You Can’t Scale a Marketing Operation Until the Operating Decisions Are Explicit
How Rudd Consulting helped a global life sciences organization define how Marketing work should run and build those decisions into Airtable.
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The Challenge
A global life sciences organization engaged Rudd Consulting to create a more scalable way to manage campaign planning, creative intake and delivery, approvals, and project execution across its Marketing organization. As one stakeholder described the goal, “I want this to be where everything lives.”
The request for a new system raised a deeper operational challenge. The organization needed to make a series of interconnected decisions explicit: How should different types of work enter the process? How should requests be prioritized? Who should own each stage? Who needed to review and approve work, and when? What turnaround expectations should apply? What did the team need to understand about capacity and work in progress?
Those questions affected one another and the architecture of the eventual solution. Intake decisions influenced routing and scheduling. Approval requirements affected ownership and workflow design. Turnaround expectations depended on the type of work being requested. Reporting needs depended on how the underlying data was structured.
Rudd partnered with the organization to clarify how key Marketing workflows should operate and design a system capable of supporting those decisions. The work was to make the organization’s intended way of working explicit enough that a system could consistently support it.
The Approach
Rudd Consulting worked with the organization to turn previously implicit ways of working into explicit operational decisions. The team used the developing platform to test whether those decisions held up against actual work.
Rather than beginning with a fully defined process and translating it into Airtable, process design and system implementation happened together. Rudd established the foundational architecture early and used real work to validate the structure, terminology, relationships, and assumptions before layering dependent functionality on top of it.
The resulting architecture connected work from the highest level of campaign planning through execution: Parent Campaigns connect to Campaigns, Campaigns to Tactics, Tactics to the Tasks required to execute them, and Tasks to the Assets and Deliverables produced through that work. This gives each deliverable a connection to the campaign it supports, preserving context as work moves from planning to execution.
From there, the teams moved through an iterative cycle: define how a workflow should operate, translate those decisions into the system, test the workflow against actual work, gather feedback, and refine both the process and the platform.
Testing the process and platform together helped the team resolve questions about intake, prioritization, ownership, approvals, turnaround expectations, and reporting before building further functionality that depended on those answers. A change to an approval requirement, for example, has implications for both ownership and scheduling. The architecture needed to support those relationships.
From Tactic to Approved Deliverable
The campaign hierarchy provided the structure, but the workflow needed to define how work would actually move through the organization.
Rudd worked with the team to translate decisions around ownership, expected turnaround times, dependencies, and review and approval requirements into a connected workflow. Those decisions were then built into the system so that due dates, assignments, notifications, and approvals could support the agreed-upon process rather than relying on teams to coordinate each step manually.
The system gave the organization a way to put its newly defined Marketing processes into practice. The campaign relationships established what the work supported; the workflow established who needed to act and how the work should progress.
Extending the Architecture to Events
As the Marketing platform took shape, the team identified an opportunity to bring Events into the same connected environment rather than manage it as a separate system.
Rudd worked with the Events team to understand how their needs differed from the core Marketing workflow while identifying where the underlying data and processes should connect. Events could have their own purpose-built experience while remaining connected to related Campaigns, Tactics, shared organizational data, and the Tasks assigned to Marketing team members.
The shared architecture let Events follow its own workflow without creating another silo for work that depended on the same people and information. The team could connect the underlying data without forcing both functions into an identical process.
During a walkthrough of the Events experience, the Events stakeholder immediately recognized the fit with what he had envisioned: “You guys read my mind.”
What Changed
The resulting platform brought campaign strategy and execution into a connected environment. Campaign relationships preserved the connection between planning and deliverables, while the agreed workflow provided a consistent framework for intake, ownership, timelines, and approvals.
Events extended that foundation into another team’s work. Its purpose-built workflow and interface remained connected to the broader Marketing operation, demonstrating how the architecture could accommodate different ways of working within a shared environment.
Rudd helped the organization make its operating decisions explicit, validate the architecture they depended on, and translate them into workflows that could be tested and refined. Airtable became the place where those decisions could guide the work, with a foundation that could expand as the organization’s needs evolved.
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