Campaign Building Isn't Your Bottleneck Anymore | Marketing Ops

The bottleneck moved. Most teams didn't notice.

For years, campaign execution was the hard part. You needed specialized skills to build in Marketo or HubSpot. You had to know the quirks of every platform, every integration, every edge case that could break a flow.

That era is ending.

Platforms got smarter. Templates got better. AI handles the fiddly stuff. The actual building of campaigns? It's faster than ever. What used to take a week now takes a day. What took a day now takes an hour.

So why does launching a campaign still feel like a slog for marketing operations teams?

Building got automated. Management didn't.

Here's what nobody talks about: the technical work shrank, but the coordination work exploded.

You're not stuck because you can't build the campaign. You're stuck because you're waiting on brand review, legal sign-off, stakeholder feedback that's three days late, assets that were supposed to arrive last Tuesday, and a calendar invite that keeps getting rescheduled.

The bottleneck isn't building anymore. It's managing.

Approvals. Dependencies. Handoffs. Status updates. "Just checking in" Slack messages. The calendar Tetris of getting five people in a room. The spreadsheet that tracks the other spreadsheet.

This is the new tax on Marketing Ops.

You didn't sign up to be a project manager.

Most Marketing Ops pros got into this work because they're builders. They like systems. They like making things work. They like the satisfaction of a clean automation that runs perfectly at 2 AM while they're asleep.

Instead, they spend half their day in status meetings, chasing approvals, updating project trackers, and explaining—again—why the campaign can't launch until legal reviews the disclaimers.

The building is the easy part now. The managing is what's eating your calendar.

What actually needs to change

The answer isn't another project management tool. You've got plenty of those. The answer is removing the coordination overhead entirely—or at least automating the hell out of it.

That means approvals that route themselves. Dependencies that resolve without you playing air traffic controller. Status updates that happen automatically, not because you remembered to update Asana.

It means treating the management of campaigns with the same rigor we now apply to building them.

The technical execution problem is largely solved. The coordination problem is wide open. And it's where the next wave of Marketing Ops innovation needs to focus.

Because you didn't get into this to babysit spreadsheets. You got into this to build things that work.

Time to make the management work, too.