Ask any marketing leader whether their team is well-structured. Most will say yes. Then watch how they spend their week.
Meetings to align on meetings. Email chains where everyone needs to be in the loop. Decisions that should take an afternoon taking three weeks. Specialists so buried in requests they can’t deliver anything properly.
That’s not a workload problem. That’s an organisational design problem. And it’s one of the most expensive problems in marketing – because nobody invoices you for it.
The cost nobody measures
Bad org design is a hidden tax on marketing effectiveness. It doesn’t show up in your budget. It shows up in the quality of your work.
When roles aren’t clear, people fill the vacuum. Everyone thinks their item is the most important. Volume of requests outpaces capacity to deliver. Specialist teams get drowned. And instead of doing fewer things brilliantly, you end up doing many things vaguely – to please everyone, which moves no one.
I’ve also seen teams get carried away delivering stuff – things that look impressive or feel high impact – without anyone asking whether it’s born from an actual business problem. Ego and optics dressed up as strategy. It’s quite funny, and quite damaging, that people can work for the same company and not be aligned on what actually matters.
Clarity is the unlock
At WEX, one business unit did something simple and brilliant. In their annual offsite, each leader had to answer two questions: what do I need from you to hit my objectives, and what do you need from me to hit yours? Sales, marketing, risk, operations, finance – all in the room, being explicit about the dependencies. The result was a team that knew how to work together, not just how to coexist.
It sounds basic. It rarely happens.
Everything should have a RACI. Strategy and delivery can have different ones – that’s fine, encouraged even – but someone has to own each part. The moment accountability gets blurry, you get committees. And committees produce compromise, not good work.
Barclays could feel process-heavy at times. But when you needed something done, you always knew the SLAs, who to involve, and at what stage. That kind of clarity – however bureaucratic it seemed on the surface – removes the invisible friction that quietly kills momentum elsewhere.
Agile principles, without the religion
This is where Agile thinking is genuinely powerful – not as a rigid methodology, but as a mindset. The core of it is simple: regularly reprioritise, and be crystal clear about who makes those reprioritisation calls and how.
People get attached to their ideas. Projects gather momentum long after they’ve stopped being the most important thing. Without a forcing function to step back and ask is this still the right thing to focus on? – teams just keep going. Sprints and scrums aren’t mandatory. But the discipline of regular, structured reprioritisation very much is.
You don’t need to do Agile. But you do need to think like it.
Leadership has to be brave
None of this works without leadership willing to make hard calls. Resource is finite. Having too many people doesn’t just cost money – it adds complexity, slows decisions, and dilutes accountability.
The questions worth asking are rarely comfortable. Is marketing effectiveness resourced well enough to actually measure what you’re doing and make smart decisions from it? When does it make sense to do something internally vs. through 3rd parties? Is there a clear planning function, or would creating one make campaign delivery meaningfully smoother? Are you carrying headcount in one area that could unlock a capability you’re genuinely missing?
The hardest part of good org design isn’t drawing the chart. It’s being honest about where the real commercial opportunity lies, resourcing those areas properly, and having the courage to let go of talent when it no longer serves where the business needs to go.
Don’t wait for the big re-org
The organisations that get this right treat structure as a living thing. At Amex, there was almost an annual rhythm of reviewing and reshaping teams. Small, regular adjustments. That’s infinitely better than leaving things untouched for three to five years and then triggering a scary, disruptive overhaul.
Good org design isn’t a project. It’s a discipline.
And like most disciplines – you can’t outsource it, it’s a muscle that needs practice and you can’t fake it.
Jay Safdar is a growth marketing leader with experience spanning global financial giants, British icons and tech innovators – including AllSaints, Amex, Amazon, Barclays, EE, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Hyperoptic, John Lewis, Lloyds and WEX Inc. Specialising in demand generation, performance marketing and marketing effectiveness, Jay has a proven track record of driving commercial impact through data-led strategy and insight-driven creative.
