Instead of a traditional structure, Gymshark has a CCO and CBO with complementary marketing skills. This unique org design ensures the customer's voice is dominant in strategic decisions, preventing short-term commercial goals from overriding long-term brand equity and customer focus.

Working for a founder who understands marketing (e.g., a former CMO) creates a high-trust environment. This empowers marketing teams to invest in long-term brand building and creative initiatives that are notoriously hard to attribute, without being handcuffed by demands to prove the ROI of every dollar spent.

To keep growth aligned with product, foster a shared culture where everyone loves the product and customer. This isn't about formal meetings, but a baseline agreement that makes collaboration inherent. When this culture exists, the product team actively seeks marketing's input, creating a unified engine.

Instead of a single centralized growth team, ElevenLabs creates dedicated "sharded" growth teams for each product line (e.g., consumer app, creator tools). These pods act as mini-CMOs for their product, supported by a horizontal team of channel specialists like SEO and performance marketing leads.

Misalignment stems from sales and marketing using different numbers and narratives. High-performing organizations treat GTM as a single, unified motion. They focus on seamlessly passing the customer from one stage to the next, prioritizing a collective win over defending individual functional metrics.

To modernize her team, Ally's CMO designed a new structure based on core capabilities (Insights, Execution, Creative, Measurement) rather than traditional functional silos. This model, benchmarked against other high-performing organizations, creates clearer ownership and a more effective workflow.

To avoid biased prioritization, structure Marketing Ops as an independent unit rather than placing it under Demand Gen or a sales-led RevOps team. This allows Mops to be a neutral hub, prioritizing projects based on their impact on total company revenue, not just one department's goals.

The battle over attribution isn't a personality conflict but a systemic issue. It's caused by measuring marketing on MQLs and sales on closed revenue. Unifying both teams under a single, shared revenue goal eliminates this friction and fosters collaboration.

At Informatica, the CEO made the CMO solely responsible for the company's entire sales pipeline. This shifts marketing's focus from departmental metrics (like MQLs) to the ultimate business outcome, forcing deep alignment with the CRO and sales organization.