I came across a wonderful blog from Seth Godin, which says that every individual wears one of the following three hats at their job.

• Scientist: The Scientist does experiments. 
• Engineer: The Engineer builds things that work.
• Operations: The Operations Manager takes the handbook and executes it.

At Fractional CMO, we always think from the marketing perspective and while reading Seth's blog, I was trying to put these hats on the key roles in marketing and see what tasks each one of these roles would undertake.

The Three Hats

Scientist

In Marketing Team, they are the Creative team which should do the experiments on the Website, Content, Media etc. based on certain hypotheses and pass it on to the right teams for building and executing it. 

This team is very important and has to always think out of the box. They have to break the rules of the game and get something new that can bring the required change in the business. They are one of the critical parties in the success of a business. 

Forex: The hypothesis for the team can be a simple statement i.e.: the customers are just bouncing off from the product offering page.        

Now, this 'Scientist' team will have to work towards getting the right data set and then do their judgments and come up with alternatives that can solve the mentioned problem. 

The key attribute of this team is that they have to be very agile i.e. sometimes things will work and many a time it might not work and the pace of experimentation should always be super fast. It can be one or even two experiments a week.  

Engineers

They are a new but a very formidable entrant in the Marketing Team. They are the ones who builds the required stuff mentioned by the scientists i.e. nothing but our creative team. 

A lot of disruption has happened in this space and its the key factor which is now making the life easy for the Marketing department because now you can do more experiments at a lesser cost and measure the results too. 

A lot of technical tools have come up for Website design, Marketing Automation, SEO, Analytics etc which makes things relatively easy to execute and measure. 

For ex: The creative team has given 2-4 prototypes of the product page to be implemented. Now this team has to make the 4 versions which fits into the theme and make sure it is responsive etc. The prototypes should get converted into the polished pages which can be put out the world. 

They can give the suggestions to the Scientists i.e. creative team but can’t have the last say.  

Operations

They are the ones who executes things based on the guidelines. Their focus is to execute things on time with excellence. 

There are a lot of stuff which needs to be executed or taken stock of in the day to day operations of the Marketing Department. This team is very critical to close the loop of the marketing department. 

The ideas flow from the scientists, get built by the engineers and if not brilliantly executed then the complete marketing department is to loose. 

For ex: the 4 web pages are built by the tech team and got them tested but they its the operations team which take those pages and puts it out the world by publishing it. 

It doesn’t end by just publishing it, they also have to run a series of tests on these pages and get the results if these pages are producing the results or not. Is he whole hypothesis on which the experiments started are getting fulfilled or not. 

This team acts as a mirror to the Scientists and the Engineers. 

If one person is wearing all the three hats, then either he is exceptional or he is bluffing the world. Its nearly impossible to have a person whose left brain (analytical) and right brain (creative) works equally 

Do your Marketing team have people wearing these hats? If not, lets discuss. We are all ears.