How to get your marketing team to drive more impact

Emily Kramer, who led marketing at Asana, Carta and other companies, argues that much marketing work wastes time because teams lack alignment before work begins. She introduces GACCS (Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, Stakeholders), a five-part marketing brief written before any project starts. The framework gives work focus, sets context for reviewers, and reduces back-and-forth by bringing the right people in early. Kramer also recommends building a marketing foundation (OKRs, personas, brand story, channel inventory) and an Areas of Responsibility list so other teams know who owns what. The result is higher-impact marketing that other teams trust and help shape.

01Key takeaways

• Write a short brief with goals, audience, creative angle, distribution plan, and stakeholders before starting any marketing project.
• Tie every marketing project to a higher-level OKR and explicitly list non-goals to prevent scope creep.
• Define a specific audience; if the target is just 'users,' the scope is too broad.
• Only create content that adds a unique point of view or improves on what already exists.
• Plan distribution before creating work, and think about how one asset can be repurposed into multiple formats.
• Maintain an Areas of Responsibility list so cross-team collaborators know exactly who owns what.

02Key sections

Why marketing work misses the mark

Marketing output often lacks a clear goal, prioritization, audience, differentiation, distribution, or expert involvement. These problems usually stem from misalignment rather than poor intent.

The GACCS framework

GACCS is a five-part brief covering goals, audience, creative point of view, channels, and stakeholders. It acts as a one-pager that ties day-to-day work to OKRs and sets shared expectations.

Building the marketing foundation

Before GACCS works well, teams need shared OKRs, ICPs, a brand story, a channel inventory, and clear responsibilities. Each foundation element maps to one GACCS section.

How to use GACCS in practice

Share the brief early, keep it in the working doc, use it with contractors, and frame feedback against the brief. This reduces late-stage rework and cultural friction.

Areas of Responsibility (AORs)

A shared list of who directly owns each marketing and cross-functional area, so teams know exactly who to involve and avoid job-title ambiguity.

03From the post

“1. How to get better at influence 2. When to sunset a feature 3. Open thread: What’s your team’s communication rhythm? Subscribe to get access to these posts, and every post from the past. Working with marketing can be a struggle. Especially as a PM. So many big ideas, so many resources and distractions, but often so little to show for it. I’ve worked with many great marketers and a few not-so-great, and I can tell you that it doesn’t have to be this way. While building and leading marketing teams at Asana, Carta, Ticketfly, and Astro (acquired by Slack), Emily Kramer created and refined a framework called GACCS to help product, marketing, and sales teams collaborate. When I saw Katie Mitchell (marketing leader at Sprig) post this message on LinkedIn, I knew I needed to get Emily here to help spread the gospel. I’m excited to share this framework, and all of the insights Emily has about building an effective marketing organization, to save everyone countless hours of running in circles. Enjoy! You can follow Emily on Twitter and…”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.