How to Align IT and Marketing Teams During a Website Redesign

Website redesign projects often stall when IT and marketing teams work at cross purposes. Marketing focuses on speed, branding, and user experience. IT, on the other hand, safeguards performance, stability, and security. Without a shared strategy, this disconnect leads to missed deadlines, scope creep, and a site that doesn’t meet business goals.

To avoid this, both departments must work as one from day one. This article breaks down the most common causes of friction between IT and marketing teams—and offers concrete steps to improve collaboration, streamline workflows, and launch a site that performs technically and delivers on business value.

Common Pain Points in IT–Marketing Collaboration

Before solutions can take hold, it helps to recognize why IT and marketing clash in the first place. A frequent issue is misaligned priorities and expertise. 

Conflicting Priorities and Goals

Marketing teams push for cutting-edge features – personalized user experiences, dynamic content, and rapid releases to match market trends. IT teams, meanwhile, prioritize scalability, security, and integration with existing systems. This mismatch of priorities creates a tug-of-war. 

For example, marketers might want a new campaign landing page launched in days, while IT raises concerns about performance or data flows. When the two sides fail to reconcile goals early on, projects stall and essential features are either scrapped or force-fit. 

If these priorities aren’t defined and owned together, teams end up:

• Working off different timelines, leading to missed launch dates
• Fighting over decisions instead of solving for user outcomes
• Delaying sprints because of unclear content or data needs
• Repeating QA cycles due to handoff confusion
• Launching a site that satisfies neither team, and underperforms

This disconnect also encourages workarounds—like marketing adopting unsupported tools or IT blocking initiatives—which slow progress and erode trust.

Siloed Teams and Poor Communication

IT and marketing often use different workflows, tools, and terminology. Without structured collaboration, misunderstandings multiply. For instance, design mockups might be approved without technical feasibility checks, or new infrastructure gets built without accounting for content strategy.

A joint discovery process, early in the project, can prevent these missteps by aligning expectations and constraints before work begins.

Unclear Roles and Governance

When responsibilities are ambiguous, accountability breaks down. Key questions go unanswered. For instance, 

• Who owns the final say on new feature requests: the marketing director or the IT manager?
• Which team approves budget changes? 

Without a defined governance framework (such as a steering committee or RACI matrix), decisions get delayed in lengthy email chains or endless meetings. 

Conversely, when every team member “understands their roles and how they contribute to the bigger picture,” alignment naturally improves. In other words, assigning tasks and decision-making authority upfront – and documenting it – prevents confusion. 

Misaligned Metrics and KPIs

IT and marketing typically measure success differently. Marketing tracks conversions, engagement, and traffic growth, while IT focuses on uptime, performance, and reliability. If these KPIs aren’t aligned, teams may pull in opposite directions.

To stay aligned, organizations should establish shared success metrics that reflect both departments’ impact on business goals, such as improving load time and lead generation. Clear, measurable KPIs create a unified vision that guides every decision from kickoff to launch.

Solutions: Bridging the IT-Marketing Divide

Fortunately, these challenges can be solved through intentional cross-team practices. Below are several evidence-based approaches that have helped organizations synchronize IT and marketing.

1. Conduct Unified Discovery and Planning Sessions

Misalignment starts early, when the IT and marketing strategies are in isolation. To avoid conflict later, begin your redesign with a unified discovery session that brings both teams (and stakeholders from UX, content, sales, and leadership) into the same room.

During this kickoff meeting, the group can review high-level objectives, target audience needs, technical constraints, and success metrics together. For example, IT can explain legacy system dependencies, while marketing shares brand strategy and content needs. 

One of the most important outcomes of this session is a tech stack decision everyone supports. Too often, marketing gets stuck with tools it can’t update, or IT is forced to support tools that don’t scale. A truly collaborative discovery process avoids this by jointly identifying what the platform must support.

Here’s what that stack should enable:

• A CMS or DXP that allows modular content editing without developer bottlenecks
• Built-in support for SEO, schema markup, redirects, and content scheduling
• APIs and backend structure that integrate cleanly with legacy systems and analytics tools
• A governance model that defines who can publish, approve, and roll back changes

Marketing needs agility for campaigns, personalization, and A/B testing. IT needs a stable, secure stack that won’t trigger 2 AM alerts. A headless CMS or hybrid DXP often strikes the right balance, separating content from presentation and giving each team room to operate.

During selection, hold a joint evaluation process, not a handoff. Run demos. Build sample workflows. Validate how the system handles key use cases for both teams, like real-time publishing, permission controls, or integration with lead scoring.

