NASA Astronauts, Soviet Cosmonauts, and Autonomous Marketing Processes.

When I want to refocus myself on the principle of keeping things simple, I remind myself of a story I heard years ago. I don't know if the story is true or where it originated (It might have been a movie). It just makes an excellent point.

At the height of the cold war and the space race, NASA scientists worked day and night to create a pen that could work in outer space. They sweated over the ink that could withstand no gravity, space temperatures, and harsh conditions. They researched different materials and devised and tested failure scenarios and use cases for using a pen on a spacecraft. After many months of hard work, they sent the NASA astronauts to the ultimate frontier with a working pen. A space-pen. Success.

Soviet cosmonauts were given a pencil.

No wonder they got there first.

"Houston, we have a problem."

We are programmed to seek innovation from the moment early humans devised the first tools for survival. We love new ways of doing things and gravitate towards experimentation and invention. It's in our DNA.

But we also love the complexity and tend to overthink solutions. You must be familiar with @khaby.lame , who became a social media celebrity by ridiculing life hacks. I think you get my point: often, we are so obsessed with doing things fast that we create unnecessary complexity along the way that results in the opposite.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

If you've ever worked with me, you know I love using this proverb, with a slight change to its meaning.

The original road to hell is paved with good intentions proverb means that it is not enough to mean to do well; one must take action to do well. A good intention is meaningless unless it is followed by mean-well action.

Side note: I recommend you think hard about this proverb and follow its recommendation IF:

• You believe in a higher power;
• You believe in heaven and hell;
• You believe hell is not a lovely place to be in; and,
• You think you might, someday, find yourself in it.

Back to my point.

My interpretation of the proverb: You may do all the right things, have the best intentions, and still find yourself in hell at the end of the road.

Today I use the proverb to demonstrate how task management solutions had all the best intentions, working hard to introduce simplicity, speed, and order to the world of work, but in reality, delivered software so complex, manual and chaotic that it is placing their users in hell (literally).

Take Monday, for example. I was an early adopter and a fan. Monday went through many pivots, but after a few years, when they finally got their product right, I was delighted to use the software to create marketing plans, assign tasks to my teams and even manage my marketing budget.

At first, I was in task management heaven. I could create a board for every project or campaign, quickly create a few tasks, assign team members, and get notified of progress. I was so excited that I spent hours learning the ins and outs of the software, investigated every capability, and proudly used all the available automations.

Goodbye spreadsheets! Hello, automation! Hooray!

It was all good when I had a team of 3 or 4, and the company was small. But as I started scaling up and growing my marketing machine, my needs changed and the processes I wanted to manage became more complex.

Yes, processes. I graduated from managing a single-digit list of tasks into designing, setting up, connecting, automating, aligning, managing, and supervising hundreds of double and triple-digit task lists that made up a function, a role, or an initiative-specific process.

For example, creating a piece of content in the early days was easy. 2-3 people were involved, basic steps (brief, copy, design, done!), and the amount of manual work needed to update and manage the board was minimal and didn't take my team away from doing their job.

When the team grew, and our marketing plan included many more initiatives for multiple regions and channels and more people to run the process (approvals, reviews, input) - we quickly outgrew Monday.

When a team member discovered a new view or feature in the software, we were thrilled, but to use the new features, we sometimes had to redesign the process, or they just weren't significant enough to create efficiencies.

I remember when my team and I met to discuss executing a webinar using Monday. Each member had their preference for designing the process and how boards should look and function. I realized that we had three unique ways of launching a webinar. The product marketing manager developed one, the growth marketing manager designed another, and I created one that best suited my work preferences. We all agreed we were executing the same webinar, but how we managed it looked different on Monday.

Three webinar owners, three distinct execution methodologies.

We all agreed that one standard is better, and everyone said that they would not insist on their particular way of doing things if it would mean that our marketing team would have an efficient standard for launching webinars.

Too many cooks in the kitchen don't make a good meal.

When I stepped away from the day to day work about work and took a look at the software my team was using to run our business, I realized I was in trouble. I noticed the countless boards created by my growing team (For one marketing plan in one year). It's not that the team didn't try to be efficient ( no one wants to do extra work), and it's not that they weren't smart enough to build something that could work. It all worked, but we were paying a steep price in inefficiencies and time to execution because the software required us to focus on the little details of task management instead of doing our work. In our pursuit of simplicity and order, we created complexity and a ton of manual work that had nothing to do with the job at hand.

Monday wasn't - and still isn't - built to run complex processes. Its core components (workspaces, boards, tasks) are designed for simple ones. Monday made every new feature on top of these core components, but they aren't the right ones in the first place. Not for running a marketing org, at least.

Monday had all the best intentions, but my team and I ended up in hell. We needed a pencil and ended up with a space pen.

What's a CMO to do?

The marketing tech ecosystem has a giant black hole when it comes to marketing work management software. The world around us is evolving, and all other functions in the organization are starting to use function-specific, best practices based, and automated software to run their business. Sales have Salesforce, Customer Experience has Gainsight, Product Management has productboard, HR has Lattice, Finance has Workday, and Marketing has... nothing.

Every department has a unified execution solution that works in concert with other solutions. Companies invest in process-critical solutions and require customer-centric departments to work in concert. CMOs have nowhere to go. So they bring together a set of tools, patched up to create a work environment that will do. And end up in hell. Marketing work management hell.

Today, there's no unified, marketing-first, cross-functional, autonomous, and user-friendly solution for managing a company's marketing plan and execution. That's why I am building one.

marketer is the world's first marketing execution management solution designed for clarity, performance, and action, with a self-driving marketing plan at its core. We distill all the marketing know-how into autonomous processes that orchestrate marketing execution－ liberating marketers from manual busywork and enabling sales, CX, product, and HR teams to participate in marketing.

We're still building it, and my team and I evaluate every little step, feature, component, or screen we make with a critical question: will it take the user to heaven or hell? I'll see you in heaven. Soon.

Apply for early access and join our early user community at gomarketer.io .