This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Colin Piper, CMO of BuildOps, an AI platform for commercial contractors. Prior to that, he spent more than 10 years at Autodesk, eventually leading a large marketing team for its construction business vertical. The essay has been edited for length and clarity. Autodesk said in a statement that it has modernized and transformed its marketing department over the past four years.
Some people call it “empire building.”
You get your hands around your department, and you want to make sure it’s growing.
The number of reports you have in your organization is directly tied to your worth at the company and, certainly, to the budget, which is very important to marketing.
I can absolutely relate to chasing some of that internal visibility and notoriety. It’s a trap that many people fall into, and I would say I did at Autodesk. There were over 130 people globally just in my marketing department.
An unwieldy 30-person planning meeting
There were so many layers of management that I felt like I was just managing people, not actually managing the business or marketing. I got so far removed from the real day-to-day work.
I recall a time when I was in a room leading the annual marketing planning session, with 30 great creative marketers present. We’re trying to make decisions, and it’s just highly inefficient, going around in circles.
That, to me, was a big lightbulb moment: Okay, we’ve grown to a point where it’s getting in the way of our actually being an efficient machine.
Our target for getting a complex campaign fully executed from inception to market was one quarter — or 13 weeks — but sometimes it took 20-plus weeks. Sometimes, with too much budget and too many resources, you get to be a little bit too creative.
The creation of ‘program managers’
As the team grew, the need for a program manager role became increasingly apparent. It was somebody to coordinate the work among product marketing, demand generation, operations, and external stakeholders, and to be that go-between for all these teams.
We had an entire team of program managers under me. The function was built almost as a symptom of the fact that the team was already too large. A leaner team would likely not need that function at all.
Another issue was passion projects. It’s easier for them to hide within a bigger organization because there’s a lot more going on, and there’s less visibility at each layer. Looking back, there were some great projects that may not have been fully aligned to North Star marketing goals and impacting the top line metric you want to move as a marketing leader. In a leaner organization with more oversight and a tighter structure, everybody is charging toward a similar goal.
How AI is changing the marketing organization
Towards the end of my time at Autodesk, the company and marketing department were rapidly modernizing. They were rethinking how to go to market, how to retail, and how to bring AI into a very large company, but do it with an incredible amount of creativity and innovation. I have a lot of respect for what was being put in motion as I was leaving. I think they’ve gone through that transformation and are doing things much more efficiently.
Things have changed a lot in the last 18 to 24 months with the advent of AI and its impact on the marketing function.
Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and some of these big new things coming to market have really turned the mirror on marketers. If so much of this can be produced at a highly efficient level with a smart implementation of AI, you may not need those 130 people anymore. You may need 20 people to do that work.
At BuildOps, where I am now, we moved quickly into what I like to call first-party, enterprise-level AI.
We have an AI that’s attached to our system, so it reads your internal documents, our data warehouse, and email. It can be a lot more effective than just a generic LLM. AI is working horizontally across the entire marketing team, and we’re orchestrating different agents to work together.
Last week, we launched a new campaign that went from inception to fully launched in less than six weeks. My leadership team of five people came up with that idea at our offsite, and the team just went into a heavily AI-enabled execution mode. They built a campaign with a long-form, complex research asset, developed a bunch of creative, and it’s now in market six weeks later. That was kind of mind-blowing.
There’s a trend happening right now where marketing is shrinking. Companies are saying, “Is this a function that needs so many people to do the work?” Probably not anymore.
I have a highly efficient team of 20 marketers. It’s a mini version of how I structured my organization at Autodesk, but with a fraction of the people. I want to make sure that every single person we bring through the door is adding a ton of value and has the right scope. I’m not interested in bringing in managers for managers’ sake. We don’t have the luxury of having those types of hires at a startup.
My advice for CMOs is not to be afraid to get closer to the work. You also don’t need to be a CMO who is focused only on vision or only on the brand. You need to care a lot about the execution, the numbers, and the operations of the team. If you have that perspective, you can do a lot more as one person in this new AI world than you could have previously, where you needed several layers of teams to execute that work on your behalf.
An Autodesk spokesperson said in a statement that the company has modernized its operations and transformed its marketing over the past four years.
“We’ve embraced AI to move faster and get more done, and we’ve made accountability and experimentation core to how we work,” the spokesperson said. “The result is an effective, modern growth machine that’s delivering for our customers and our business.”
