Efficiency Over Headcount: Why Smaller Marketing Teams Win with Colin Piper, CMO at BuildOps

Find the full transcript here:

Jodi: Hi Colin. Thank you for joining me on the Finite by Clarity podcast today.

Colin: Hi Jodi. Great to be here.

Jodi: It's a pleasure to have you here. We're going to be talking about your experience working in leaner teams, why that is, and how it contrasts with your very interesting background in a much larger team. It would be good to set the stage first. Could you tell us about your background in marketing, where you've come from, and the team sizes and structures you've typically worked with and led over your career?

Colin: Absolutely, happy to start there. I look at my career in marketing in three chapters. Early in my career, I worked in professional services marketing. I was in-house in the AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) industry, leading very small marketing teams of maybe two or three people within architecture, civil engineering and urban planning firms. I loved that work, but I always wanted to get into software and tech.

That led me to the second chapter of my career, which is where I spent the bulk of it: Autodesk, a large AEC software company based in San Francisco, where I live. I joined Autodesk in 2015, in the early days of their move into cloud software, as a product marketer for one of their newer products. That role grew into leading larger demand gen and growth teams, and eventually a very large marketing organisation across their construction technology vertical, which is what I was doing when I left.

My third chapter, after about ten years at Autodesk, was a big pivot to a startup. Last year I joined BuildOps, a vertical AI company building software for trade contractors, and I've been leading their marketing department for the past year.

Building a 20-person marketing team in a 500-person company

Jodi: That's a really interesting contrast. We all know Autodesk at this point, even if we're not in architecture, so going from that kind of enterprise-scale marketing team to a startup is quite a shift. Tell us more about the startup. How big is your team now, and what does your day-to-day look like?

Colin: BuildOps is later stage; you might call it a scale-up. We're a Series C, VC-backed company with about 500 employees across four offices. I came in as our first CMO, so they'd never really had a marketing leader at the exec team level, and my job was to build out the team.

I inherited a very small marketing team of fewer than ten people. We started to assess what skills and structure a marketing team needs in the AI era, within a company of around 500 people. What are the bare essentials? And how do we scale the marketing department to match the growth BuildOps is on as a high-growth startup? I've been building out the team over the past year, and today it's about double that size, around 20 people. To me, that's still a very lean team compared with some of the large enterprise teams I led at Autodesk. It's a different structure, with different roles.

Compared with my enterprise experience, my day-to-day is much more hands-on. The CMO role, and any exec role at a startup, needs to be hands-on-keyboard at times, while also managing large strategic initiatives and managing up at the executive level. So it's a varied scope. I set the strategy for the marketing department and the brand strategy at company level, and we execute to drive revenue, because revenue is our top priority and marketing plays a very large role in that at BuildOps. The rest of my day is spent with my marketing team, getting into the projects we're working on together, tracking towards our goals and, ideally, executing at a very high level within our leaner team structure.

Is AI behind the shift to leaner marketing teams?

Jodi: Great, thanks for that. So, 500 people company-wide and a 20-person marketing team: definitely on the leaner side. A lot of the guests I have on the show are at around that 500-person scale-up mark, and in the past we'd definitely be talking about teams of over 50 at that level. So we're noticing a shift in team sizes. And the elephant in the room: is this because of AI? Because of automation, and the enhanced capabilities and efficiency AI brings? I want to put you on the spot and get your honest opinion. Is this a reasonable response? Is this the way we should be going in response to these new technologies?

Colin: I think that's a great topic to dive into. My response would be that it is a reasonable reaction to how efficiently marketing teams can operate in today's world. Coming into BuildOps, I felt very lucky. Instead of inheriting a team that felt too large, where we'd have to make difficult changes, I got to inherit a very small team and build it the right way. I'm super grateful for that.

About three or four months into the role, there was a big shift with Claude Cowork, Claude Code and some of these big enterprise tools coming out that really changed the game for marketers, and for other departments across any B2B enterprise. That changed our hiring strategy and the org design I had in mind. It allowed us to be incredibly conservative with how quickly we scale the team from a human headcount perspective. In that way, I had some foresight into what the future of a marketing organisation looks like at a Series C startup like ours, and how to build a team that meets the technology where it is, with the technology making every team member exponentially more productive.

