The player-coach model: why the best marketing leaders stay close to the work.

There's a version of senior marketing leadership that's all strategy — vision-setting, stakeholder management, org design — with minimal engagement in execution. I've seen this model, and I think it has a fundamental flaw: you lose your calibration.

When you're not close to the work — not in the campaign reviews, not looking at the data, not occasionally writing the brief yourself — you start making strategic decisions based on abstractions. You lose the ability to know whether your strategy is actually executable. You stop understanding why things are harder than they should be.

The player-coach model is the alternative. Set the strategic direction, build the team to execute it, and stay involved in the things that matter most. Not to micromanage — but to keep your judgment sharp, to signal to the team that the details matter, and to be the person who can actually help when something is stuck.

In practice, this means I spend time on the executional details that others at my level might delegate away entirely. I write the brief for the highest-priority program. I'm in the attribution model review. I know what the pipeline numbers look like at the segment level.

I think this is how the best CMOs operate, and it continues to shape how I approach my work.