This article was originally a talk at our Revenue Marketing Summit New York that you can watch On-Demand.

Introducing our marketing pros

Dee Dee de Kenessey

I'm Dee Dee de Kenessey. I'm currently Head of Product Marketing at Teamwork. We’re a B2B SaaS business based in Ireland and we provide project management software. My previous role was at Shopify, where I was Head of Content Marketing in their Shopify Plus division. There was a strong partnership between marketing and sales, and we saw incredible hyper-growth when I was there.

Tara Robertson

I’m Tara and I’m CMO at Bitly. I joined only a few months ago, so I am deep in the org design and so excited about this conversation today. Prior to Bitly, I had the honor of working alongside Dee Dee as the CMO at Teamwork. Before that, I worked at Sprout Social while we went from early growth to rocket-ship growth to IPO.

Jeff Boron

And I'm Jeff. I'm the Global Head of Marcomms at TikTok. I work on the B2B side and lead the digital strategy in all of our channels – paid media, social, and owned.

Structuring teams for success

Jeff Boron

To get us started, Tara, can you tell us about the structure of your team at Bitly?

Tara Robertson

Sure. As I mentioned, we're deep in the org design, looking at where we are today and where we need to be one year, two years, and three years from now. Mind you, as you're thinking about org structure, those things are constantly changing and evolving. When you're in rapid growth, you should expect rapid change.

Although I’ve only been with the team for a few months, our org has already shifted - we rolled out a new org structure just last week. Now marketing has four different pillars, plus a pillar on the bottom that supports the full org.

The most important pillar is our product marketing team. I say it’s the most important because we are a SaaS organization, so everything that we do starts with the product. Every single team is important, but product marketing is at the heart of what we do and how we're evolving our team.

Alongside the product marketing team, we've got our revenue marketing team. Bitly is a product-led and sales-led organization, so they manage both funnels. We're also B2B and B2C, so we've got a ton of different customer types of every single size, which means the revenue marketing team is working on a lot of different strategies to drive overall revenue. There’s also a growth team within that team, and they do everything that’s focused on conversion

Our third pillar is the performance marketing team, which is focused on all things SEO, SEM, and paid strategies – everything that gets people in and converting to revenue. We have a ruthless focus on numbers and KPIs and we work very closely with our sales team to make sure we're driving the proper pipeline.

Next up, we’ve got brand marketing, which is split into brand communications and brand creative. Brand communications focus on everything external and make sure people know who we are. They work on everything from PR to out-of-home advertising, events strategy, and field marketing. Creative is a bit of an in-house agency. While they work under the brand team, they also support all of our teams to make sure that we've got great design and video resourcing.

The last team, which we're setting up right now, is our content marketing team. They’re going to be thinking about podcasts, videos, user stories, and ways to drive more thought leadership – all of which is brand new to Bitly.

Those are the four pillars. All of them drive revenue to a certain degree. Some are a straight line to revenue; some are a wiggly line, but they're all connected.

The fifth team, which isn’t one of our pillars but the foundation, is the revenue operations and analytics team. They focus on making sure that we've got marketing efficiency across the board. They ensure that everything that we're doing drives the right unit economics, and they’re a partner to every single one of the teams when it comes to our overall impact on growth for the business.

Jeff Boron

Great answer. Dee Dee, how about you? How are your teams structured at Teamwork?

Dee Dee de Kenessey

The funny thing is that Tara built our marketing team so, unsurprisingly, it’s pretty similarly structured to Bitly. There’s product marketing, growth and acquisition, brand, and underlying those three pillars, there's the analytics and operations team.

Deciding how to structure your teams

Jeff Boron

I'm fascinated by how leaders make decisions about team structures because when it's done really well, it can birth amazing things, but it can be a big source of tension when roles and responsibilities aren't clear or people have conflicting ideas about how that structure should look.

I'm curious – as you began structuring these teams, how did you go about evaluating the different options out there?

Tara Robertson

You touched on a couple of really important points. One is clarity. Roles and responsibilities have to be clear, regardless of how you build your org.

You really have to figure out what your business strategy is and what your goals are, and then how can you all work together to help achieve those goals. You should also think through how to create a structure that's not so rigid, so people don't feel like they have to fit into a box. On top of that, you need to consider all your areas of strength and look at how to plug any gaps.

I'll walk you through the journey that I've been on so far at Bitly. The first 30 days were a listening tour. I spent a ton of time in my first month talking to everybody in marketing, our global leadership team, and some partners in the org.

I asked every single person the same five questions, then I took all of those answers, threw them into a spreadsheet, and started to parse through all the data. I was taking a quantitative approach to qualitative insights and looking for patterns. Based on those patterns, I could see where the team was really crying for help and where they were doing really well. That built the foundation for our new team structure.

