Effective project leadership relies on structured tools
Project leadership in marketing technology is the baseline. If you’re in a senior role, odds are your teams are working across multiple platforms, stakeholders, and deadlines. Without a process to handle that complexity, you’ll burn time, drop details, and make slower gains than your competitors. That’s where tools come in. Not tools for show, tools that actually help you move faster and smarter.
Start with action item lists. They’re simple, but most impactful things are. These keep people accountable. Assign a task, attach a deadline, and let the system track it. Platforms like Confluence or Asana do this well. Actions get done because they’re visible. People don’t forget what’s right in front of them.
Then you’ve got RAID logs, Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies. These aren’t just files for compliance. They’re living records that show how a project evolves and where it can stall. When you review RAID logs regularly, you spot problems early. That gives you lead time to adjust.
RACI charts round out the structure. They’re for role clarity: who’s responsible, who’s accountable, who’s consulted, who’s informed. Defined at the individual level, not just by team, RACIs reduce back-and-forth and misalignment. Big companies spend weeks and a lot of money cleaning up role confusion. Get this right, and you avoid that.
Execution moves with speed when every part works together. These tools create that cohesion. As a leader, showing your organization how these tools interplay isn’t micromanagement, it’s engineering for alignment.
Project artifacts are key for guiding and tracking progress
If you can’t measure it or document it, you can’t improve it. Project artifacts exist to keep your teams pointed at the same target over long timelines and across shifting priorities. Things will change, fast. But without versioned, visible documentation, no one will know where the change started or whether it’s helping.
There are four core artifacts worth your attention: business requirement documents (BRDs), solution design documents (SDDs), backlogs, and burndown charts.
BRDs clarify what the company actually needs. These should be written to reflect what solves the business problem, not what sounds impressive. They’re foundational. If your teams aren’t aligned on the BRD, step one is broken.
Then SDDs show how tech will meet those business needs. They translate requirements into system-level solutions. Good SDDs prevent confusion between executives, developers, and operations. If BRDs tell you where to go, SDDs show you how you’re getting there.
Backlogs track the granular. These are your in-flight and upcoming tasks. When the backlog is structured and up-to-date, your teams ship faster and with more focus. Combine that with burndown charts, which track how much work remains, and you get real-time visibility into progress.
Artifacts aren’t overhead. They’re speed. They give everyone a shared operating picture. Leadership decisions are only as good as the quality of the information you’re looking at. These documents ensure that quality is there, in real time. In the long run, the teams that keep well-structured artifacts don’t just move faster, they move better.
ICE scoring helps martech teams prioritize initiatives using objective evaluation
Business moves fast. Martech even faster. You won’t do everything, and you shouldn’t try. ICE scoring, Impact, Confidence, and Ease, is a practical filter. It works because it refines decision-making to what matters. It forces your teams to ask critical questions before time and resources are committed.
Start with Impact. What’s the potential upside for the business? Think revenue, user growth, engagement, whatever your core metrics are. The higher the impact, the closer it should be to the top of the list. But raw ambition isn’t enough.
Then look at Confidence. Do you actually believe the impact will happen? Has it been tested? Is there data behind it or a strong trend pointing you that way? Confidence reduces noise, especially on ideas that seem tempting but aren’t grounded.
Finally, Ease. What’s the cost to make it happen? Not just budget, execution time, stakeholder buy-in, integration complexity. Easy wins with high impact are rare, but when they appear, ICE points you straight at them.
C-suite leaders benefit most when the team’s effort is focused on initiatives that produce measurable returns with minimal wasted effort. ICE scoring saves time on debates. It turns scattered ideas into structured priorities. And it helps leadership say no to initiatives that sound good but don’t scale.
Don’t wait for a huge backlog before using this. Apply it early. Apply it often. Over time, it teaches teams to think strategically without being told.
Navigating martech procurement effectively
Martech procurement often stalls when leaders face too many options and not enough clarity. It gets worse when there’s a fear of making the wrong call, what’s known as FOBO: Fear Of Better Options. You can’t eliminate complexity in this process, but you can manage it.
Use tools that organize viable platforms and cut down your consideration set. Product catalogs like G2, Capterra, Gartner, BuiltWith, and CabinetM are built for cross-comparing features, vendor credibility, and customer feedback. Use the reviews. Ignore the hype. Look for fit.
