Should You Run Marketing Like a Product Team?

#355 | Dave sits down with Maria Scheifler to talk about why your marketing team might be getting less done as it grows — and what to do about it. Maria makes the case for running marketing like a product team: two-week sprints, a prioritized backlog, and a lightweight intake process that kills approval bottlenecks without losing control. She walks through the context-switching exercise that proves multitasking is destroying your output, how to push back on random requests from across the company without saying no, and why getting team buy-in before rolling out any operational changes is the step most marketing leaders skip.

Timestamps

• (00:00) - - Intro: the problem isn't your strategy, it's your operating system
• (02:23) - - Maria's background
• (05:23) - - Why teams get bigger and somehow get less done
• (07:52) - - The multitasking exercise that proves context switching kills output
• (15:21) - - Running marketing like a product team: the mindset shift
• (18:09) - - Building a working agreement with your team
• (20:41) - - The experimentation guardrail template: killing approval bottlenecks without losing control
• (25:06) - - Building a prioritized backlog
• (29:27) - - How the backlog helps you push back without saying no
• (36:16) - - Two-week sprints: how to plan, commit, and ship
• (38:28) - - Daily standups: how to keep them short and useful
• (39:19) - - Sprint reviews: showing the rest of the company what marketing does
• (41:00) - - Retrospectives
• (42:59) - - Where to start on Monday

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