For years, SaaS companies have hired marketing specialists one function at a time. A content writer. A designer. An SEO lead. A marketing ops manager. A demand-gen specialist. Each role solved a small part of the problem, so founders assumed more roles would create more capability.
But as Stijn Hendrikse explained in our recent webinar “How the Smartest SaaS Founders Scale Marketing Without Scaling Headcount”, that structure no longer works.
AI has changed how marketing gets done. Channels move faster. Work needs to be integrated, not split across ten owners. And when too many people own small slices of the work, the system slows down—even if every individual is talented.
The real bottleneck isn’t skill. It’s the structure the skills sit inside.
This diagram captures the problem:
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(Source: https://getlighthouse.com/)
As you add people, the number of communication lines grows exponentially. Not linearly—exponentially.
At four or five people, alignment is manageable. At eight to twelve, the coordination overhead becomes its own workload. Team members spend more time syncing, clarifying, and negotiating decisions than producing work that moves the company forward.
The result is predictable:
This isn’t a motivation issue or a competence issue. It’s the predictable outcome of a structure built for a pre-AI era.
And we experienced the consequences firsthand.
At the beginning of this year, our SEO team and our Content team operated separately. Both teams had talented people. Both were producing good work. But because ownership was split, even simple decisions required negotiation.
Who owns outlines?
Who decides between keyword structure and narrative clarity?
Who prioritizes updates?
Who evaluates whether a page is “working”?
Both teams cared about results—they just optimized for different definitions of good. SEO prioritized findability. Content prioritized clarity.
Nothing was wrong with either perspective, but the structure forced them to compete.
Eventually, we merged both teams under one leader with one operating system. Some people expanded their skills, some roles were combined, some evolved into hybrid responsibilities, and others exited. We strived for coherence.
And the results were tangible.
We realized the misalignment we experienced in 2023 wasn’t a people problem, it was a structure problem. It also became one of the clearest validations of the four-role model from the webinar.
The four-role model, introduced in Stijn’s Syntropy framework, simplifies marketing into the core capabilities modern teams actually need. Instead of ten narrow roles with overlapping responsibilities, you create four broad roles with clear ownership.
This solves the root issue: marketing work no longer requires ten different people to touch every project.
Here’s what each role does—and why founders click with this model immediately.
Most founders unknowingly play Navigator on top of five other jobs. That’s why marketing drifts: no one holds the whole plan day-to-day.
The Navigator owns:
This role ensures the team isn’t guessing and isn’t pulled in different directions by sales, product, or new ideas.
(Deep dive in Chapter 3 of the Syntropy book.)
SaaS messaging breaks when five people write in parallel. You get inconsistent landing pages, mismatched decks, and content that doesn’t sound like the same company.
The Scribe owns:
They ensure every word—across marketing and sales—comes from one source of truth.
Most companies spread design and UX across 3–4 different contractors or specialists. That guarantees slowdowns, inconsistency, and brand drift.
The Sculptor owns:
This role makes the product understandable quickly—something AI can’t do alone.
Modern marketing is 50% communication and 50% infrastructure. Without a system owner, things break constantly.
The Engineer owns:
This is not a “HubSpot admin.” It’s the role that keeps marketing scalable.
The four-role model is simple, it works in an AI-first world, and it reduces the communication overhead that kills momentum.
You don’t have to use these exact titles or adopt this structure word-for-word. Every company has its own terminology, maturity level, and talent mix. What matters is less the labels and more the logic behind them: modern SaaS marketing works best when a small number of multi-skilled people own full outcomes, not fragments of work.
Some teams merge Navigator and Scribe. Others split Sculptor into brand + product storytelling. Fast-growing companies may pair an Engineer with a junior ops specialist. The shape can vary—the principle does not.
The goal is to reduce unnecessary handoffs, increase ownership, and give each core function a clear place to live.
Because it eliminates the two friction points specialists create:
Handoffs disappear because each role owns an entire domain end-to-end.
Four owners mean far fewer lines of communication, which means fewer meetings, fewer syncs, and clearer decisions.
AI makes many specialist tasks easier or unnecessary. What you need now are broad, accountable roles that integrate with AI—not more specialists.
Founders often assume a lean team means compromise. In practice, this model produces more momentum with fewer people.
You get:
This is the structure that supports scale, not the traditional 10- to 12-person specialist lineup.
You don’t adopt this model by announcing a reorganization. You evolve into it by realigning ownership.
Here’s the simplest path:
Done well, this increases capacity before you change headcount.
Modern SaaS marketing doesn’t slow down because teams lack skill but because too many specialists own too little of the work.
The four-role model proposed by Stijn fixes that. It’s simpler, faster, and designed for an AI-powered world where speed and clarity matter more than headcount.
If you want help mapping your current team into these roles, contact us, we’re happy to walk you through it.
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Watch out webinar “How the Smartest SaaS Founders Scale Marketing Without Scaling Headcount” here 👇
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