The problem might not be capacity. 

Growth puts pressure on a marketing team in a very specific way. More campaigns need to launch, more channels need managing, and more people need to sign off before anything goes live. So, when projects start slipping and the team feels stretched thin, the instinct in the room is almost always the same: hire another marketer, bring in another agency, add another set of hands. It feels like the obvious move, because more work really does seem like it should mean more people. 

The trouble is that growth bottlenecks trace back to inefficient workflows far more often than they trace back to a shortage of people, and workflow problems don't disappear when you add headcount to them. They just find someone new to slow down. 

Adobe Workfront's research backs up more directly than most people expect. Their State of Work study found that knowledge workers spend only 40% of the workday on the work they were actually hired to do. The other 60% goes to meetings, emails, approvals, and the general administrative shuffle that's come to be known as "work about work." So before assuming a team needs more people, it's worth asking what the current team could get done if that 60% shrank even a little. 

This matters more in marketing than in almost any other function, because a single campaign rarely belongs to one team anymore. Strategy hands off to content, content to design, design to paid media, and somewhere in their legal, leadership, CRM, and analytics all need a say before anything reaches the market. Every one of those handoffs can be done well on its own, and the campaign can still slow to a crawl, simply because nobody defined how the handoff itself should happen. A brief goes back and forth for clarification. An approval sits in an inbox a day longer than it should. A report gets stitched together from three tools that don't quite agree with each other. Someone duplicates work that already existed because ownership was never quite clear. Individually, none of that reflects a lack of effort from anyone involved. Collectively, it reflects the absence of a system connecting one stage to the next, and that gap adds quietly until a team that looks understaffed on paper is actually just under-supported by its own process. 

Why more people don’t solve broken processes 

The Project Management Institute has been tracking a version of this for years, and the number is a useful gut check: organizations waste 9.4% of every dollar invested due to poor project performance, with unclear communication and weak governance among the leading causes. Run that against a real marketing budget, and the number stops feeling abstract fairly quickly. It cuts the other way too, and more encouragingly: PMI has also found that high-performing organizations waste nearly 28 times less money than underperforming ones, which suggests the fix isn't complicated so much as it's just rarely prioritized. 

Try the hiring instinct against this, and it falls apart on its own terms. Imagine bringing in another content writer because campaigns keep slipping. If the brief reaching them is still incomplete, they'll produce work against the same unclear instructions everyone else did. If approval still needs three rounds of sign-off, their content waits in the same queue everyone else's does. Adding a person to a broken process rarely removes the bottleneck; more often it just moves the bottleneck to someone new, and now there's another salary attached to the same problem. 

Asana's Anatomy of Work Index puts a number on how widespread this really is: in its most recent global edition, employees reported spending 58% of their working time on work about work, coordinating rather than creating. The alignment side tells a similar story. Adobe's State of Work 2023 report found that only 22% of employees say they clearly understand their organization's goals and know how to prioritize accordingly, even though 75% believe better collaboration across teams is essential to delivering good customer experiences. People clearly want that clarity; most organizations just haven't built up the system that gives it to them yet.

Build the workflow before you build the team 

So, before the next hiring conversation, the more useful set of questions has nothing to do with headcount: whether a campaign begins with a clear brief, whether ownership is defined at every stage, whether approvals move without needing to be chased down, whether anyone can see where a project is actually stuck, and whether reporting is consistent enough to trust. If those answers come slowly, the next investment probably isn't another marketer. It's the workflow itself. 

That's the exact gap the What a Marketing Team Must Deliver Checklist was built to close. It walks through the foundations, briefs, approvals, handoffs, ownership, and reporting, so a growing team can find its actual bottleneck before it turns into a hiring decision that doesn't solve anything. 

Scaling a marketing team well comes down to giving the people already there the structure and visibility to do the work they were hired for, well before the pressure of growth forces a hiring decision that quietly solves nothing. 

Check out our website: https://digital.occamsadvisory.com or Schedule a free consultation: Book Your Occams Digital Demo - Occams Digital 

This blog is intended for informational purposes only and should not be considered as any professional advice. Please consult with the respective professional for any specific advice related to your situation.   

Location: United States of America   

Media Contact: Harsh Golani   

Contact Details: digital360@occamsadvisory.com

References 

1. Adobe Workfront. State of Work Report, 2018-2019 edition. business.adobe.com/resources/reports — knowledge workers spend 40% of the workday on primary job duties. 
2. Project Management Institute. Pulse of the Profession 2021: Beyond Agility. pmi.org/learning/thought-leadership/pulse — 9.4% of every dollar invested wasted due to poor project performance. 
3. Project Management Institute. Pulse of the Profession 2017: Success Rates Rise. pmi.org — high-performing organizations waste nearly 28 times less money than underperformers. 
4. Asana. Anatomy of Work Global Index, 2023 edition. asana.com/anatomyofwork — 58% of working time spent on "work about work." 
5. Adobe Workfront. The State of Work 2023: A Radical Rethinking of Work Is Underway.business.adobe.com/resources/reports/state-of-work-2023.html — 22% understand organizational goals and know how to prioritize; 75% say improving collaboration is essential.