Global biopharma · Marketing platform operating model
Underwater IT Teams Clear a Third of Their Backlog in One Quarter
Touchpoints grow on an exponential curve. A marketing platform built over a decade of reasonable decisions can reach the point where costs scale in proportion to the touchpoints if nobody keeps an eye on the big picture.
A global biopharma's marketing automation platform delivered more than fifteen million touchpoints a year to healthcare providers and patients. A thirteen-week assessment had just found what the platform's own history predicted: ambiguous ownership across business and technology teams, the same campaign configured three times in three systems, business logic scattered across every integration, and a measurement program that served the teams who built it, when what it needed was co-creation and transparency. The sponsor's question: how does a platform this size cost less and move faster, with no time to start over?
In one quarter we strategically retired a third of the technology backlog and focused the rest on critical business outcomes. Leadership now sets the line each quarter on where effort goes, and the enterprise program that plans the technology effort works with clarity.
We came in after the assessment to run the remediation. We sat between the partners that ran campaign operations and managed services, as the independent with no service or platform to upsell.
The situation
Every decision in the platform's history made sense under its pressure. Digital outsourced for speed. Data insourced to own it, before anyone owned the full picture or held the decisions at the top with enough knowledge to drive the strategy. A parallel data hub born of a team boundary. More than twenty business units in the marketing tool because agencies had free rein to do so.
The bill arrived all at once: a backlog in the thousands, refinement calls with eighty people invited, and ideas that took over six months to reach the market.
What we did
We gave the platform a product position: what is core, what is extended, what is out of scope, feature by feature, so scope arguments ended in a category instead of a meeting.
We rebuilt the model around three initiatives from the assessment, applied where they fit: scale and lower cost, productize the services, and establish the service delivery model. We gated and tagged every incoming request. This ran in parallel with the critical operations inside: coaching the teams, fixing friction in real time, and surfacing the fixes into repeatable program improvements.
We read the contracts. A consolidation that should have cut license cost ran into a clause nobody had read. Finding it corrected the value case early, and the consolidation went ahead on its other benefits.
We went after the misalignment at its source. The technology teams wrote the business objectives and acceptance criteria themselves to satisfy the agile process, while the business teams accountable for them lacked the engagement and the time to keep up. Teams recorded release demos, and implied acceptance became the operating model. The knowledge gap drove decisions to the point of runaway costs, with triage debt consuming the capacity the business needed. Nobody had time to start over. We chose to become intentional, and to prioritize the architecture fixes that reduced friction and allowed self-service. Along the way we protected the product owners from a workload meant for a team of FTEs they didn't have, and drove decisions as the trusted advisor using the rules we defined.
We put the hundreds of items requested each quarter into strategic groupings, each defined with an effort estimate, a priority, and a narrative of the requests the teams fielded. Those groupings went into the planning cycle, where leadership set the line on where effort would be committed and the teams groomed the work to match. We cut inefficiencies and fixed what could be fixed along the way, in smaller tiger-team workshops, prioritized by impact on foundational elements: consolidating per-brand business units into two built around the customer, moving transactional and sales traffic off the marketing platform to the teams that owned it, and a standard segmentation model and component catalog so campaign operations could configure instead of request.
What's running now
The quarterly planning cycle runs on the strategic groupings, and the enterprise program that plans the technology effort works as one team. Ownership tiers the platform team applies on its own: self-built and self-maintained, partnership toward a standard, platform-owned core. A standard campaign catalogue with a configuration-not-customization rule. An assessment checklist that every request passes before work is assigned, carrying the sponsor's decisions forward as precedent.