Most Companies Need a Practitioner, Not a Leader
Most Companies Need a Practitioner, Not a Leader
Before you post that job description for a VP of Marketing or a CMO, answer one question honestly: is your actual problem a strategy problem, or is it a getting-work-done problem?
Those are not the same hire. And confusing them is one of the most expensive mistakes a growing company can make.
Most companies conflate seniority with abstraction. The assumption is that if someone is experienced enough to be valuable, they should be directing work, not doing it. So you reach for the senior title, write a job description full of words like “visionary” and “cross-functional leadership,” and end up with someone whose superpower is building a team around them – in a company that doesn’t have one yet, and probably doesn’t need one.
That’s not a bad hire because the person is bad. It’s a bad hire because you misdiagnosed the problem.
The career ladder has a design flaw
Here’s what I’ve observed after 13 years in growth and marketing: at some point, the ladder stops rewarding craft and starts rewarding management. If you’re good enough and experienced enough, the expectation is that you’ll move into a role where other people do the actual work. If you don’t want that, the implicit message from the market is that you’re either not ambitious enough or not senior enough to matter.
This isn’t unique to marketing. Engineering ran into the same wall and actually did something about it. The Staff Engineer track exists because the industry acknowledged that some of the best engineers create more value by going deeper into the craft than by managing other engineers. Their judgment, their technical instincts, their ability to make hard calls at the architecture level – that compounds over time. Pulling them into people management doesn’t elevate the organization. It removes a great engineer and adds a mediocre manager.
Marketing never made that distinction. The assumption has always been that experienced practitioners graduate into leadership, and leadership means abstraction. We just kept pushing good people up and out of the work they were actually good at.
The result is a missing middle. There’s a gap between junior marketers who are still learning the craft and CMOs who are building org charts and managing agencies – and almost nothing in between. No legitimate career home for the senior person who is exceptionally good at the work and has no interest in leaving it behind.
That gap isn’t just a career problem. It’s an organizational one.
Two things break when the middle is missing
The first consequence is obvious once you see it: junior people have no expert practitioner to learn from. They have managers. Managers can tell them what needs to happen and whether the output hits the mark. But a practitioner who is still in the work – actually building campaigns, pulling data, debugging measurement – can show them how to think. How to work through a problem they’ve never seen before. What good actually looks like when you’re building something from scratch, not inheriting something that already works.
That kind of knowledge transfer doesn’t happen in a weekly 1:1. It happens when someone experienced is working alongside you, making decisions in real time and explaining why.
The second consequence is less visible but just as damaging. When marketing leadership is several years removed from actual execution, strategy starts to drift from reality. The recommendations are sound in theory but miss practical constraints – what’s actually hard to build, what tools work the way the vendor claims they do, where the data falls apart under pressure. I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly when I come into a company for an audit: a coherent strategic direction sitting on top of completely broken infrastructure. Nobody caught it because the people with enough experience to know better hadn’t been close enough to the work to see it.
Smart strategy plus broken execution isn’t a leadership problem. It’s a proximity problem.
What you actually need
The person I’m describing operates at two altitudes simultaneously. At 10,000 feet, they understand the business model, where the growth leverage is, what the measurement needs to support, and why a particular channel mix makes or doesn’t make sense at a given stage. At 100 feet, they’re the one building the thing – setting up the tracking, structuring the campaigns, pulling the analysis, running the test.
That dual range is what makes this profile genuinely rare. Most experienced people are good at one level or the other. The ones who can move between them without losing fidelity at either are the ones who can actually close the gap between what the strategy says and what the execution delivers.
It’s also worth being clear about what this person is not. This isn’t a generalist – someone who touches everything because they’ve never gone deep enough in anything to specialize. The practitioner has gone deep. They have real expertise across enough of the marketing stack that they understand how the pieces connect, where the leverage is, and what breaks when you pull a particular lever. The difference is that their depth didn’t calcify into a narrow lane. They stayed curious and kept expanding.
And critically, their value doesn’t depend on headcount underneath them. They’re not waiting on an agency to execute or a coordinator to pull the report. They can operate with a small team or no team at all, which is exactly what most companies at the $5M-$50M stage actually need.
The honest version of the hire
If your company is at a stage where you need someone to build the machine, not manage the people who run it, the CMO profile is probably the wrong answer. You’re paying for organizational leverage you don’t have the infrastructure to use. The title signals seniority, but the actual value that title delivers – vision, delegation, stakeholder management, org design – is future-state value. It doesn’t solve today’s problem.
What solves today’s problem is someone with the experience to make the right call and the willingness to execute it themselves. Someone who can tell you why your attribution model is lying to you and then go fix it. Someone who can look at your acquisition funnel, identify where the real drop-off is, and run the test that proves it. Someone who treats strategy and execution as the same job, not as two separate phases with a handoff in between.
That person exists. They’re in every industry, at every company size. They’re often undervalued because there’s no shared language for what they do – no title that captures both the strategic credibility and the hands-on capability. So they either get slotted into roles that underuse them, or they get passed over for someone with a more impressive org chart in their background.
Marketing needs a practitioner track the way engineering has one. A legitimate path for senior experts who create compounding value through depth and execution, not through the size of the team they manage.
Until that track exists, the least companies can do is learn to recognize the profile when they see it – and actually hire for the problem they have.