There's a simple exercise I recommend to any marketing leader concerned about operational efficiency: ask your ops lead to draw your workflow on a napkin. Give them sixty seconds. Watch what happens.

If they finish in time, you likely have a defensible operational infrastructure. If they're still sketching long after, hunting for space in the margins, or handing you multiple napkins held together with arrows, you've discovered something important about your organization. The complexity isn't in your work, rather in your systems.

This is the Napkin Test, and it's become one of the most revealing diagnostics in modern marketing operations.

How we got here

The infrastructure bloat didn't happen overnight, and it wasn't born from incompetence. It emerged from reasonable decisions made in isolation, each one solving a specific problem at a specific moment.

You needed better project visibility, so you adopted a planning tool. Then task management became unwieldy, so you layered on another platform. Creative collaboration was scattered, so you added a third. Asset management was chaotic, publishing calendars were fragmented, documentation lived everywhere.

Each tool solved something real. Each purchase seemed rational at the time.

But what shifted is that we stopped asking whether new tools could integrate into existing workflows and started accepting that managing seven half-integrated platforms was simply the cost of doing business.

We hired people, smart people, whose primary job became translating between systems and manually stitching disconnected processes together.

This acceptance is contradictory to operational maturity. It's operational debt compounding in real time.

Here’s the truth

Your campaigns still require briefs, creative still needs collaboration, approvals still need guardrails, and results still require measurement. The marketing foundation is not any more sophisticated than before.

What's changed is our willingness to accept fragmentation as inevitable.

We've developed an almost defeatist posture toward tool sprawl. There's a tacit assumption that marketing's complexity demands this level of technological scaffolding. The more sophisticated your organization, the thinking goes, the more specialized your tools should be.

Specialization has been conflated with sophistication. They're not the same thing.

But specialization has a hidden cost

We don't typically measure the cost of specialization. We measure tool spend, headcount, and output. But complexity of specialization carries taxes that never appear on a spreadsheet.

• There's the cognitive load: team members who spend mental energy remembering which tool is authoritative for which information.
• There's the onboarding burden: new hires who need weeks to understand where things actually live and how work actually flows.
• There's the decision fatigue: choosing between five different places to check on project status.
• There's the data integrity problem: information that exists in multiple systems, inconsistent versions of truth.

There's also the opportunity cost. Every hour spent managing tools and translating between systems is an hour not spent on impact.

Most significantly, there's the structural fragility. When your operations depend on manual handoffs and human memory, you've built a system that can't scale and that becomes increasingly brittle under stress.

How to fix it: Rethinking operational design

The conversation about marketing operations infrastructure has been stuck in the wrong place for too long. We've been optimizing for tool breadth when we should be optimizing for process clarity.

We've been assuming that more specialized tools equal better outcomes, when evidence suggests the opposite: the most effective operations are often the simplest ones. 

The solution is not radical.

We’ve seen our marketing team recover hundreds of hours by doing one thing differently, designing their process first and letting tools follow. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of it.

• Start with process instead of tools

Before you evaluate software, map the actual flow of work from brief to delivery to reporting. Identify where value is created and where friction hides.  

• Consolidate around sources of truth

Every function from campaign planning to analytics, deserves a single authoritative home. Not two, not five. One.  

• Measure the cost of maintenance

Every tool has an upkeep cost like integrations, context switching. Make that cost visible. If the hidden maintenance outweighs the benefit, it’s time to prune.  

• Design for humans, not software

Operational excellence only comes from clarity. If your system requires a full-time translator, you’ve built it wrong. Aim for workflows that are intuitive.

Complexity may feel powerful until you realize it is an ever-draining, attention-demanding engine that never stops. True software, like the one we’ve built at 5day.io, should make systems feel invisible. 

• Embrace operational humility

Having an advanced stack is a trap. Your best bet is a system that works quietly in the background. And best believe it’ll scale, because it’s simple.

It is time to be intentional about the technology you use. Being minimal about it.

Define your workflow first and allowing that workflow to determine your tools, rather than letting your tools determine how work happens.

Recover a sense of operational humility. The best systems are no longer just feature rich. They're the simplest systems that actually work. 

At B2B Marketing Live? I'd love to see how you are currently managing your workflow and how we can polish it further. Meet me there.