What we're seeing is individuals on the team being able to do more. AI can be a writing partner and a thought partner, and it can now execute for you through the agentic workflows we've been building. But it's also changing how we structure our marketing technology stack, and it's changing some of the roles we're creating, which is unlocking even more efficiency across a small team. All of those things together have allowed us to build what I'd call a much more modern marketing team. I've been intentionally conservative and, coming from a company where I had a very large team, I think that's influenced how I've decided to build the team here. Hopefully we're making all the right calls for the future.

The AI tools and agents changing how marketing works

Jodi: That's such an interesting perspective. You weren't cutting your team down or even implementing a hiring freeze; you were building out your team with this efficiency in mind. You mentioned Claude Cowork. Were there any other tools, triggers, people or conversations that set the tone for your strategy and made you realise, "Wait, this isn't just hire, hire, hire anymore. It's time to embark on this journey of tools and agents"?

Colin: I think we all went through a pretty transformative period. Early 2026 is when I remember these new enterprise tools, mostly from Anthropic, coming onto the scene, and every department, but especially marketing, had their eyes opened to what AI can actually do for us.

Marketing departments have always been early adopters of LLM technology. It's a heavily written-word-focused function, similar to how engineering and coding are very language-intensive. We do a lot of writing, and it's usually humans doing it. So we adopted early, but things changed when AI moved beyond efficiency gains in written output into agentic orchestration.

Cowork is one example. You can speak to AI (Claude, in this case) in natural language and have it build out files, spreadsheets, plans and documents. It can access your email, your internal company data, your data foundation, Salesforce, your CRM and your marketing automation platform. That makes the output so much more valuable than a generic ChatGPT workflow without all that business and enterprise-level context. That's where we got really efficient, and the quality of the output is what really surprised all of us.

At that point, as a marketing team, myself included, we were vibe coding, building our own agents and little web apps. That let us have a lot of fun with AI, but also create things that stuck and that we're still using today. We took a creative approach. As a company, all departments participated in internal hackathons that produced some really cool results. Some of my marketers came up with an agent called Marketing OS, a central brain and hub for the marketing team. Any department can ask it questions, and it produces brand-approved positioning, messaging and copy for teams creating their own materials and decks. We had agents creating dashboards that didn't just visualise the data but analysed it and provided insights back, which is sometimes the hardest part, because that usually takes a human marketer to interpret. Those are things we're still using today, created six-plus months ago. We've had a lot of fun with the technologies that came onto the scene for us in January and February.

Jodi: And it's all so recent. It's crazy how much everyone's achieving in such a short time.

Colin: It is crazy.

The roles a lean, AI-native marketing team needs

Jodi: You've given us some great examples of how you're making marketing more automated on your team. I'm wondering about the people behind that. Who are the 20 people you've hired, the roles you felt were must-haves? And are there any new roles emerging that you're hiring for?

Colin: This part may or may not surprise you, but the design of the functions within my marketing team is very similar to the hundred-plus-person team I was managing. You still need a product marketing leader, which is a core function of a marketing org, a content and brand marketing leader, a demand gen and growth leader and team, an operations leader, and an events team out in the field. That's all very similar to the structure of the much larger org I ran at enterprise level at Autodesk. But the teams within are leaner, for all the reasons I shared.

For the roles we're sourcing, both for leadership and the teams within, I look for people who can boundary-span and think outside their own function, which is almost the opposite of a specialist. You need someone who's thinking broadly, not just across marketing but about their cross-functional impact within the company. You need people who can play a quarterback or orchestrator role, thinking across teams and across agents: how those agents can work together, and how a workflow spans beyond your role as a product marketer into a demand gen campaign and the operations layer of the marketing stack. A lot of our new hires carry those attributes.

Over time, I think that could change as marketing teams continue to evolve. Some roles may turn into what I'd call a full-stack marketer: someone who understands the marketing strategy, the messaging and positioning, how a campaign gets built and orchestrated, how the emails go out, and how the data layer feeds back into the campaign strategy. In future, a single role may be able to do many of the things that used to take four, five or six different marketing handoffs across that lifecycle. You see this happening in software. LinkedIn is a famous example, with full-stack engineers who do some of the product management, some of the visual design, the engineering and coding itself, and some of the QA at the end of the lifecycle. We're not quite there yet, and we haven't built it in that format, but I think it may be coming to marketing teams.

Do AI agents need leaders or babysitters?

Jodi: Absolutely. We talk so much about entry-level and mid-level roles fusing with leadership, but I'd love to ask you about the role of leadership itself. Do you think these leaders are still needed because they're better at synthesis and strategy? Or do the agents and the automation just need a babysitter?

