The Team Was Already Remote Before I Was
What years of coordinating founders, agencies, developers, sales teams and suppliers taught me about making distributed marketing work
When founders ask whether a senior marketing manager can really work remotely, I understand the hesitation. Marketing touches too many parts of a business to feel like something you can safely hand to a person who is not physically there every day.
Then I think about what my teams actually looked like.
The founder might be in one city, I would be working from another, the web developer somewhere else, the PPC agency with its own team, the graphic designer working independently, while the information we needed came from sales, production, customer service or people working in the field.
Even if I had spent every day sitting next to the founder, a large part of the marketing operation would still have been distributed.
That has been true across several of my longer collaborations, from manufacturing and energy to financial services and experiential marketing. My role usually included the ongoing management of marketing, with priorities, budgets, suppliers, reporting and decisions, alongside individual projects such as a website rebuild, a CRM implementation, a repositioning, a campaign or a new commercial system.
Working remotely made some management habits more visible because there was less room for information to travel by accident. Someone had to know where the current version lived. A supplier had to know who was giving the final direction. A decision had to reach everyone whose work depended on it. A delay had to be understood in terms of what else it would move.
Over time, this became part of how I approach marketing work more broadly through Pinpoint: start with the business, understand the people and constraints, then build enough structure for the work that actually needs to happen.
I map the business before I map the tasks
At the beginning of a project, I want to understand what the business is trying to achieve, what already exists, who is involved, how much time and budget are available, where information comes from and how decisions are really made.
That last part matters a lot in smaller and mid-sized businesses. An organisational chart rarely tells the whole story.
The founder may approve one category of decisions. Sales may have information that changes the commercial message. Production may need to confirm a technical claim. Customer service may know the questions buyers keep asking. An external agency may already be running campaigns that depend on a website managed by someone else.
In one energy business, for example, the PPC agency, web developer, sales team and founder already existed when I came in. Later, when I coordinated the CRM implementation, the project had to connect campaign forms, the website, email, sales stages, lead routing, users and reporting.
The software itself was only one part of the work. I first needed to understand what happened to a lead from the moment it entered the system until somebody in sales took over.
In an experiential marketing agency, the situation was very different. Marketing was managed remotely while the actual work came alive at physical activations and events. That meant thinking about marketing before the event happened. What images would we need? What should the field team document? What information would make the project useful as a case study later?
Some moments cannot be recreated once everybody has packed up and left.
This is also why I try to establish decision rights fairly early. If I am coordinating a supplier, that supplier needs to know whose direction to follow. Four people sending separate feedback to the same designer or developer usually creates a different problem from the one we were trying to solve.
A useful brief carries the thinking that happened before it
Briefing is one of the areas where I see the connection between strategy and project management most clearly.
By the time I brief a designer, developer or advertising specialist, I have usually worked through a much bigger set of questions.
What is the business trying to achieve? Who are we speaking to? What role does this asset play in the buyer journey? What can we genuinely claim? What should someone understand or do after seeing it? What information still needs checking? Who approves the result?
The answers become different instructions for different specialists.
In one manufacturing project, we were developing visual identities for two product ranges with different commercial roles. One was associated more strongly with aesthetics, light and comfort. The other leaned into structure, precision and long-term durability.
The designer needed that distinction because it gave the creative work a reason. The task was larger than producing two visually pleasing logos. There was a business logic behind each identity, and that logic created a useful frame for creative decisions.
The web developer needed a different version of the same strategy. The questions there were about structure and behaviour: which pages had to change, how products should be organised, what professional buyers needed to find, where trust signals belonged, how users moved towards the next action, what happened to form data and what had to remain consistent across languages.
I handled the translation between the business need and the specialist brief. The developer could then focus on the technical solution.
Advertising teams needed another translation again. They needed to know which products had priority, which audiences mattered commercially, what qualified as a useful enquiry, what claims we could support and which page matched each campaign.
I wrote separately about one of the larger B2B projects where this kind of coordination connected marketing, production, sales and external suppliers.
A good brief also gives you a way to judge when the work is actually finished. A webpage being live does not automatically make it complete. The form may need testing, mobile may need checking, links and tracking need to work, the final text needs to be in place and somebody has to approve the result. A campaign is similar. Ads can be technically ready while the landing page, lead routing or sales follow-up still need work.
For me, this is where project management becomes very practical. “Done” has to mean something that the people involved can recognise.
