Why marketing will never be agile

A CTO once asked me "Why do product teams run agile and marketing teams just do stuff?"

I'd never thought about it that way, but he was right. Product teams ship in sprints, measure everything, iterate constantly. Many traditional marketing teams make annual plans and run campaigns.

Eventually I figured it out: Agile was developed as a response to scarcity. Traditional marketing will never be agile because it's not actually resource-constrained.

Product teams have scarce engineering hours - every yes means a no somewhere else. Marketing has mainly budget constraints, and budgets expand with success. I've literally had CFOs ask me “How much more money can you spend?” because they knew $1 in good marketing returns $10 in three years.

When your only constraint is money, you don't need the discipline that creates agility. Bad product kills your company. Bad marketing mostly just goes away.

Why This is Deadly

Here's the real problem: Without agility's discipline, you lose its greatest benefits.

Product teams get weekly feedback loops. They ship, measure, learn, repeat. Every sprint makes them smarter.

The best marketers experiment constantly, but too many marketing teams design annual plans and run six-month campaigns. With so many moving parts and such long cycles, it’s hard to learn anything useful in this waterfall approach.

And worse - the real growth levers aren't even in marketing.

The Real Growth Levers

At PayPal, my job title said “marketing,” and I made billions for shareholders – but none of my biggest wins came from marketing. We fixed onboarding flows, A/B tested customer service treatments, bundled products, tweaked pricing.

Marketing controlled levers for incremental growth. The levers that drove big growth were scattered across the business – product, engineering, customer service, pricing, even legal.

Google, Facebook, Uber, Stripe, AirBnB – none grew through marketing campaigns. They have cross-functional growth teams that run sprints around growth outcomes, not departmental KPIs.

The best marketers know this. If they constantly ask for product and engineering resources, that's a good sign.

What actually works

Do what Facebook did: Pull your brightest people from marketing, product, engineering, and data. Teach them to work as a cross-functional growth team. Run experiments. Measure everything. Kill what doesn't work.

We’ve helped hundreds of companies adopt this process. German founders especially love when I tell them growth is a measurable, optimizable process. They look at me like kids on Christmas, then wonder why they've been treating it like dark art.

Your factory runs lean manufacturing. Your product team runs agile. Your finance follows procedures that date from the Medici.

Too often marketing still says "trust me, I have best practices. And give me $30M."

If you're tired of funding faith-based marketing and ready for evidence-based growth, we should talk.

Traditional marketing will never be agile. But growth can be - if you stop thinking of it as a marketing problem.

I explain the full process in my First Round Review article, and our Growth Program helps teams make this transformation.