Should You Run Marketing Like a Product Team?

#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 (02:23) - - Maria's background (05:23) - - Why teams get bigger and somehow get less done (07:52) - - The multitasking exercise that proves context switching kills output (15:21) - - Running marketing like a product team: the mindset shift (18:09) - - Building a working agreement with your team (20:41) - - The experimentation guardrail template: killing approval bottlenecks without losing control (25:06) - - Building a prioritized backlog (29:27) - - How the backlog helps you push back without saying no (36:16) - - Two-week sprints: how to plan, commit, and ship (38:28) - - Daily standups: how to keep them short and useful (39:19) - - Sprint reviews: showing the rest of the company what marketing does (41:00) - - Retrospectives (42:59) - - Where to start on Monday Join 50,0000 people who get Dave's Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/***Brought to you by:Optimizely - the AI platform for marketers. Build your own AI agents or pull from a directory of 50+ pre-built ones for marketing use cases. Their new Virtual Teammates can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your website optimized. Learn more at optimizely.com/exitfive.Webflow - A website platform built for the agentic web, letting modern marketing teams build fully custom sites that perform in AI search with no developer needed. Learn more at webflow.com/for/exitfive.Zoom Webinars & Events – The virtual event platform built to help B2B marketers run webinars that actually drive pipeline, with branded registration pages, live engagement features, and built-in tools to repurpose sessions into clips and content. Learn more at zoom.com/exitfive.Compound Growth Marketing - A full-funnel demand gen agency helping high-growth cybersecurity and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey, combining AEO, modern paid advertising, and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Podcast listeners get two free media planning sessions to find out what channels are driving the best ROI. Learn more at compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exitfive. ***Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more