The right system is sometimes sophisticated. Sometimes it is an Excel file.
I have worked with CRMs, automation systems and dedicated project management platforms. I have also run projects perfectly well with Google Drive, shared documents, email and carefully structured spreadsheets.
The system depends on the complexity of the work and on the people who have to use it.
When several projects run in parallel, responsibilities overlap, approvals happen at different levels and one delay can affect five other tasks, a platform such as Asana or Monday can be extremely useful.
A smaller project may need far less.
I have never found much value in adding software simply because professional project management is supposed to look sophisticated. If four people can see what they need in one well-built document and they actually use it, the system is doing its job.
Different tools also hold different kinds of information. A project tracker tells me where execution stands. Drive holds files. A CRM tracks leads and commercial activity. An ERP may contain operational information that marketing should reference rather than duplicate somewhere else.
The part I care about most is knowing where the current version lives.
This sounds almost too basic to mention until you have a designer working from one text, a developer working from another and a founder approving a PDF that stopped being current three days ago.
Distributed teams make version confusion expensive very quickly.
Remote communication works better when the channel has a purpose
I do not want every small question to become a meeting.
A quick clarification can happen in a message. An approval or structured request is easier to manage somewhere it can be found later. Working documents need a shared home. Commercial information belongs in the system where commercial activity is already being tracked.
Important decisions also benefit from a small amount of memory.
Sometimes that means nothing more complicated than an email or a note recording what we decided, when we decided it and what changes because of it. A month later, that context can save a surprisingly long conversation.
Video calls become valuable when several perspectives need to meet at once. If marketing, sales and the technical team all see different parts of the same problem, a shared conversation may resolve in twenty minutes what would otherwise spend days moving between inboxes.
I also use live conversations more at the beginning of a relationship or when something feels uncomfortable or unclear. Remote work makes it easier to miss the fact that somebody has understood the task differently, has a concern they have not raised, or needs more context than you realised.
The rest of the time, people need space to do the work.
I also pay attention to how long a project spends waiting. A developer can deliver everything on time and still appear “late” if the project has been waiting four days for an approval. Knowing whether the work is delayed by execution, information or decision-making leads to much better management conversations.
A deadline means very little without dependencies and capacity
Marketing projects rarely move in a perfectly straight line.
A paid campaign may depend on an offer, a landing page and tracking, then on the people who receive the enquiries. A website needs structure, content, design and development, with information often coming from other parts of the business. A photo or video project requires preparation long before the filming date and produces more work afterwards.
I try to identify early decisions that have the power to block several other things.
Once those are stable enough, other workstreams can move in parallel.
I also plan around real availability. A task that takes three working hours does not necessarily have a three-hour lead time. The specialist may only be able to start next Tuesday. That difference matters when the next three tasks depend on the result.
Get Andra Ciucescu’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The level of checking changes with the cost of a mistake too.
Something that will be printed hundreds of times deserves an earlier review than a small digital asset that can be corrected quickly. A claim in a sensitive industry deserves a different validation process from routine social content. A tracking mistake in a significant paid campaign can affect far more than the person who configured it.
Experience has made me increasingly interested in reversibility. The harder or more expensive a decision is to undo, the earlier I want the right people looking at it.
Scope changes are part of the project, and they need to be treated fairly
Projects change because businesses change.
A new piece of information appears. A founder sees an opportunity. A product gets delayed. A sales conversation reveals something useful. A new asset suddenly becomes necessary.
When that happens, I look at what else the change moves.
Does it affect the deadline? Is there enough budget? Is the specialist available? Does another deliverable need to move? Can we include it now, or does it belong in a later phase?
This also matters in the relationship with suppliers.
There is a meaningful difference between correcting work that did not follow the agreed brief and asking for new work because the brief itself has changed.
When a supplier has already worked against an approved direction and the business changes its mind, I think it is fair to acknowledge that the project changed. Depending on the size of the change, time and cost may need to change with it.
Long-term supplier relationships become much healthier when both sides can tell the difference.
Leadership gets more personal when you cannot rely on physical presence
I have managed experienced specialists and I have also mentored a marketing intern completely remotely.
The amount of structure people need varies.
With a junior, I care about how they arrived at the result because that tells me what they understood and where they need more context. Early on, I may create more checkpoints, give examples and explain the reasoning behind a decision. As the person understands the business and the work, they can take on more independently.
