👋 Hey, it’s Sundar! Welcome to experiMENTAL: a weekly newsletter on B2C Marketing & data science how-to guides, frameworks, and stories from 15 years including early Uber.

Why the right cadence matters

Every Marketer says they want an analytical counter part. Yet, so many that have one are unhappy.

It’s not just the marketer though. Data analysts and scientists are also unhappy. From their perspective, they’re doing everything that feels right but then get passed over during promotion. And the business cost of this misalignment is crazy high: missed opportunities and incorrect decision making is just leaving money on the table for the business.

So, how do you fix it? Like any relationship, the foundation of a good one is communication. In a future article, I’ll talk about how to improve communication between Marketing and Analytics but today I’m going to outline a framework on how to structure the right meeting cadence between Marketing and Analytics.

When businesses make decisions

Every framework is meant to solve a business problem even a communication one. In most B2C companies, the pace of innovation and strategic change is fast meaning that context gets lost quickly, so this framework helps reduce the cost of lost context. .

Here’s when businesses usually make decisions:

They set quarterly plans, review them monthly, and make decisions weekly. Seems straightforward enough, but how often is that context being passed to the lowest employees of the company? Is there a forum in which senior leadership shares “This is the strategy for the quarter” and then “Hey, here’s how the business changed this month so we’re doing XYZ”? The answer is anecdotally No.  

Unfortunately, when there’s a breakdown in communication it’s the lowest of the totem that suffer and get blamed. A proper meeting architecture forces repeated interaction but also outlines what needs to be discussed at each meeting.

The meeting architecture

Like many framework this one is primarily rooted in experience. There’s no scientific proof that this will absolutely work, but I have a pretty good hunch that it will because I’ve been in situations where there’s been the right framework and ones where there wasn’t.

More importantly, you can no longer use communication as an excuse for poor performance so it removes a variable when trying to solve organizational dysfunction.

Socialize

• Cadence: 1x a quarter or 2x a year

• Goal: Build rapport between teams

• Attendees: All employees

We tend to forget the human side of relationships in the corporate world. It’s not a “stakeholder” or a “manager”. It’s a person first. This is especially true between functions that are often looked as “support” functions and let’s be honest, data teams often are.

When was the last time you grabbed a coffee with your Marketing or Analytical counterpart? When was the last time both teams did a fun outing and built rapport?

At Uber, I was often invited to Marketing’s offsites and got to chat with my colleagues outside of work. Even though it happened only once a quarter or 6 months, it was great because I knew more about the person when we were having our remote conversations.

Feelings like “oh that person sounds rude over zoom” go away because you realize that the person often has no poor intent and that’s just who they are. These subtle quirks that have gotten even harder to overcome with more remote work make day to day professional interactions feel more transactional.

Socializing is the best way to reduce this perception.

Strategize

• Cadence: 1x a quarter

• Goal: Align on how to build Marketing plans for the quarter

• Attendees: Marketing & Data Analytics / Science leads

At the same time that everyone is meeting up to socialize is a great time to strategize. Strategizing is less about coming up with a complex plan for a quarter and more about aligning between teams. It’s also about deciding what NOT to focus on.

When you get in a room together with a sole focus of deciding what to work on, you’ll start to see that there are so many unspoken assumptions.

“Wait, I thought we were working on XYZ”

“We were but then ABC happened”

“Oh wow, glad you told me that because I was about to go work on that”

To avoid this, a quarterly prioritization exercise between Marketing and Analytics let’s both teams discuss resourcing, projects from last quarter, and what to focus on. Conversations should be around high level themes instead of exactly details.

At Uber, this meant that we would bring data on business trends plus a review of last quarter’s work to understand what worked and what didn’t. Some companies do Quarterly Business Reviews (or QBRs) and this is a great place to introduce the takeaways from that conversation as well.

Prioritize

• Cadence: 1x a month

• Goal: Review previous month’s business performance and realign on priorities

• Attendees: Marketing & Data Analytics / Science leads

Monthly Business Reviews (MBR) are a great meeting but more often than not, analytics is not in those conversations. That’s a huge miss for teams. Not only does it provide exposure but it also bypasses a game of telephone.

It’s important to then take the output of the MBRs and create a monthly prioritization meeting where the goal is to again focus on alignment but go one level deeper and prioritize across the most pressing and urgent topics. In these meetings, you can also surface insights and analyses that the team has uncovered. These meetings need to be well documented so that they can be looked at later on when there’s uncertainty. Finally, this meeting can be kept to leads and more senior level folks but this is where any unshared context can also be brought up.

Many people reading this will feel like this is just a shit ton of meetings and it’s how it creates bureaucracy. Wrong. Shitty meetings create bureaucracy. Good meetings create alignment. Don’t confuse volume of meetings for quality.

Operationalize

• Cadence: 1x a week

• Goal: Discuss operational blockers, progress, and new information that updates priorities

• Attendees: Marketing & Data Analytics / Science Managers and ICs

Finally, we come to the weekly meetings where we operationalize the priorities that have been aligned. It can be a sprint meeting or a weekly business review meeting but the purpose here is to focus on execution and bring up blockers to work that might lead to priorities being missed.

Teams often spend too much time looking at what happened last week and not enough time and doing the actual work so it’s important to find the right balance here.

Also, this is the meeting where you can break the stereotype of Analytics being a support function. In a weekly meeting, it’s important for Analytics and Marketing to work together as partners. Marketing stakeholder should own the priorities but take input from Analytics.

Think about it like a PM and an Engineer. If the PM just thinks the engineer is there to do their work then it’s a pretty broken relationship. Instead, the best PMs leverage Engineers to find the best solution to a problem. The same thing applies to Analysts and Marketers. Share the problem and context and analysts will perform better.

Wrapping up

The key to any good relationship is communication and that holds for the one between Marketing and Analytics.

Here’s a meeting structure that works well:

1. Socialize quarterly

2. Strategize quarterly

3. Prioritize monthly

4. Operationalize weekly

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