May 14, 2026

Should You Run Marketing Like a Product Team?

51 minutes

#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

(05:12) - - Maria's background

(08:12) - - Why teams get bigger and somehow get less done

(10:41) - - The multitasking exercise that proves context switching kills output

(18:10) - - Running marketing like a product team: the mindset shift

(20:58) - - Building a working agreement with your team

(23:30) - - The experimentation guardrail template: killing approval bottlenecks without losing control

(29:09) - - Building a prioritized backlog

(33:30) - - How the backlog helps you push back without saying no

(40:19) - - Two-week sprints: how to plan, commit, and ship

(42:31) - - Daily standups: how to keep them short and useful

(43:22) - - Sprint reviews: showing the rest of the company what marketing does

(45:03) - - Retrospectives

(47:02) - - Where to start on Monday

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