With an experienced specialist, I usually care more about the quality of the brief, the expected result, the deadline and anything that may put the rest of the project at risk. Their expertise deserves room.
Seniority alone does not decide the level of autonomy. Familiarity with the business, the ambiguity of the task, the history of the working relationship and the cost of a mistake matter as well.
A senior person entering a technical business for the first time may need more context than a junior who has spent a year inside it.
One of the most useful things a manager can create remotely is enough trust for people to say things early.
“I do not know.”
“I cannot make Friday.”
“I made a mistake.”
“I am missing something.”
These are useful sentences while there is still time to do something with them.
Disagreement is useful too. Sales may see a message differently from marketing. Production may challenge a claim. An agency may recommend a different route. The founder may have another commercial priority.
My role in those moments is to understand why each person sees the problem differently, check what we actually know and turn the discussion into a decision the project can use.
The founder should stay involved without becoming the marketing switchboard
This is one of the patterns I have seen repeatedly in founder-led businesses.
The agency needs an answer. The developer needs approval. The designer sends options. Sales has feedback. Someone asks about budget. Someone else needs a decision before they can continue. Individually, most of these questions look small. Together, they turn the founder into the point through which the entire marketing operation has to pass.
A senior marketing manager can absorb a large part of that coordination. How much depends on the relationship and the mandate. Some founders delegate broadly. Others prefer to approve more. What matters is knowing where that line sits.
When I need a founder decision, I try to bring the problem in a usable form: what happened, which options I see, what each one changes and what I recommend.
Reporting works in a similar way. The founder rarely needs a diary of everything I did that week. They need to know what is moving, what changed, where there is risk, how the budget looks and whether a decision needs them.
This is also a large part of how I think about a Fractional CMO or external marketing director role. I have written separately about how I divide marketing decisions between a fractional leader and the founder, because the quality of that relationship depends heavily on having enough responsibility to manage while keeping the founder close to decisions that genuinely belong at business level.
Remote management still has physical edges
Some of the businesses I have worked with had factories. Others had activations, filming days or events. Those things still happen somewhere.
Production people validate technical information and prepare the product. The event team runs the activation. The photographer goes to the location. Sales speaks directly with customers.
My job is to make sure the marketing work connects to what happens there.
That may mean briefing the field team about what needs to be documented, obtaining technical validation before publishing something, or making sure photos and project information arrive in a format that can be used later.
A distributed model therefore does not mean every activity becomes remote.
There are also businesses where a senior person should probably be physically present more often. A highly operational team in one location, a showroom with constant activity, continuous field management or a difficult internal period may benefit greatly from someone being there.
Sometimes a predominantly remote relationship also benefits from simply sitting in the same room for a day.
I find the question much more useful when it is specific: what does this role need to observe, decide, coordinate and influence in this particular business?
Good external management should leave something behind
I pay attention to what remains when a project or collaboration ends.
Final files matter, of course. So do working documents, open issues, account access and enough context for somebody else to pick up the work.
In external collaborations, I prefer important business assets to remain under the business’s control. Analytics, advertising accounts, domains, hosting, CRM systems and other core platforms should still be manageable after one supplier or consultant leaves.
I also keep whatever can make future projects easier: brief structures, useful templates, arguments that have been validated, processes that worked and notes about what slowed us down.
That is part of risk reduction too.
A business should be stronger because somebody good worked inside its marketing system, rather than becoming more dependent on that person’s inbox, memory or private accounts.
That principle sits behind much of my work at Pinpoint and behind the way I approach project-based marketing interventions as well as longer-term leadership. You can see more of that work and the feedback I have received from founders and collaborators on my Pinpoint profile.
After several years of working this way, I tend to evaluate remote marketing management through fairly practical questions.
Can the manager reach the right people? Can decisions move without disappearing into private conversations? Do suppliers know who is coordinating them? Can problems be raised early? Is the system simple enough for people to use? Does the founder know what requires their attention? Can somebody else understand the project if one person is unavailable?
When those conditions exist, distance can become a manageable part of the operating model. When they do not, putting everybody in the same building may still leave the underlying management problem exactly where it was.
Before you go
- Please take a moment to like the post and follow the writer!
- Did you know that over 400,000 developers share what they’re building, learning, and discovering across our platforms every month? Learn how you can contribute here.
