Part one of three. 

  • Part one: Understanding your individual value only comes from 20% of your work.
  • Part two: Learning how marketers in this community have already built valuable tools.
  • Part three: What tools you can use right now to get started.

Aaron Levie of Box named the mistake everyone makes about somebody else’s job. You generate something in an afternoon, look at the output, and conclude a whole profession just evaporated. What you replaced was “the first 80% of the job.” The expertise lives in the part you did not see.

That unseen part is the 20%, and it is worth defining before anything else. The 80% is production: the deck, the recap, the draft, the report, the fourth version of the plan. The 20% is judgment: making the tradeoff, telling the partner no, moving the CFO. Anyone who has briefed an agency knows the difference in their bones. The deck gets built in four minutes, and the decision about what belongs on it still has to be made by someone.

Nobody is paying you for the slides. They are paying for the judgment that decides what goes on them. The tools are doing something more interesting than saving time: they are stripping out the work that was hiding what you are actually good at.

Start With The Ratio

So the recommendation is simple. Spend the next twelve months getting the 80% off your plate and off your team’s, put every hour it returns into the 20%, and make sure you can prove you did it. Four ways to start:

  • Track one week honestly. Mark every block as production or judgment. The ratio will tell you more than any performance review.
  • Move one recurring production task off your plate permanently. Not faster. Off.
  • Write the sentence that names the part of your job nobody else can do. If you cannot write it, that is the work.
  • Hand each person on your team one thing they own end to end that they could not have owned last year. Then stay out of it.

 

Each of these does the same thing: it frees an hour of production and points it at judgment. The pointing is the part that matters, because freed hours do not stay free.

The Hours Come Back Whether You Direct Them Or Not

Levie’s sharper point is that once the production layer is automated, the market resets. Everyone knows what is possible now, so expectations climb, and what used to be most of the job becomes the baseline.

You are already living it. Few teams are getting bigger. Every senior marketer we talk to is covering more surface area with fewer people; you are strategists AND doers.

So the returned hours get spent one of two ways. Either you direct them toward the customer, toward the case that unlocks the budget, toward finally sitting inside the channel you have been accountable for and never actually run. Or the ratchet spends them for you, and twelve months from now you are doing more volume at the same altitude. That is the difference between efficiency and repositioning, and it is decided by you, on purpose, or not at all.

What You Are Repositioning For

Repositioning needs a destination, and the destination is growth. We have been through revolutions before: the internet, search, mobile. None of them supplanted what they were supposed to kill. The work changed shape, and whoever understood the new shape first got to decide what it looked like.

Constriction is a phase too. Companies do not cut their way to growth. The pressure flips, the executives who spent two years defending margin get handed a growth number, and they go looking for whoever can deliver it. That version of the job will not look like 2019. Smaller teams, higher expectations, the tools in the middle of everything. But it will be growth, and growth gets built by marketers.

This is why the twelve-month horizon matters. You and your team are not preparing for a defensive market. You are preparing to be the obvious people to hand the offense to.

The Part You Control

The obvious objection is that you may not be there when the growth number lands. True, and not yours to decide. Layoffs happen in a room you are not in, based on a number that has nothing to do with your media plan.

It also is not the threat it is being sold as. Kathryn Anne Edwards, a labor economist and Bloomberg Opinion columnist, refused to give Casey Newton a number on how many layoffs are truly attributable to AI. A company can be optimistic about the technology, have over-hired during the pandemic, and want to carry less risk through a volatile stretch, all at once. Then the release names AI, because that is the version the market pays for.

“At the same time” is not the same as cause and effect.

Energy spent defending against the wrong threat is the most expensive thing you own right now. What you do control is the 20%: how good you all get at it, how strong a skill set everyone walks out with, and how much of the workload you take off each other. That holds whether you stay or go, which is exactly what makes it worth doing. And it pays twice. A fluent team can absorb the growth number when it lands. The people you made good are also the network you will be working alongside for the next fifteen years. Everyone in this community has gotten a job through someone they once managed or were managed by.

One Question

All of it comes down to proof. If your role were posted tomorrow, what would you show that the candidate pool could not?

If the honest answer is your experience, that is real, and it is fragile. Experience is what everyone applying has some version of. What almost nobody has is proof they personally ran what they were accountable for, moved money toward it, and built people other companies try to poach.

You have somewhere between twelve and twenty-four months. Decide now what you want to be able to say when the number lands on your desk.

This article is cross posted on LinkedIn. I would love to hear your take on this.