Latest / The Marketing Career Podcast with Fexingo: Marketing Jobs, Skills, and Career Growth / How Marketers Use the Career Lattice Not the Ladder
Transcript
- Lucas: There's this quiet assumption running through most marketing careers — that progress means moving up. Associate to manager to director to VP. The ladder. But the data says a majority of the moves that actually build careers are sideways. Luna: Sideways meaning lateral — same level, different function or business unit? Lucas: Exactly. LinkedIn released a study last fall — I think it was October 2025 — tracking job changes across marketing functions. They found that 62 percent of moves by marketers between 2022 and 2025 were lateral, not vertical. And the people who made two or more lateral moves in that period had 23 percent higher promotion rates over the next three years compared to people who stayed in one lane waiting for the next title. Luna: So the ladder is actually slower than the lattice. Lucas: That's the idea. The career lattice. You move across — into adjacent disciplines, into different product lines, into roles that stretch your skill set horizontally — and that breadth becomes the thing that gets you promoted later. The classic example I keep coming back to: someone at Procter & Gamble who started as a brand manager on Tide. Luna: Okay, that's a classic ladder role. Brand management at P&G is the gold standard for consumer packaged goods marketing. Lucas: Right. But this person — I'll call her Sarah, though that's not her real name — after two years on Tide, she took a lateral move into the digital analytics team. Same level, but she learned attribution modeling, media mix optimization, how to read a Python notebook well enough to spot errors. Eighteen months later, she moved again — lateral — into product marketing for a new laundry subscription pilot. Then, two years after that, she got promoted to director of digital commerce, skipping the associate director level entirely. Her peers who stayed on the brand management ladder? Most of them are still senior brand managers. Luna: So the lattice gave her a compound skill set that made her more valuable than someone with deeper but narrower experience. Lucas: Exactly. The key insight is that marketing problems are increasingly cross-functional. A brand director today needs to understand data engineering constraints, customer lifetime value modeling, content production pipelines, and sometimes even basic regulatory compliance around data privacy. You can't learn all that by staying in one function. Luna: Right. So if I'm a mid-career marketer right now, how do I actually build a lattice instead of climbing a ladder? What's the first move? Lucas: First, audit your current organization for what I call 'lattice nodes' — roles or projects that sit at the intersection of your current function and another one you want to learn. If you're in brand, look for cross-functional task forces. A product launch that requires close collaboration with the sales analytics team. A CRM overhaul that needs a brand person to translate customer segments into messaging. Raise your hand for those. Luna: But don't those opportunities usually go to the high performers who are already being groomed for promotion? Lucas: Sometimes. But you can create them. The most effective tactic I've seen is what I call the 'six-month ask'. You go to your manager and say: 'I want to spend 20 percent of my time over the next six months embedded with the data science team to learn their workflow. I think it'll make me a better brand strategist. At the end of that period, I'd like to move into a full-time role on that team for a year, then come back to brand with that capability.' Luna: And they actually say yes? Lucas: More often than you'd think, if you frame it as a skills investment that benefits the company. P&G has an internal mobility program that explicitly encourages this. But even at smaller companies, managers want people with broader capabilities. The risk is that you leave to get those capabilities elsewhere. So a structured lattice move — with a return date — is actually a retention tool for them. Luna: What about outside of big companies? If you're at a startup or a midsize firm, there might not be a data science team to embed with. Lucas: Then you build the lattice through projects. Volunteer to own the email marketing automation setup even though you're a content marketer. Teach yourself enough SQL to pull your own campaign reports. Take on the partner marketing relationship with a tech vendor — that forces you to learn their product, their sales cycle, their support model. Each of those is a lattice node. Luna: So it's less about job titles and more about the portfolio of capabilities you assemble. Lucas: Exactly. And the thing that makes this hard for most people is that we've been trained to measure progress by title. When you take a lateral move, your LinkedIn headline doesn't change. Your friends at the