Why Shrinking Marketing Teams Create an Isolation Problem
TL;DR
- As marketing engineers absorb multiple functions into a single role, marketing teams are shrinking to a handful of highly capable generalists grouped in small pods under a PMM-style owner, instead of a wide bench of channel specialists.
- Shrinking a marketing team creates a judgment problem: the person doing the most technical work often has no one internal to check their thinking against.
- Peer communities and agency partners are stepping in to give marketing engineers the second opinion a leaner team no longer has built in.
Part 2: Why shrinking marketing teams have an isolation problem and how marketing engineers can build community in an isolated role
Read Part 1: A Marketing Engineer's Value Comes Down to Four Things Most Teams Aren't Tracking
I sat in on a pitch call recently where a prospect told me every other agency they'd talked to said the same thing about their website's issues: fix your schema. I pushed back on the diagnosis. Their site was already ranked near the top of the market, so showing up wasn't the problem. The real question was whether an AI, faced with five similarly visible options, would actually recommend them over the other four. We hung up, and I turned to my team and asked if I was the one missing something.
That flicker of self-doubt turned out to be the same thread running through the second half of a conversation I had with Josephine Cahill of Oyster HR, Nick Lafferty of Profound, and Josh Grant of StackedGTM. It all centered on the feeling of being the person who has to be right, with no one internal to check the call against.
Oyster HR runs its marketing team with eight to 10 people, a strikingly small number for a company operating in 180-plus countries. But that's where many marketing teams are heading as AI tools let a handful of people absorb work that used to need a specialist per channel, running research, execution, and measurement themselves instead of handing pieces off.
That structure looks efficient on paper, until you ask what happens to the org chart itself once a team gets this lean.
This conversation was part of Edgar Allan’s ongoing Building the Next Web series, which has included discussions with Finsweet’s Jesse Nieman, OFF+BRAND’s Stu Ross, and more.
Smaller marketing teams gain capability and lose redundancy
A shrinking marketing org reads like a capability story: fewer people doing more, thanks to better tools. That's true, but it undersells what's changing. A 10-person team that used to need a specialist for paid, content, lifecycle, and ops now runs on fewer people who each carry more. What gets lost is the redundancy multiple people offer: colleagues who know a piece of the same problem well enough to disagree, or agree, productively.
I've watched this happen in our own team for years, long before "marketing engineer" was a job title. Every time we've retired a role that a tool made redundant, we've had to consciously replace the second opinion it provided, or the work quietly gets worse before anyone notices.
The PM-led pod is the model borrowing most directly from engineering
Nick's read on where this settles is that marketing teams start to look more like engineering orgs, with a PMM-equivalent owning a domain and a small pod of marketing engineers and designers executing underneath, replicated across business units.
It's already showing up in practice. At Figma, product marketers have taken on the function directly, building the shared context layer that keeps messaging consistent across the team. At Samsara, marketing ops owns it, maintaining a library of roughly 90 AI agents. Both gave an existing function more surface area rather than hiring a new department.
It's the same shift I described to Josephine when she asked where this leaves agencies: our job is building the systems a lean team can eventually run without us, then handing over the keys. A pod model only works once someone's made the system repeatable enough to hand off, which usually isn't the job of the person running the pod day-to-day.
The lean team model creates a structural isolation risk
Here's what the PM-pod model doesn't solve, however: at most companies right now, there's exactly one person in this role, usually the most AI-fluent marketer on the team, the one making calls about what to automate and what to leave alone.
A marketing organization is under-supported when the one person doing the most technical work has no one internal to check their judgment against.
I felt a version of this after that pitch call. Josephine's own experiments at Oyster make the stakes concrete: she ran a six-week A/B test, got a clear win, handed the same workflow to a friend at a similarly sized company, and it failed anyway. That's the risk of having one technical decision-maker with no one to check the call against: nobody catches it when a result that worked once doesn't generalize, and that person is often the one shaping how the company talks to its market.
Peer networks are becoming part of the org chart, whether or not anyone puts them there
Nick found a novel way to respond to the isolation: a supper club. He and Lucy Hoyle, a marketing engineer at Carta, are starting a monthly gathering in New York where marketing engineers can build together and compare notes. He described the demand as immediate and overwhelming.
That's worth taking seriously. The marketing engineer is replacing a structural role the org chart used to fill on its own. The forums that used to hold these communities together were built around a specific platform or channel, and this role doesn't have that kind of shared surface anymore. Marketo's forums did this for a generation of marketers because the community formed around a shared tool. This one needs a community built around a mindset instead.
I felt the same shift at ZeroClick in San Francisco earlier this year, where most of the room was SEO and PR practitioners, and I was the only web-building agency person there. The old lines between web, growth, and brand communities are dissolving because the work no longer fits inside one lane. Nick's supper club is the right response to marketing engineers, a role that has outgrown the communities built for the specialist jobs it replaced.
Agencies solve the same problem community does at a different scale
Josephine's clearest answer for why she still works with outside partners was sample size. A company only knows what worked on its own account. An agency that's run the same test across dozens of accounts can tell the difference between a real signal and noise on one company's data, the same function a peer meetup performs at a smaller scale.
That’s part of what Edgar Allan's Customer Success Program (CSP) is built for: embedding with a client's team on a flexible, ongoing basis so the person making the technical calls has someone in the room who's seen the same decision play out at other companies, not just a vendor brought in after the fact. Nick's supper club and Edgar Allan’s CSP take different shapes, a monthly gathering versus a formal partnership, but they solve the same problem at different scales: giving the person who’s making the technical calls someone to be wrong in front of first.
That pitch call I mentioned at the start of this article worked out, by the way. The prospect signed. But the discomfort of not knowing in the moment stuck with me longer than it should have, and it’s a big part of why we keep building partnerships that let a client's team pressure-test a decision before it ships rather than after.
If your marketing team has shrunk to the point where one person is making most of the technical calls, the question worth asking is who they're allowed to be wrong in front of before a decision ships.
FAQs
Does a smaller marketing team mean the organization is losing capability?
Not necessarily. A lean team built around marketing engineers can often do more than a larger team of narrow specialists, since the same people carry research, execution, and measurement together instead of handing work across departments. What shrinks is the built-in redundancy of having multiple people who can catch each other's mistakes and grow their experience in their field.
What does a marketing org chart look like when most of the team are generalists?
The clearest emerging model mirrors engineering orgs: a PMM-style owner sets direction for a domain, with a small pod of marketing engineers and designers executing underneath, replicated across business units or product lines. Companies like Figma and Samsara are already running versions of this, built from existing product marketing and marketing ops functions rather than new hires. The model works because the pod owner has enough authority to make tradeoffs, not because the individual contributors are more skilled than a wider bench would be.
How do you avoid isolating the most technical person on a marketing team?
Give them a peer group outside the company, whether that's an industry meetup, a practitioner community, or an agency partner who has seen similar decisions play out elsewhere. The goal is a second opinion on judgment calls before they become standard practice, not a performance review. That group doesn't need to be large or formal to help, it just needs to exist before the next high-stakes call, not after one goes wrong.
Does hiring an agency solve the isolation problem for a lean marketing team?
It solves a version of it. An agency's advantage is sample size: pattern recognition built from working across many accounts rather than just one. That's structurally similar to what a peer community provides, just delivered through a formal partnership instead of an informal group.