Fix Your Marketing–IT Misalignment

In large organizations, marketing and IT frequently are misaligned. The reasons are understandable: Marketing’s timelines can be weeks or months, whereas IT’s can be years. Marketing strives for flexibility to respond to customer needs and marketplace opportunities, while IT prioritizes stability, maintainability and security. Both worldviews are correct and necessary. However, the resulting misalignment can be an innovation-killer, with the potential to turn any initiative into interdepartmental trench warfare. 

That inherent struggle has real-world implications. As Gartner sees it, the current moment should be a Golden Age for MarTech, but it isn’t: “Operational frictions and conflicting priorities often hinder marketing’s ability to effectively partner with IT and data teams, slowing down strategic digital initiatives.” In many cases, companies have made MarTech investments, but misaligned goals have hampered development of applications and analytics.

Misalignment may be the inevitable byproduct of a corporate operating model in which marketing and IT function as separate silos. They eye each other with suspicion and lack a shared understanding of roles, even a shared vocabulary. And to complicate matters, marketing achieving its priorities may depend on IT resources and data functions that marketing does not control.

Exacerbating the disconnect is the tendency of IT to view marketing as a “soft” discipline whose initiatives lack true urgency; as a result, marketing’s needs are deprioritized. So every marketing initiative takes longer and costs more. Worse, marketing may have incomplete data on customer needs and product performance, leading to deficient journey orchestration and inadequate personalization. And most insidiously, misalignment leads to underutilization of the organization’s IT investment, making it difficult to demonstrate ROI, which in turn makes it harder to get future budget approved (“You’re not even using what we gave you last year ...”).

If you’re frustrated by organizational misalignment, well, you’re not alone: It affects most of our clients. As a digital agency, VShift, frequently finds itself in the middle of the marketing-IT tug-of-war. In our experience, the best way to bring peace and move forward is for businesses to adopt a product-oriented operating model.

What we mean by “product,” generally, is the corporate website or a marketing campaign platform. The product approach prioritizes the needs of the product as determined by the marketplace, competitive analysis, user feedback and business goals.

The product manager lives outside – and thus is not constrained by – the traditional marketing and IT organizational model.

It's important to note the approach is led by a product manager and product owner who live outside of and thus are not constrained by the traditional marketing and IT organizational model and reporting structure. This serves to put them outside and above the usual inter-fiefdom jostling. They in a very real sense serve the needs of the product, not a functional organization, and have authority to control the human and budgetary resources required to complete necessary workstreams.

This “product-led” organization, by definition, cannot be misaligned, as it is single-mindedly focused on achieving the goals of the product as captured by the product manager and delineated in the product roadmap. Reporting to a product owner (who in turn likely answers to an executive board), the product manager has authority over all resources, including technology, needed to achieve the milestones in the roadmap. No competing agendas, no warring factions. Misalignment: solved. 

Best practices for the product management approach include:

• Creating a product-focused organizational chart: In the product management model, the product manager has authority over developers, marketing and other critical resources.

• Gathering continual customer and marketplace feedback: The product-driven approach is fueled by continual data gathering and analysis, yielding insights used to drive the product road map.

• Prioritizing and reprioritizing: Because change happens and resources are finite, the product approach calls for continual reassessment and reconfirmation of priorities. The only thing worse than having to switch gears is needing to switch and not doing it.

Remember, misalignment leads to missed opportunities. Prioritizing the product—and aligning your team to execute the product road map under the direction of an empowered product manager—is the best way to ensure that everyone, regardless of function, is on the same page.

A version of this article was previously published in Forbes.