Your CMO cannot tell the product team what to build because they do not have the authority. They cannot tell the finance team how to measure marketing because they do not have the standing. They cannot tell the CTO what the data infrastructure needs to produce because that is not their territory. And they are accountable for commercial outcomes that sit in all three of those places.
This is the accountability-without-authority problem that makes the CMO role structurally untenable in a digital business at serious scale. The commercial outcomes the CMO is measured against are produced by a system that includes product, data, technology, and finance as well as marketing. The CMO owns one part of that system and is accountable for the performance of the whole.
The political consequence is a CMO who is spending significant energy managing relationships with adjacent functions whose cooperation they need but cannot mandate. The product team has its own roadmap. The CTO has their own infrastructure priorities. The CFO has their own measurement standards. The CMO navigates between all of them, building enough goodwill to make the commercial system work at the margins, without the authority to change the structural conditions producing the performance they are being held against.
That navigation is exhausting and commercially expensive. It is also what the role requires because the role was not designed with enough authority to do what the business actually needs.
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