You’ll need requirement documentation. Not something vague. Requirements should be business-driven and created by both marketing and procurement teams. Pull input from customer data, operations feedback, market research, and compliance teams. Then weight those requirements using the MoSCoW method: Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have. It tells you what’s essential and what’s just nice to have.
Once needs are defined, send Requests for Information (RFIs). Use these to explore potential fits without deep engagement. Then narrow the field with Requests for Proposals (RFPs). Require vendors to show how their tools meet your specific use case, not just generic pitch decks. Include NDAs where needed so you access real detail.
Enterprise-level martech solutions are expensive in time and budget. Structured procurement tools create forward momentum. Decision fatigue is just the result of a broken process. Set clear requirements, ask targeted questions, and hold vendors to focused responses. That’s how you move with speed and reduce risk.
Successful change management
When you introduce new technology, processes change. And whenever processes change, people push back, even when the change is clearly beneficial. That pushback is predictable, and smart organizations prepare for it. If you ignore it, your rollout will stall, and adoption will stay shallow.
This is where structured change management matters. The ADKAR model, Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement, offers a clear way to work through resistance. It was developed by Jeff Hiatt, founder of Prosci, a leading change management firm. ADKAR isn’t about vague sentiment. It’s about sequencing key behaviors so your people know what the change is, why it matters, how they play a role, and what support they’ll get to succeed.
Each element matters. Awareness gets their attention. Without it, the change lands without context. Desire answers “what’s in it for me?” If people aren’t bought in, they’ll block progress. Knowledge gives your team the technical and strategic understanding they need to operate the new tools. But knowing isn’t the same as doing. That’s why Ability, practical application, is critical. Finally, Reinforcement keeps the behavior repeatable. Without reinforcement, even successful shifts fall apart over time.
Beyond ADKAR, use coalition analysis to map out who supports the change and who resists it. Some stakeholders will be influential, and not always aligned. Identify where they stand and how competent they are in the new framework. Bringing highly competent supporters into visible roles accelerates momentum and counterbalances resistance.
If you lead the change, lead the people first. That creates durable adoption and builds credibility across your teams. Don’t treat change management like an afterthought. Treat it as a primary factor in operational execution.
Collaboration across roles amplifies martech execution and strategic success
Martech combines marketing with technology, and that intersection touches almost every department. No one team owns the entire solution. Which means if you want meaningful results, departments have to operate together.
High-performing companies understand this. They involve project managers to drive momentum, procurement leads to control platform selection, legal for compliance handling, and change managers to scale user adoption. All these roles need alignment early. Otherwise, you waste time syncing after the fact.
Executives who support cross-functional collaboration get better strategic alignment. End-to-end visibility improves. Risk drops. Communication bottlenecks shrink.
Leadership should make collaboration a default. As you scale complexity, clarity, speed, and adoption rely on teams that understand the full picture. When marketing, IT, procurement, and change leadership are aligned on both outcomes and process, your organization moves faster and delivers tech that actually gets used.
This is about pulling in the right skillsets at the right stage and giving everyone a stake in the outcome. Moving in sync builds leverage. That’s how real progress gets made.
Key executive takeaways
- Drive execution with structure: Teams execute faster and with more accountability when action items, risks, and responsibilities are tracked using tools like action item lists, RAID logs, and RACI charts. Leaders should standardize these across teams to accelerate delivery and reduce project friction.
- Use artifacts for visibility and alignment: Documents like BRDs, SDDs, backlogs, and burndown charts provide ongoing clarity and alignment between strategy and execution. Executives should require these artifacts for cross-team visibility and better decision-making.
- Prioritize with ICE scoring: The ICE framework (Impact, Confidence, Ease) allows teams to filter noise and focus on initiatives with the best strategic ROI. Leaders should adopt this method to align stakeholder priorities with achievable outcomes.
- Streamline procurement to speed decisions: Tools like G2 and Capterra simplify vendor discovery, while frameworks like MoSCoW, RFIs, and RFPs ensure requirements drive selection. Decision-makers should systematize procurement to reduce risk, bias, and delays.
- Make change management a leadership priority: Resistance to change is predictable and manageable through structured models like ADKAR and coalition analysis. Executives should lead adoption efforts by supporting user enablement and monitoring stakeholder alignment.
- Leverage cross-functional collaboration: Martech success depends on coordinated effort between project managers, IT, marketing, procurement, and change managers. Leadership should build early collaboration into project design to improve speed, alignment, and adoption.