That listening tour was really important. You have to listen to your team first when you're thinking about org design. The last thing you want to do is come in and throw a new org structure at everyone and not have them be a part of that journey. That's when you get tension and people start to push back.

I also reached out to my network of CMOs at other large SaaS organizations to ask for their input. I looked at the ways other businesses are structured and put together a roadmap on what that structure will look like for us.

For those areas that aren’t so well-defined, you need to figure out what will work best for your business. Content is a good example of that. When Dee Dee and I were working together, we were trying to figure out what content would look like at Teamwork. In that instance, it was split across multiple teams, because that's what made sense. We didn't need a centralized content team; we needed a team focused on each pillar. At Bitly, however, it’s completely different.

Change management is vital throughout this whole process. As I rolled out our updated org design, I was sure to tell the entire marketing team that this was only step one; there are a lot of other changes coming, and the team will be involved in every single one of those changes. We need everyone to be prepared for that because change is inevitable when you grow.

When I was at Sprout, my org was changing every six months. It was hard. People got whiplash. They were overwhelmed. They were like, “But we just fit into this role!” So I think you have to talk people through that change and be able to celebrate it.

To summarize, I’d say step one of structuring or restructuring a team is listening to the people involved, step two is mapping out an org structure that aligns with your KPI, and step three is managing change.

Knowing when to pivot

Jeff Boron

Dee Dee, you inherited the team structure you have now. Have you thought about making any adjustments to your team?

Dee Dee de Kenessey

Absolutely. I think you have to. Tara talked about how important it is to go on a listening tour when you join a new organization, and I totally agree, but it's so important to remember to do it again and again – not just when you start a role. We all take the time to sit down with everyone and ask all the questions when we begin, but then we forget to keep checking in – I know I’ve been guilty of that.

To my mind, you’ve got to do it every six months, at least with your key stakeholders or the people you work with most. Otherwise, you can be charging off in a certain direction while the business needs have changed. Or you can or can find yourself trying to figure something out alone, without taking in the bigger picture of the business needs.

As Tara said, our content team is totally decentralized at Teamwork. Before that, when it was a shared resource, we used to have a lot of bottlenecks, so decentralizing it made sense – everyone could run more quickly if they just had a content person on their team.

However, more recently, we've seen that the decentralization of that team has caused a lot of unanticipated friction. The content people aren't really talking to each other, working together, or learning from each other, there's duplicate work going on, and some of them have different skill sets than others, so there's some jealousy between teams.

Now we’re starting to ask ourselves if it would make sense to rethink our approach and bring the content team back together. They would have to function very differently – more like an agency serving a bunch of other teams – but that could help us run faster and better meet the org’s current needs.

Sometimes you just need to know when to pivot. It could be because of the macroeconomic environment – maybe you need to do some recession-proofing – or it could be about whether what you’re doing is actually working. In order to understand that, you have to keep checking in not only with your teams but with the people who work with them.

Recession-proofing your team

Jeff Boron

Dee Dee, you mentioned recession-proofing. I’d love your thoughts on what that means and how you go about doing that.

Dee Dee de Kenessey

Boy, this is the question, right? I'm going to be candid here: I think the honest truth is none of us know how to do it particularly well. There's a lot of educated guesswork, trying, and failing.

You see it with companies that are doing layoffs across the board. That is, to be blunt, a failure to look forward and recession-proof. I say failure, not in a disparaging way – it's just the truth of the situation. They grew too fast, they planned too big, or they thought “We've got this growth rate of 30% year over year; it's gonna continue forever, so let's keep on hiring,” and then they got stuck in a bind and ended up having to do layoffs.

Just to caveat everything I'm about to say, it would be silly for me to sit up here and say there's one right way to do it, or that I’ve got the magic wand and this is how you recession-proof. No company is immune; it's just that some companies are handling the recession better than others.

When you're growing a team, when your company’s in a growth stage, or just when you're hiring period, you have to ask yourself if you’re making a big bet. Maybe you’re building a whole new function or hiring in a new market and you don't know if it's going to prove itself out – those are big bets. You should take big bets – that's the only way you can grow – but you have to understand the risks. If this thing doesn't work out in a year, how are you going to reassess?

Instead, is there a way to dip your toe in that water to test out that new market? Can you hire a contractor rather than building a whole new function? Can you reallocate part of someone’s time to try this new thing out? I don't know if that's recession-proofing per se, but I think that's the direction a lot of companies are going to go in.

Jeff Boron

Interesting. Thank you both so much for your amazing and very thoughtful answers. I've learned a ton.