The first 90 days as CMO: what I actually did vs what I said I'd do

The 90-day plan is a ritual. Every senior hire produces one. It looks good in the interview. It signals structure and forward thinking. It tells your new employer you have a clear approach for how you will get started.

Then you start the job.

I have been a CMO a few times now. I have written a few 90-day plans. None of them survived contact with reality intact. Not because the plans were bad. Because the reality of a new leadership role is almost always different from what you could have planned for, and pretending otherwise is just a way of feeling organised before the chaos hits.

What the plan usually says

A standard CMO 90-day plan looks something like this.

• Days 1 to 30: listen and learn. Meet the team, understand current strategy, audit existing activity, build relationships across the business.

• Days 30 to 60: assess and prioritise. Identify quick wins, flag gaps, start building a roadmap.

• Days 60 to 90: begin executing. Launch the first initiatives, get some early results on the board.

It is a sensible structure. Interviewers love it. The logic holds up on paper.

The problem is that it assumes a relatively stable environment where your primary job in month one is learning. In most startups and scaleups, that assumption is wrong from day one. You will be in execution mode on something before you have finished your first week of stakeholder meetings.

What actually happened

When I joined MATE the first time, the business was growing fast. Fast growth does not wait for a new Marketing lead to finish a listening tour. Within two days I was executing on things I had not anticipated, because they needed doing and I was the person now responsible for doing them.

When I came back as CMO in 2025, I already knew the business well. I still found the first month looked nothing like what I had planned. There were structural issues in the budget that needed addressing immediately. Team questions that needed resolving. Agency relationships that needed renegotiating. All of it pressing. None of it in the plan.

Every CMO I have spoken to about this says the same thing. The plan is a framework that reality immediately starts editing.

What the first 30 days are actually for

The listen and learn framing is right but incomplete. What the first thirty days are actually for is threat assessment, not just discovery.

You are not just learning how things work. You are working out what is broken, what is about to break, and what is going to create a problem for you personally if you do not address it quickly. Those are different questions and they require a different level of urgency.

That means getting into the data faster than feels comfortable. Looking at the budget in detail, not summary. Having honest conversations with the team about what they think is not working. Finding out what the previous marketing lead did not manage to fix before they left. That last one, in particular, is almost always worth a direct conversation.

The uncomfortable information is always there. You find it in week two or you find it in month three. Week two is better.

The quick wins trap

Most 90-day plans include a section on quick wins. Do something visible early to demonstrate value and build credibility. In theory, fine. In practice, this sends a lot of people in the wrong direction.

Quick wins are tempting because they make you feel productive and give you something to report at your first leadership check-in. But the things that are easiest to move quickly are not always the things that matter most. Spending your early political capital on visible but low-impact activity can actually reduce your credibility with the people in the business who know where the real problems are.

The best quick win I have found in any CMO role is not a campaign or a launch. It is demonstrating that you understand the business model better than people expected a marketer to. Nothing builds credibility faster with a CEO or CFO than a marketing leader who speaks their language from week three.

Plan for more than one scenario

Write a plan, yes. But write it in three versions.

• Your optimistic version: the listening tour goes to plan, you launch your roadmap on schedule, month three looks roughly how you drew it up.

• Your realistic version: two or three significant issues surface in month one and you spend the first six weeks dealing with those before you can do anything strategic.

• Your chaotic version: you are in triage mode for sixty days and your roadmap gets pushed to month four because something was more broken than anyone told you in the interview process.

The chaotic version happens more often than people admit. Being prepared for it mentally means you do not spiral when it arrives. You just work the problem.

The comparison that actually teaches you something

Write down what you planned to do in the first 90 days. Then, when you come out the other side, write down what you actually did. Keep both documents.

The gap between them is one of the most useful pieces of self-knowledge a marketing leader can have. It shows you exactly where your assumptions about new environments are wrong. It shows you which of your instincts are good and which ones need recalibrating. And if you have changed roles more than once, you will start to notice patterns in where your plans always diverge from reality.

I learn more from that comparison than from almost any other reflection exercise. The plan you wrote tells you how you think. What actually happened tells you what the environment required. The gap between them is the territory you still need to get better at navigating.

Worth doing every time, even when the 90 days were hard.