CMO Turnover Every 18 Months Isn't a Hiring Problem. It’s System Failure

Most CMOs are terrible.

Talk to most earlier stage startup founders and you'll hear the same story:
"We need to find a better CMO."
Your last one lasted 14 months. The one before that made it 18 months.
The search firm promises this time will be different.

It won't be.

CMO tenure averages 1 year and 2 months in tech — the shortest of all C-level executives. That's barely enough time to vest equity, let alone build anything meaningful. Companies spend months recruiting, pay search firms $50K+, offer $500K+ packages, and watch the same failure pattern repeat.

Working with 30+ companies annually, I see this across every vertical. The pattern is identical: hire CMO with initial optimism, slow realization they can't execute, quiet departure (bonus if you make them an advisor for the off-ramp), cycle repeats!

But here's what we miss: it's not the people. It's the system.

The Root Cause: No L8 Track for Marketing

You can be an L8 engineer at a FAANG — highly respected, great compensation, doing actual technical work. No one forces you into management. You can build systems, architect solutions, and solve complex problems for your entire career. The technical track runs parallel to management, not underneath it.

There's no equivalent IC track for marketers.

In marketing, the progression is brutal in its simplicity. You do 4-5 years of actual marketing work. Growth hacking, running ads, Inbound/SEO, building funnels, optimizing conversion rates. Then you get promoted to managing a team. By year 6-7, you stop doing marketing completely. You're managing people who manage people who do the work you stopped doing.

This isn't a choice — it's the only path forward. Want to make more money? Manage more people. Want respect? Build a bigger team. Want to advance? Stop executing and start strategizing.

So every CMO with 10-12 years of experience hasn't touched actual marketing execution in half a decade. They've been in conference rooms talking about marketing while other people do it. They know what good creative looks like, but they haven't written copy themselves in years. They understand attribution theory, but they haven't set up tracking themselves.

If you think I’m wrong, give your CMO any of the modern GTM tools and let me know how it went!

AI Has Accelerated the CMO Crisis

This CMO approach worked fine when marketing changed slowly.

Learn the fundamentals, manage people who execute variations of what you used to do. Get credit for your team impact (and truthfully its size too, which is dumb but true).

But now AI workflows are reshaping everything monthly. These leaders can't implement what they don't understand. They are disconnected.

The pace of change is unprecedented. A year ago, most marketing teams were manually writing ad copy and email sequences. Today, they're building AI workflows that generate hundreds of personalized variants, A/B test them automatically, and optimize based on real-time data.

But to build a great workflow, you need to know how to do the actual work. What are you trying to automate?

I see this issue across every company we work with. CMO joins, promises transformation, spends months "assessing the team" and "developing strategy."

Meanwhile, the actual work — setting up new AI tools, optimizing workflows, testing new channels — happens without them. Or worse, doesn’t happen at all.

The Incentive Misalignment

Marketers can't afford to fail. Miss one product launch and you're damaged goods. Miss two launches and you're out.

So you optimize for safety, not results.

The CMO playbook becomes predictable: hire expensive agencies, follow "best practices," run safe campaigns that won't embarrass you. Never take the bold creative risks that actually move metrics. Better to deliver mediocre results than risk spectacular failure.

But here's the deeper problem: marketing success isn't even objective. Engineering has tests that pass or fail. Product delivers features following a spec. Sales has deals that close or don't. Marketing has the CEO's taste.

"I don't like this creative." "This messaging doesn't feel right." "The brand voice is off." These are opinions, not metrics. And when the opinion comes from the person who controls your budget and your job, you optimize for their taste, not market response.

What Happens Next

Here's what I think happens in the next 24 months: 50% of early-stage companies (Series A → C) skip the CMO hire entirely (Also happening at a late-stage fintech company with no CMO…).
They'll build VP-level execution teams instead. And I think it’s the right call.

Why this prediction?

• First, we’re back in a high-growth era. Companies must grow fast, and grow now. A CMO who can't generate immediate growth is harder to justify than a VP who can. When timeline is tight, execution beats strategy.

• Second, AI reduces team size requirements. The workflows that used to need 10-person teams now need 2 people and AI tools. You don't need management layers when you don't need large teams. You need senior ICs who can build and optimize these hybrid systems.

I could be wrong. Maybe marketing leadership figures out how to stay connected to execution. Maybe the L8 track emerges within traditional marketing career paths. Maybe AI creates new roles that bridge strategy and execution.

But here's what I see: the companies that adapt first will have a massive advantage. While competitors cycle through expensive CMOs, they'll have senior ICs building growth engines. While others manage management layers, they'll be optimizing actual workflows.

The future belongs to people who can do the work, not just talk about it. Marketing is finally catching up to what engineering learned decades ago: the best individual contributors are worth more than average managers.