After completing my first month at Focus GTS as project manager for Navigator Services, I’m more convinced than ever that we’re solving a problem that’s been plaguing martech teams for years. I’ve seen this pain from every angle: as a consultant rushing to deliver before SOW hours run out, as a hiring manager watching backlogs balloon during months-long recruitment cycles, and as a team member firefighting issues instead of driving innovation.
The Reality Check: Martech Is Broken
Let’s be honest about the truth for most enterprise martech teams right now: Backlogs keep growing. Strategic initiatives stall out before they can show return on investment. Enterprise investments sit idle while teams toggle between crisis mode and waiting for hiring approvals in a world of corporate HR red tape.
Meanwhile, your AEM instance has capabilities you’re not using. Your Workfront workflows could be optimized. Your Salesforce Marketing Cloud campaigns could perform better. But there’s never enough time, never enough hands, never the right expertise at the right moment.
Sound familiar? It should, because this is the reality for most organizations running robust instances of Adobe and Salesforce enterprise solutions.
Why Traditional Models Keep Failing
I’ve worked within all three traditional engagement models, and I’ve watched each one fall short in predictable ways:
Hiring Internally means playing a three-to-six-month waiting game while your backlog compounds daily. You write the job description, wait for approvals, post the role, screen candidates, conduct multiple interview rounds, negotiate offers, and then wait for notice periods to expire. Even when you find the right candidate, onboarding takes months before they’re truly productive, and by then your priorities have shifted twice. You’re stuck paying full-time salaries and benefits for what are often part-time needs, and when the work naturally ebbs and flows, you can’t scale down without layoffs.
Staff Augmentation with In-House Contractors puts bodies in seats, but charges you for hours instead of outcomes. I once worked at a company where contractors could work on a contract only for a certain amount of months before a mandatory cool-off period kicked in. Hiring managers spent more time playing Tetris with contract durations and availability windows than actually managing the work itself. Who can start when? Who needs to roll off next month? Who’s eligible to come back after their cool-off? Meanwhile, you’re tracking timesheets, managing multiple vendor relationships, and still wondering if the work is actually moving your business forward or just checking boxes to justify the hourly spend.
Agency & Consultancy SOWs promise the world but deliver slowly. I spent years as a project manager at digital marketing agencies, and I saw this pattern repeat endlessly. Engagements are overpriced and overscoped, and by the time you get through procurement and kickoff meetings, your urgent need from Q2 is now a Q4 deliverable. You’re paying for strategy decks when you needed fixes yesterday. And here’s what clients often don’t see coming: to keep costs down, consultancies frequently staff projects with offshore contractors working in opposite time zones. That means every question becomes a 24-hour round trip; every revision takes an extra day. Every urgent issue waits until morning in Mumbai or evening in Manila. You’re not just fighting slow processes, you’re fighting the clock itself.
The Navigator Way: Outcomes Over Everything
Navigator Services was built on a simple premise that should be obvious but somehow isn’t: Companies should pay for outcomes that move the needle, not for hours logged or proposals written.
Here’s what actually happens when you work with us. You have a problem: maybe your analytics tracking broke after a deployment, or a surprise penetration test revealed security gaps you need to fix immediately, or your personalization engine isn’t delivering the conversion lifts you expected. You put in a request in our Navigator Services portal, and within the week, we’ve deployed the right expert with hands-on experience in your exact tech stack. No procurement delays. No SOW negotiations. No three-month ramp-up period.
That expert delivers the fix, validates the outcome, and then scales back when the work is complete. You scale up when priorities demand it, and scale down when they don’t. You pay for results, not retainers.
What We’re Actually Fixing Every Day
The problems landing on my desk aren’t theoretical. They’re the urgent, business-critical issues that martech teams face when traditional models move too slowly.
Tracking and analytics implementations that need real-time audits, data reconciliation, and Customer Journey Analytics optimization. When your attribution is broken, every dollar you spend on marketing is a gamble. We fix that fast.
Data-driven personalization projects where quick UX improvements can lift customer experience scores, SEO rankings, and conversion rates simultaneously. These aren’t six-month transformation projects; they’re tactical wins that compound over time.
Cybersecurity remediations after surprise penetration tests expose vulnerabilities in your Adobe or Salesforce environments. You can’t wait for a consulting engagement to spin up when security issues are on the table.
Migration strategies and execution when you’re moving from on-premises to cloud infrastructure and need someone who’s done it before to help you avoid expensive mistakes.
Why This Model Works (From Someone Managing It)
I’m not going to pretend that Navigator Services is magic. It works because we’ve removed the friction that makes traditional models slow and expensive. We’ve built a bench of experts who specialize in Adobe AEM, Adobe Workfront, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Salesforce CRM. We’ve created workflows that let us deploy them quickly. And we’ve structured pricing around outcomes instead of utilization rates.
From a project management perspective, this model is a dream. I’m not managing scope creep on fixed SOWs, or trying to stretch remaining hours to cover unexpected issues. I’m matching problems to experts and tracking outcomes. When something works, we do more of it. When priorities shift, we pivot immediately.
One Month In, Already Convinced
I joined Focus GTS because I believed Navigator Services could fix what’s broken in martech delivery. One month in, I’m not just convinced. I’m seeing it happen in real time. Teams are getting unstuck, backlogs are shrinking, and ROI is showing up faster than anyone expected.
If your martech team is stuck in the traditional consulting-hiring-staff augmentation cycle, there’s a better way. Navigator Services isn’t just a subscription model for expertise—it’s a fundamentally different approach to getting martech work done. It’s one that prioritizes speed, outcomes, and flexibility over process, hours, and paperwork.
And from where I sit, as the PM managing this offering, that difference is everything.
Interested in learning how Navigator Services can help your team? Let’s talk about your biggest martech backlog challenge and how we can help you solve it.