Colin: That's an interesting question. My quick response is that you definitely need the perspective of a leader and strategic thinker, whether that's a very senior, tenured marketer or someone earlier in their career who can think that way. It's not just a babysitter watching the agents. Not at this point, and I don't know that it ever will be. The work still needs a human element. It needs taste and brand infusion, and I don't know that an agent could ever do that at a level that's true to the brand you're representing, with the human touch that's so important. Maybe even more important in an age where AI content production has exploded. So it becomes more about trust and authenticity in the content you create as a marketing team. Because of that, you need someone who's a strategic thinker but can also be authentically creative in the work they're orchestrating or executing through AI agents in future.

How much human touch does AI-generated content need?

Jodi: I agree. Strategy needs to be creative and innovative; you need to be at the frontier, pushing those boundaries. I do find it funny how much strategy as a discipline is valued, though, compared with more execution-based roles. A social media post can be written by AI, ideally overseen by a human. But how much can you really automate? Audiences are pushing back against fully AI-driven content, and we've got watermarks coming in to signal AI-written prose. What's the trade-off there? How much human touch do you think even that execution needs?

Colin: I think that topic is very interesting, and there are a couple of things there. "Human in the loop" may be a cliché, but it's very important and will continue to be for any AI-generated content. No good marketer should ever put that out without a strong human review. You need to read it and scrub it for the AI clichés we've all gotten very tired of, whether it's a social media post or a longer-form piece of writing. The human needs to own the output, which isn't just a copy-and-paste draft from the LLM. It's someone doing a review cycle. In that way, the marketer's role on the content side becomes more of an editor or reviewer: levelling up the content, taking ownership of it and being willing to put their name on it at the end of the day. I think that will always require a human.

The AI watermarking point is interesting, and I'm watching it very closely. The EU is leading the way there, and the US is quickly adopting; I think California recently passed regulation following the EU's dates and standards. Right now, the onus is on the providers to do the watermarking, and we're not yet at a point where it's exposed at a level where marketing needs to adjust and take action. That may happen as social media platforms tag and flag AI-generated content because of watermarking, and we'll need to watch that and decide how much editing is required. It would be a shame if that meant losing what is a highly efficient way to produce written content. There's no harm in gaining efficiency from AI output, and marketers welcome that. But as I said earlier, it can't just be copied and pasted into your social media content stream. It needs to be owned and edited by a human to represent the brand authentically. So I'd like the human to be more than in the loop: hands-on, and more of an editor and owner of that output. We'll see what comes of it.

That's written content, by the way. We haven't talked about visual content, which is in the same boat, with AI watermarking and tagging you need to keep a close eye on. So the jury's still out for me. Maybe that's not the perfect answer, but we're watching it closely.

Jodi: No, I think you've articulated that really well. It's going to be a really interesting discourse to watch unfold, where you have the almost-inevitability of AI content production meeting people who may or may not recognise AI-written content at first glance, and may not even mind if it's written by AI eventually.

Colin: Exactly.

Jodi: I think visual is a little different. It still really stands out as AI, though we're getting better at it.

Colin: Yes, the visual piece is interesting, because you're exactly right: it's so obvious. It's gotten a lot better, but it's still quite obvious, at least when it's bad AI visual content. You can spot it a mile away, especially as a marketer.

We're starting to dabble in AI-generated video content, because that's where the dollar efficiency really adds up. Historically, we might pay a significant amount for a live-action video shoot or a highly produced commercial or ad spot with a high-powered agency. If you can do some of that in-house or through AI production, you're saving quite a bit of money as a marketing team. With teams and budgets leaner, that's going to be really important for marketing to stay successful. And to your point, if it's not distinguishable and not misleading (we're marketing B2B software, not anything potentially dangerous by consumption, just creative and ad campaigns), why not let it be AI-generated, or at least AI-assisted? I don't believe there's harm in that. You're just gaining efficiency of production.

Where are the limits of a lean marketing team?

Jodi: Absolutely. Throughout this conversation, especially hearing how you're using AI within your team and scaling with it, I want to understand where you see the limits of that scale. How long will you keep a 20-person team? When does it become necessary to push again and build out further, if at all? How much can you automate, and when will you absolutely need more humans?

Colin: It's a good question. The biggest place is especially relevant in the vertical AI space I'm in. We sell to trade contractors and construction personas, in an industry that especially values in-person interaction: in-person time, the handshake deal. Trust becomes incredibly important to our audience, but I'd argue this applies horizontally.