2. Build Cross-Functional (Agile) Teams

Instead of organizing by department, consider forming an integrated project team or agile “squad” that includes:

• A project manager (ideally neutral, with authority to resolve conflicts)
• A marketing lead who understands content, SEO, and campaign goals
• A technical lead who understands infrastructure, CMS integration, and performance
• A UX/UI specialist who can translate strategy into structure

Agile practices like standups and sprint reviews help both teams stay visible and responsive. Integration issues—like personalizing content or syncing analytics—are solved faster when marketers and developers collaborate early.

Working together also allows teams to evaluate new tools or features jointly. Instead of marketing requesting a platform and IT validating it later, both explore options in parallel, testing how well a solution supports technical needs and business goals.

Ultimately, a cross-functional team reduces handoffs, catches problems early, and builds shared accountability into every project stage.

3. Create a Shared Project Roadmap and Governance Model

A shared roadmap keeps everyone moving in the same direction. Instead of separate plans for IT and marketing, use a unified project timeline with clear milestones, dependencies, and owners. Using collaborative tools, both teams should have complete visibility into each other’s tasks and delivery timelines.

But visibility alone isn’t enough—governance fills the gap when decisions get hard.

Set up a steering committee or leadership forum with representatives from IT, marketing, and other critical departments. This group should meet regularly to resolve scope questions, shift priorities, or reallocate resources. Without this structure, simple issues can spiral into weeks of email threads or delayed decisions.

A documented RACI chart—identifying who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed for each task—clarifies ownership and eliminates confusion. Everyone knows who approves a new tool, signs off on content, and resolves technical blockers.

Executive support is also critical. When leadership champions the joint roadmap and checks in with both teams, it reinforces that success is shared, not departmental. Alignment is no longer a handshake; it’s operationalized.

4. Define Common KPIs and Shared Success Metrics

Establish the metrics defining project success from the outset and ensure IT and marketing co-own these goals. For example, suppose the company aims to increase online sales. In that case, the website redesign KPIs might include conversion rate, average order value, or time to checkout—metrics involving technical performance and marketing impact. 

If brand awareness is the goal, page views, bounce rate, and social shares become part of the scoreboard. The key is that marketing and IT contribute: marketing drives traffic and content quality, while IT ensures site speed and reliability.

Aligning on KPIs keeps incentives from diverging. When IT knows that faster page loads directly contribute to the lead goal, and marketing understands how user behavior impacts system load, they are both invested. 

As practical steps, decide on a handful of quantitative goals in the discovery phase, and then monitor them as a team dashboard. Hold periodic joint review meetings of these metrics: celebrate wins (e.g., X% improvement in load time) and address shortfalls. A unified scoreboard ensures that every feature or campaign is evaluated for how well it moves the meter for everyone, not just one department.

5. Ensure a Joint Post-Launch Plan

A redesign doesn’t end at launch—that’s when the real work begins. Yet many teams disband once the site goes live, leaving no one responsible for performance, fixes, or optimization. Minor issues snowball into lost leads, slow pages, and finger-pointing without a joint post-launch plan.

After launch, IT and marketing must maintain a shared roadmap covering ownership, measurement, and improvement.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Define post-launch ownership. Who tracks uptime and bugs? Who owns conversion metrics? Assign clear roles for maintenance, reporting, and enhancements.
• Establish performance benchmarks. Set targets for site speed, form completions, and user engagement—then review them monthly. Use dashboards that both teams can access.
• Plan for ongoing optimization. Marketing may want A/B testing and campaign tweaks. IT may need to update integrations or patch dependencies. Bake this into a living roadmap, not an afterthought.
• Hold post-launch retros. Within two weeks of going live, gather both teams for a retro to discuss what worked, what didn’t, and what needs to change before the next update.

When marketing and IT co-own the outcome, not just the build, the redesign delivers long-term value, not short-term stress.

Partner with Alliance Innovations for a Smooth Redesign

Website redesigns don’t have to be battlegrounds. With the proper process and support, IT and marketing can form a powerhouse partnership rather than rivals. Alliance Innovations specializes in making this happen. As a digital technology strategy firm, Alliance partners with organizations and marketing agencies to deliver innovative digital experiences. 

Our team facilitates:

• Collaborative discovery workshops that get everyone aligned early
• Joint roadmaps with governance structures that prevent decision gridlock
• Agile workflows that keep sprints focused, cross-functional, and value-driven
• Platform recommendations—like CMS or DXP solutions—that both IT and marketing can confidently support

We don’t just build websites—we build alignment. Whether you’re platforming, rebranding, or scaling your digital presence, we help you get there faster with fewer setbacks.

Ready to bring clarity and speed to your next redesign?

Reach out to us today to learn how we can help your IT and marketing teams work as one so your next website redesign stays on budget, on time, and exceeds expectations.