because they were forced to, but because space was created for them to.
I had been the bottleneck. Not because I was incompetent. Because I didn’t fully believe they were better.
If your team feels slow, ask yourself these questions
Are there too many handoffs?
Is ownership blurry?
Are priorities constantly shifting?
Are you quietly inserting yourself into everything?
Speed doesn’t come from pressure. It comes from clarity. From trusting your team enough to design a system where they can move without you touching every piece.
From deciding what matters. From shipping.
When I think back to that Slack message now, I’m grateful for it.
“The campaign is live.”
It felt like a failure at the time. But it was the moment I stopped trying to be the engine.
And started building one I believed in.