The CMO role was designed for a world where marketing was a department. In a digital business in 2026 it is the connective tissue of everything. Appointing a department head to run connective tissue is why your last two CMOs looked capable in the interview and struggled in the role.
I want to be precise about what changed and when. Before digital became the primary revenue engine, marketing had a clear boundary. It generated awareness and handed off to sales. The handoff was clean. The accountability was clean. The CMO owned one side of it and the sales director owned the other.
In a digital business, that boundary dissolved. Marketing runs inside the product. The product generates the marketing data. The CRM shapes the acquisition strategy. The acquisition data informs the product roadmap. There is no clean handoff because the whole thing is a single connected system. The CMO who arrives to lead the marketing function discovers that the marketing function does not have edges anymore.
You have been appointing leaders for a function that no longer has a perimeter. That is not a hiring problem. It is a structural one. The role needs to change before the hire does.
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