reunion ask 'so are you still a manager?' and you feel like you're standing still. But the data says you're actually accelerating. Luna: That's a real psychological hurdle. How do you manage the ego piece? Lucas: I think you reframe your career narrative internally. Instead of telling yourself 'I'm a senior brand manager', you start tracking what I call your 'skill portfolio'. Write down every capability you've gained in the last six months. Attribution modeling. Stakeholder management in a cross-functional team. Basic Python. Vendor negotiation. That list grows much faster on a lattice than on a ladder. And when you do interview for that next promotion, you walk in with a story that's three-dimensional. Luna: I want to get concrete on how you pitch a lateral move in a job interview or a performance review. What's the language? Lucas: You lead with the compound outcome. Not 'I want to learn X', but 'I want to combine my brand expertise with data fluency to solve a specific business problem that neither function can solve alone.' For example: 'As a brand manager, I saw that our media spend was suboptimal because we didn't have a closed-loop measurement system. I want to move into analytics for 18 months to build that capability, then return as a more effective brand leader.' That's a narrative that sells. Luna: You mentioned earlier that 62 percent of marketer moves are lateral. Is that a recent phenomenon, or has this always been true? Lucas: I think it's accelerated in the last five years. Marketing has become more technical. Ten years ago, a brand manager could succeed without knowing anything about ad servers or identity graphs. Today, those things are table stakes for many roles. So the lattice isn't just a nice to have — it's becoming a requirement. The marketers who get stuck are often the ones who try to climb the ladder without building breadth. Luna: Does the lattice model work for early-career marketers too, or is it more for mid-career? Lucas: It works at every stage, but the strategy changes. Early career, you want to build depth in one area first — get really good at something. The lattice starts after you have a foundation. For mid-career, it's about adding breadth on top of that depth. Late career, it's about leveraging breadth to lead across functions. The mistake some junior marketers make is jumping sideways too fast without mastering anything. Luna: Right. So the lattice isn't an excuse to be a dilettante. Lucas: No. You need at least one spike. But you can build that spike, then add additional skills that complement it. The most compelling marketing leaders I know have a T-shaped skill set — deep in one area, broad across several others. Luna: Let's talk about the negotiation side. If you get an offer for a lateral move, how do you make sure you're not just getting more work for the same pay? Lucas: That's a valid concern. Most lateral moves come with the same salary, but you can negotiate for other things: a budget for external training, a commitment to a promotion review after 12 months, or a title that reflects the expanded scope — like 'Brand Manager, Digital Analytics Lead' instead of just 'Brand Manager'. You're trading current comp for future earning power, but you want to make sure the trade is fair. Luna: And what about the risk that the lateral move doesn't pay off? You spend a year learning something that turns out to be a dead end. Lucas: That happens. But even a failed lattice move gives you a clear negative signal — 'I now know I don't want to work in analytics' — which is valuable. And you still gained skills that are transferable. The worst outcome is staying in a role you've already mastered for three years because you're waiting for a promotion that may never come. Luna: If these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used — a negotiation tactic, a reframe, a concrete idea — a couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these going. Lucas: Yeah, buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's the only support the show gets. No ads, no sponsors, no data selling. Just listeners who find value and chip in a little. Luna: And honestly, it makes a real difference. A few dollars from people who've gotten something out of the episodes covers hosting, transcription, the small costs that keep it ad-free. Lucas: So — back to the lattice. One thing I want to emphasize: the best time to start building your lattice is when you don't need it. When you're happy in your current role, that's when you have the leverage to make a smart lateral move. If you wait until you're desperate to leave, you'll take whatever comes. Luna: Proactive, not reactive. That's a good note to end on. So in practice, you're saying: pick one adjacent skill, find a project that lets you practice it, and start building your lattice today. Lucas: Exactly. One node at a time. In six months, you'll have a story that's different from everyone else who just stayed in their lane.