I'd love to get the community's perspective on how CI ought to fit into a company's org structure. Does CI belong in the sales organization? Product management? Does it report directly to the executive or general manager level? Is there an R&D/tech scouting connection as well? Is responsibility for CI distributed across teams, or centralized? What are the benefits and drawbacks of the various options, in your experience?
I'm trying to develop a position on how CI could best fit into all of the other various corporate functions. Thanks for your thoughts!
I've seen it live in all the places you mentioned, and more, Sam: Sales, Product Management, Marketing, or its own Strategy function reporting up to the CEO. I think all make sense in their own way, and the reporting structure is really a reflection of what the company is prioritizing - the product strategy vs. winning sales etc. I find that when CI lives in one of the specific departments, it can be more tailored to the needs of that department (impacting positioning or sales enablement or product decisions) - but then other departments might get neglected. Meanwhile, one of the struggles I've seen when CI lives in its own department is that they get pulled in all of those different directions and spread themselves too thin.
If an organization is forming its first CI role/team, I could see it being effective to choose a specific department (I've most often seen Marketing because it aligns well with Marketing's variety of stakeholders and priorities) and then, over time, scale up to its own team.
Thanks Ellie. Having it aligned with Marketing makes the most sense to me. The challenge (and frankly, part of the excitement) is that it informs such a wide variety of decisions. In my experience it lives in many different places at the same time (sales, R&D, general management, etc.), and one of the keys to having an effective CI function is ensuring that these people are talking to one another frequently.
Sam, I agree with Ellie's comment above where she mentions that CI has been seen to sit under various functions. I also agree with what you are saying that in reality CI can and does add value to many functions.
What is even more important at the initial stages especially of setting up a CI function, is to have strong leadership advocacy or in simple language a senior "sponsor". That is even more important than where the function actually sits, because it takes time to do it properly and also it is hard to show measurable ROI within CI; it's a very tricky point to prove, so patience and belief and sponsorship are needed!!
From the openings I've seen in CI and I've done a fair bit of research, they normally live under the Product Marketing team. Product Marketing can live under Product or Marketing depending on the company. Generally as the organization gets bigger and more mature, Product Marketing tends to live under Marketing at least from what I've seen.
For me, I feel like a CI role would need to be cross functional in order to really be fully successful. If this is a brand new role for your company and it doesn't make sense to be part of product marketing, then I would think about which department you think would be the hardest to get a seat at the table for and put it there. I've worked at companies where Product Marketing wasn't tightly aligned with Product and there were a lot of gaps in the offering compared to the competition and I would have put a CI role under Product to ensure there was a focus on closing those gaps. But if your product doesn't need that same level of attention on closing gaps then being part of marketing or even sales might make more sense.