Marketing team structures at five, fifteen and fifty

Marketing teams break in predictable places as they grow. The three sizes break for different reasons, so a fix that worked at one won't carry over to the next, and the useful thing is knowing which break you have. Most reorganisations are really an answer to a problem of priorities, and no structure solves that: if everything is urgent when there are five of you, it will still be urgent at fifteen, only with more meetings.

So before you change the shape of anything, check whether what you actually have is too much work and no agreed order to do it in.

Five: everybody does everything, and that's fine

At five, the structure is a lead who decides and four people who do a bit of everything. Specialising this early slows you down, because no single specialism is a full-time job yet, and the gaps between them belong to nobody.

What breaks: the lead becomes the only person who knows why anything is happening. Everything goes through them, and they're usually doing the work as well.

What fixes it: writing the plan down so that it doesn't live in one head, and agreeing who decides what when the lead isn't there. None of that needs a reorganisation.

What not to do: hire a specialist because one channel is interesting. Hire one when a channel is carrying the business, which is the same test that settles whether your first hire should be a generalist or a specialist.

Fifteen: the first real structure, and the first real arguments

Somewhere between ten and fifteen people, you need to divide the work up, and there are only three sensible ways to do it:

• By channel: search, paid, content, email, events. It's easy to hire for and easy to measure. The weakness is that nobody owns the customer's whole experience, so the channels end up optimising against each other.
• By audience or product: a person or a small group for each market. It's better for coherence but worse for depth, and it duplicates skills from one group to the next.
• By function, with a shared service: people who decide, and people who make. It's efficient, but the usual complaint is that the makers start to feel like a queue for other people's requests.

None of them is right in general. Pick the one that fits wherever your hardest coordination problem sits, and expect to change it in two years.

What breaks at fifteen: the handover between the people who decide and the people who make. Briefs get thin, work comes back wrong, and each side blames the other. The fix is a written brief and a named decider, the same discipline as briefing an agency, and it applies just as fully to work done in-house.

Teams this size also start to depend on people who don't report to them, which brings a problem of its own: working with a designer or developer who doesn't report to you.

What also breaks: nobody can say what the team did last quarter. That's a reporting problem rather than a structural one, and the monthly report your board will read is the cheaper fix.

Fifty: coordination becomes the job

At fifty, most of the lead's time goes on making sure the parts agree with each other, and the risk changes shape completely. The team no longer fails by being too small to get things done. It fails by doing a great many things that don't add up.

What breaks: the same work happening in two places, three versions of the same message out in the market, and a planning process that takes longer than the work itself. Teams this size often reach for a framework. Before you do, read what squads, scrums and agile actually are, because the most copied model of all was a snapshot that its own authors warned people not to copy.

What fixes it: fewer, clearer priorities, published where everyone can see them, and one place where the whole quarter's work is visible. The structure matters less than whether people can see each other's work.

Signs you have a priorities problem, not a structure problem

Reorganising is disruptive, takes a quarter to settle, and is often chosen because it's a visible thing to do. Before you start one, check for these:

• Everything is a priority, and the list hasn't been cut in six months.
• Work regularly arrives from outside the team and goes straight to the top.
• You can't name the three things the team is for this quarter.
• The last reorganisation was less than eighteen months ago.

If any two of those are true, the problem is almost certainly what the team is being asked to do rather than how it's arranged. The conversation that usually fixes more than a new chart is a harder one: how to say no to another department.

If you've reached the size where you need senior judgement but not a full-time director, our fractional and part-time marketing leadership is built for exactly that, and it's priced by the day.