My career has been a series of lessons in environmental suitability. I have found that I simply do not perform well at a company that is too young and lacks resources. In those early-stage environments, the absence of foundational components leads to an inefficient use of energy where one is forced to build every tool and process from scratch.
On the other hand, I grow bored in enterprise companies that do not work fast enough. These large organizations are often focused on maintaining the status quo, which creates a stifling atmosphere for someone wired for momentum. My fit and success have consistently been in high-growth companies that are aggressively devoted to investment and growth.
This personal trajectory highlights a broader truth in business: talent must match the evolutionary stage of the organization. To build a marketing team that functions as a high-performance engine, you must move beyond generic job descriptions and apply the PST framework.
Table of ContentsOrigin and the Evolution of StructureThe Marketing Map: From Genesis to CommodityThe Three Marketing ArchetypesPioneersSettlersTown PlannersMatching Company Stage with TalentOrganizing for Constant EvolutionThe Strategic Blueprint
Origin and the Evolution of Structure
The PST structure is a direct descendant of the three types of organizations described by Robert X. Cringely in his 1993 book, Accidental Empires. Cringely categorized company archetypes as commandos, infantry, and police. Simon Wardley refined these concepts into a functional organizational structure consisting of Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners. This model is designed to manage the constant evolution of activities as they move from the uncharted to the industrialized within a single firm.
In Cringely’s military analogy, commandos parachute behind enemy lines to establish a beachhead using speed and surprise. The infantry follows to slog out the victory, taking the prototype and making it profitable, manufacturable, and marketable. Finally, the third wave moves in to maintain the territory as a stable, rule-bound environment where change is often resisted. In a marketing context, this translates to a system where your team composition must shift as your tactics evolve from novel experiments to standardized global operations.
The Marketing Map: From Genesis to Commodity
Before you can hire the right people, you must understand where your marketing tactics sit on an evolution map. In Wardley Mapping, components evolve through supply and demand competition across four distinct stages:
Genesis: This represents the unique, very rare, and highly uncertain.
Custom Built: Bespoke, uncommon, and focused on learning and craft.
Product: Manufactured, repeatable, defined, and increasingly common.
Commodity: Highly standardized, defined, fit for a specific purpose, and ubiquitous.
A marketing team that treats all activities with the same methodology is doomed to fail because there is no one size fits all approach. The mindset required to discover a novel consumer need in the genesis stage requires experimentation and a focus on reducing the cost of change. This is the polar opposite of the mindset required to manage a global, commodity-scale media buy focused on reducing deviation and volume operations.
The Three Marketing Archetypes
Pioneers
The Uncharted Explorers: Pioneers are brilliant individuals who are comfortable with chaos, high rates of uncertainty, and frequent failure.
In marketing, these are the people you hire when you have no playbook. They thrive on crazy ideas and core research, experimenting with unproven channels and defining a brand voice from thin air.
They show you wonder but fail often; you would not necessarily trust the stability of what they build for a mass market, but they make future success possible.
Settlers
The High-Growth Scalers: Settlers are responsible for draining the swamp and turning the wonder discovered by Pioneers into something manufacturable and profitable.
They identify patterns in the Pioneers’ successful chaos and build the systems to scale them.
In marketing, these are your growth hackers and product marketers who transition a campaign from a random act of brilliance into a repeatable high-growth engine through applied research and differentiation.
Town Planners
The Industrial Titans: Town Planners take something that already exists and find ways to make it faster, better, more efficient, and standardized.
They create the industrial-scale components that the Pioneers and Settlers build upon.
In marketing, these are the operations and analytics experts who manage massive, multi-channel budgets with surgical precision, ensuring the marketing machine runs with the reliability of a utility.
Matching Company Stage with Talent
The most common leadership failure is hiring the right person for the wrong stage of the company’s evolution.
The Startup Struggle: If a company is in the Genesis stage—too young and lacking resources—it requires a pure Pioneer. I have learned that I personally do not perform well here because there are not enough standardized components to leverage for fast, effective growth. Without these building blocks, every task becomes a massive custom-build project that drains energy and prevents the organization from moving into the high-growth phase.
The Enterprise Ennui: Large enterprise companies often live in a state of Peace, focused on maintaining high-margin products and following established best practices. For a growth-oriented marketer, these environments are suffocating because they prioritize efficiency, stability, and maintenance over the War state mindset of disruption. Inertia to change, often bred by past success, becomes a barrier that kills innovation.
The High-Growth Sweet Spot: Success is found when Settlers are placed in companies devoted to intense investment. These are organizations currently navigating the War phase—a period of rapid change where they are seizing the shift from product to utility to out-maneuver incumbents stuck in old, high-margin models. This is the environment where my fit and success have consistently resided.
Organizing for Constant Evolution
To sustain growth, a marketing department should not just be one big team; it should be composed of small, autonomous cells of Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners. However, a critical part of this structure is the theft mechanism.
The Settlers must steal the successful work of the Pioneers to productize it, which forces the Pioneers to move on to the next uncharted territory. Similarly, the Town Planners must steal the work of the Settlers to industrialize it, forcing the Settlers to move on to newer, emerging growth patterns. This internal cycle mimics the constant state of evolution in the outside world and prevents the organization from stagnating.
The Strategic Blueprint
Hiring a full-stack marketer is often a fantasy because Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners have fundamentally different cultures and attitudes. A Pioneer will view a Town Planner’s rules as a hindrance to creativity, while a Town Planner will see a Pioneer’s work as flaky and unreliable. Strategic mastery requires you to embrace this diversity of thought and place people exactly where they match the landscape. Building a great marketing team is about ensuring that the Aptitude matches the Attitude relative to the Stage of the company.
This framework, along with the principles of situational awareness and strategic mapping, is explored in depth in the book Wardley Maps by Simon Wardley. If you want to stop guessing and start navigating your industry with precision, I highly encourage you to download the full ebook to begin your journey toward strategic mastery.
Download Wardley Maps by Simon Wardley
©2026 DK New Media, LLC, All rights reserved | DisclosureOriginally Published on Martech Zone: The PST Framework: Building Marketing Teams for Every Stage of Evolution