Last week, Mark Fiske (Former VP Marketing @ CreditKarma) and Brittany Bingham (VP Growth @ Guru, Former SurveyMonkey) published Crossing The Canyon: From Senior Marketer To Marketing Leader. If it sounds familiar, thats because I covered the product version of this a few weeks ago.
Where General Management Fails
It highlights how this canyon from senior individual contributor to leader exists in every function. Some of the key transitions you need to make are shared across functions, but some are very functional specific. This is where general management courses fail in my opinion. It might help you with the shared transitions, but completely misses on the functional specific ones that make or break your success.
Four Transitions For A Marketer To Make
For marketing, Mark and Brittany covered four key transitions:
Being an expert in one channel → Building a strategy across all channels.
Being good at your job → Guiding others to be good at theirs.
Focusing on your area → Collaborating across functions.
Playing an instrument → Conducting the orchestra.
Being An Expert In One Channel → Building A Strategy Across All Channels
This transition stuck out to me, because it is where I see most of the friction happen. Most marketers start their career by becoming an expert in a single channel (content, paid social, lifecycle, etc). To be a leader, you have to manage a strategy across multiple channels. The problem - what you learn in one channel doesn't apply to other channels.
This is where most strategies fail and team friction occurs. Performance marketers don't understand the role of Brand (and vice versa) is the most common manifestation of this, but it occurs in many other forms.
You need to quickly understand what bad vs good vs great looks like across all channels, how they all come together in a cohesive strategy, and manage the intersection of all them for your team. Thats why it is better to be generalist early in my career, right? No....(see next quick take)
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