Field marketers need to be out there. Those are humans running events and engaging human to human, in person, with no computer involved: running an event at a trade show, hosting a dinner, making important relationship-building connections with customers or prospects. That's not going away anytime soon. In fact, it's probably becoming even more valuable in the AI era. So we'll see continued investment in those teams. You can't automate that with AI.

Other roles, like account-based marketing and product marketing, have an important ratio: a single product marketer or ABM manager to the sales or product organisation they're supporting. You can't have a company of several thousand people with a 20-person marketing team, because the stakeholder management alone for internal coordination doesn't compute. You need a healthy ratio that can scale with the growth of the company.

So to answer your question: as BuildOps continues to grow into our next phase and beyond, 20 people probably isn't sustainable. I don't think we can always be this lean, but the team needs to grow conservatively with the rest of the company. Those two things, the ratio of internal collaboration and the human interaction required out in the field, will always create the need for highly skilled marketers to fill those roles.

Efficiency over headcount: the new badge of honour

Jodi: I think that's a really good point about the ratio to the wider company. It sounds like your entire company, especially with your hackathons, is making its processes more efficient, and maybe freezing headcount across teams. Maybe headcount isn't a measure of success or growth for a company anymore. As long as you can stay lean and get more customers and more revenue, that's the ideal. Would you say that's the mindset at BuildOps?

Colin: It definitely is; that's well said. It's a new era where your personal worth isn't measured by the size of your team, or even the size of your budget, anymore. That was certainly true in my previous role, and it can be true at many large enterprises, where you become more important as your team grows larger and you have more influence internally. At BuildOps, from the top down, we've adopted an AI-first mindset to really be an AI-native company. That means we have to be all in internally, with every team using these workflows and collaborating that way. The equation won't work if the marketing team is the only one trying to be lean and the rest of the departments aren't.

I think companies in the future, especially in the startup world, will start to pride themselves on efficiency, revenue per headcount and some of the things investors care more about today than they did a year or two ago. That becomes the badge of honour, beyond the size of your team. How efficient can you be? Can you drive revenue results with a team that's half, a quarter or 10% of the size of a more traditional company? I think that's pretty cool, compared with just managing a hundred people.

Who drives an efficiency-first mindset?

Jodi: That's a really interesting way to look at it. Efficiency instead of headcount: we've flipped it on its head. It's fascinating. A final question, as we're running out of time. Is that mindset driven by you as CMO, and a shared understanding of efficiency as a valuable lever? Or is it more of a finance or CEO initiative?

Colin: That's a great question. In my position today, I'm lucky that it's very much a shared position and strategy from the top down. The entire executive team, our CEO included, not just the finance department, is asking the company to look across all parts of the business and see how we can be more efficient with AI. We'd be remiss not to act that way, certainly as a startup, but I think any enterprise should be turning the mirror on itself in the same way, because we can do a lot more with fewer people these days, not just in marketing but across companies. So it's not my position against others, with me as the only one championing it internally. We're all in this together. And to my earlier point, if one team's doing it and no one else is, the equation won't work, so everybody needs to be bought into the model.

It will also involve more of what I called boundary-spanning earlier: reaching across the aisle and more collaborative cross-functional working. You may have a marketing team helping customer success in a way it traditionally didn't, and vice versa, with customer success taking on something marketing traditionally did, because we all have fewer people and the boundaries between teams are blurring a little. I welcome that. I'm a highly collaborative marketer and co-worker, so I think it's a fun place to be. It's another reason I wanted to join a startup: that mindset of everyone being in it together on a shared mission. Maybe we're doing it with fewer people, but to me that becomes more fun.

Jodi: Well, this is it. All these mindset shifts and new objectives really are the definition of scrappy, and if you're joining a startup or scale-up, you have that scrappy mindset. So it sounds like you're in the right place, and BuildOps is doing some really exciting things.

Colin: It's been a lot of fun. It's something I was looking for in my career, and it certainly hasn't let me down. The year at BuildOps has been lightning speed. We're doing a lot, the startup is growing very quickly, and it's all hands on deck from the CMO down. That's what I wanted: to get closer to the work and more into the day-to-day of how we're impacting the business.

Jodi: Great, and a fun conversation too. Thank you so much for joining me, Colin. I'm sure my listeners have gained so many insights and so much inspiration.

Colin: This has been great, Jodi. I really appreciate you having me, and I'd love to do it again sometime.