Reforge Marketing Leadership
In 2022 I partnered with Stephanie Kwok and Reforge to create a Marketing Leadership program. Stephanie brought her experience building and leading marketing, strategy, and ops teams at FanDuel during a period where the company grew over 10x in revenue. I brought what I had learned building and rebuilding organizations at Zulily, Expedia, and Callaway. The program was designed for marketing leaders managing cross-channel teams. It originally launched as a 4-week cohort-based course and is now available on-demand.
Why this program
Most marketing education focuses on tactics. How to run better ads, how to optimize landing pages, how to set up attribution models. These are important skills, but they are not the ones that determine whether a marketing organization succeeds or fails.
The harder problems are organizational. How do you structure a team so that channel managers aren't optimizing in silos? How do you build operating rhythms that surface the right decisions at the right cadence? How do you develop people who can think across the full funnel rather than just their slice of it? These are the questions I kept running into across roles at Zulily, Expedia, and Porch, and they were the questions I wanted the program to address.
What the program covers
The curriculum is structured across four weeks:
Goal-setting and operating rhythms. The connective tissue that makes marketing organizations work. How to set goals that create real accountability rather than just activity, how to build planning cycles that surface the right decisions at the right cadence, and how to create feedback loops between brand and performance. A lot of marketing dysfunction comes from poor operating rhythm rather than poor marketing talent. This week gets into the specifics of what good looks like.
Managing finances. How to work effectively with finance, manage budget pressure, and make the case for marketing investment in terms the rest of the business can evaluate. This includes how to navigate the tension between short-term efficiency targets and longer-term brand building, and how to build a relationship with finance that produces better outcomes for both sides. This was a topic that came up repeatedly in both Stephanie's and my experience. Marketing leaders who can't speak the language of the P&L lose credibility and lose budget.
Org design and hiring. How to scope roles, structure a cross-channel marketing team, and hire for the types of problems your organization actually faces rather than the ones you solved two years ago. We developed a Marketing Competency Matrix to help leaders think through role scoping and evaluation in a structured way, especially useful for leaders who are building their first marketing team or inheriting one that needs to be rebuilt.
Team development and career pathways. How to develop people who can think across the full funnel rather than just their slice of it, and how to create career paths that retain strong talent. This includes when to invest in specialization vs. generalization at different stages, and how to build a culture where the team understands the business economics, not just the channel metrics.
My perspective
The program draws heavily from my experience building and rebuilding marketing and analytics organizations across very different contexts. At Zulily I built the analytics function from scratch during a period of hyper-growth ($0 to $1B in 4 years). At Expedia I inherited a 100+ person data science and analytics org in turnaround and had to reframe its scope from service-orientation to product-orientation. At Zulily as CMO, I took over a 300-person marketing org during a business turnaround, rehired most of the leadership team, and had to stabilize the P&L while shifting the business towards sustainable growth.
Each of these situations required different approaches to team building, operating rhythm, and stakeholder management. But the underlying principles were consistent. Hire for the problem in front of you. Build processes that create accountability without bureaucracy. Invest in the finance relationship early, not after you've lost the budget debate.