Latest / The Marketing Career Podcast with Fexingo: Marketing Jobs, Skills, and Career Growth / How Marketers Use the 80 Percent Rule to Overcome Perfectionism
Transcript
- Lucas: There's this moment in every marketer's career where you have a piece of work — a campaign, a portfolio case, a job application — and you just can't let it go. You keep tweaking. One more revision. One more data point. And the thing never ships. Luna: Right. I think we've all been there. It's that feeling that if you just polish it a little more, it'll be perfect. Lucas: Exactly. And the irony is, in marketing, perfect is usually the enemy of effective. So today I want to talk about what I call the 80 percent rule — a threshold borrowed from product development, but one that mid-career marketers can use to actually move their careers forward. Luna: I've heard of the 80 percent rule in software — ship early, iterate. But how does it apply to a job search or a portfolio piece? Lucas: Let me give you a concrete example. I was talking to a friend who spent seven years at Starbucks on the loyalty and digital marketing side. She was looking to move to a smaller CPG brand — a challenger in the plant-based space. She had this incredible case study about a loyalty program redesign that lifted retention by 12 percent year-over-year. Luna: That sounds like a strong story. Lucas: It was. But she spent three weeks perfecting the deck. Polishing the charts. Rewriting the narrative. She showed it to me and it was gorgeous. But she hadn't sent it to any hiring managers yet. She was waiting for it to feel 'ready.' And I asked her: 'What's the one thing that would make you comfortable sending it tomorrow?' She said, 'I want to add a competitive analysis slide.' Luna: And what did you tell her? Lucas: I said, 'Send it today. That slide is not going to change whether you get the interview. But waiting another week might.' She sent it the next day. She got the interview, and eventually the job. And she told me later that the hiring manager never even mentioned the missing slide. Luna: That's the 80 percent rule in action. You have enough to prove your competence. The rest is diminishing returns. Lucas: And that's the core insight. In marketing, we're trained to optimize — A/B test, refine the message, perfect the creative. But when the product is your own career, the optimization metric should be 'does this get me a conversation?' not 'does this win a Cannes Lion?' Luna: So how do you know when you've hit 80 percent? Is there a checklist? Lucas: I think there are three signals. One: the core narrative is clear. Two: you have at least one specific, quantified result. Three: you can explain the work in under sixty seconds. If those three things are true, the rest is polish. And polish matters, but it matters less than speed. Luna: I remember when I was applying for my first brand manager role, I spent an entire weekend redoing the formatting on my resume because the font wasn't consistent. I look back and think — that weekend, I could have applied to ten more jobs. Lucas: Right. And that's the opportunity cost of waiting for perfect. Every day you hold a piece of work back, you lose the chance to get feedback, to iterate, to learn what actually resonates. The 80 percent rule is also a learning tool. Luna: Let's talk about that feedback loop. If you ship at 80 percent, you get real market data. You find out what questions hiring managers ask, what parts of your story land, what gaps you actually need to fill. Lucas: Exactly. The feedback from the world is always more valuable than the feedback from your own head. I think a lot of mid-career marketers — especially generalists — get stuck because they're trying to build a portfolio that covers every possible scenario. But the hiring manager only needs to see one strong signal. Luna: Can we talk about the flip side? When is 80 percent not enough? Lucas: Sure. If you're presenting a final campaign to a client who's paying for a finished product, 80 percent is a problem. But in a job search, or in an internal pitch for a new initiative, the goal is to start a conversation. The audience doesn't expect perfection. They expect competence and curiosity. Luna: There's also a difference between 80 percent complete and 80 percent sloppy. The rule isn't an excuse to be lazy. Lucas: Absolutely. The 80 percent should be solid. The data should be accurate. The logic should hold. What you're skipping is the marginal polish — the extra design iteration, the third round of copy edits, the slide that compares your results to three industry benchmarks. Those things add value, but they add it at the margin. And when the marginal value is lower than the cost of delay, you ship. Luna: I think this is especially hard for marketers because we're trained to think about brand perception. We don't want to look unprepared. But there's a difference between unprepared and unpolished. Lucas: Yeah, and I think the best hiring managers actually value the unpolished piece more, because it shows you're real. You're not a machine that outputs perfect decks. You're a human who can think on your feet. And they can see how you handle the missing piece — do you say 'I don't know yet' or do you make something up? Luna: That's a good point. So if you're a marketer listening and you've got a case study or a job application sitting in draft purgatory — what's the move? Lucas: Set a deadline. Give yourself 48 hours to get it to 80 percent. Then send it. And if the anxiety is too high, send it to a trusted colleague first. But the key is to create a forcing function. Without one, you'll iterate forever. Luna: You know, I think about this rule a lot when I'm preparing for podcast episodes too. There's always one more article I could read, one more stat to verify. But at some point, you just have to hit record. Lucas: And honestly, if today's episode gave you a framework you actually use — maybe you send a deck you've been sitting on — that's a win. And if it was worth a coffee to you, that's the link: buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's the smallest ask and it genuinely keeps this show ad-free. Luna: Yeah, we don't run ads, we don't have sponsors. It's just listeners like you who find value in these conversations. Totally optional, but deeply appreciated. Lucas: So back to the 80 percent rule. I want to give one more example. I worked with a marketing director at a mid-size B2B SaaS company who had been trying to get a promotion for over a year. He kept telling his manager he needed to finish a 'comprehensive' business case for a new channel strategy. Luna: And what was he waiting for? Lucas: More data. He wanted to model three different scenarios with full financial projections. I told him to present the simple version — here's the opportunity, here's the rough math, here's the pilot budget. He did it. His manager said, 'Great, let's run the pilot.' He got the promotion six months later. Luna: The pilot itself became the data-gathering mechanism. He didn't need to predict the future; he needed to test it. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the deeper lesson. The 80 percent rule is really about shifting from a mindset of perfection to a mindset of experimentation. In marketing, we talk about agile, fail fast, test and learn. But we rarely apply that to our own careers. Luna: So if someone is listening and they're not sure where to start — what's one concrete action they can take this week? Lucas: Pick one piece of work — a portfolio case, a cover letter, a proposal for a new project — that you've been sitting on for more than two weeks. Identify the one thing you think is missing. Then ask yourself: 'If I sent this today, would it be good enough to start a conversation?' If the answer is yes, send it. If the answer is no, figure out the smallest thing that would make it good enough — and do only that. Luna: And then send it. No more polishing. Lucas: Right. And if it doesn't work, you learn. And if it does work, you've just saved yourself weeks of unnecessary work. That's the 80 percent rule. Luna: I think this is one of those episodes I'm going to need to revisit. I have a feeling I'll catch myself polishing something this week. Lucas: Me too. But at least now we have a threshold. Eighty percent, ship it.