When Developers Say It’s Done, But Marketers Disagree

In healthcare organizations, the lack of collaboration between marketing and IT or their agencies will hurt results of both teams. Yet even the best-intentioned teams find themselves at odds. Small technical oversights create real business friction. Projects stall not because people aren’t skilled, but because they define success differently.

A Real-Life Example: UTM Tracking Code Problems

Say you're running a campaign and a major site migration is in progress. From the IT perspective, the priority is making sure all links are live and functional after the change. But if UTM parameters aren’t preserved in the new URLs, the marketing team loses the ability to track attribution.

The campaign is still running. Traffic is coming in. But you’ve lost visibility on what’s working. That “small” oversight kills reporting and undercuts decision-making.

For IT, this kind of detail might seem minor. But for marketing, it’s core to how performance is measured—and how future investment decisions are made.

Developers Focus on Effort, Marketers Focus on Impact

It comes down to proportionality.

If a developer spends two weeks solving a complex infrastructure issue, that becomes their mental focal point. Meanwhile, something like updating a label, tweaking a form field, or maintaining UTM parameters might take two minutes. Because it’s quick, it’s often deprioritized, or forgotten entirely.

But time spent doesn’t always match importance. Marketers care deeply about how things feel to users and how they perform in the analytics. These quick fixes can carry more strategic weight than the heavy lifting behind the scenes. And unless those priorities are aligned, those small misses create disproportionate fallout.

Misalignment Starts With Two Different Definitions of ‘Done’

Ask a developer when something is “done,” and you’ll likely hear: when it works without any bugs.
Ask a marketer, and the answer might include: It’s functional, branded, clear, trackable, and the team is trained and ready to use it.

In healthcare especially, “done” often includes an additional layer of compliance and quality control. It’s not just about performance: it’s about clarity, accessibility, accuracy, and how well it fits into the patient experience.

When those definitions don’t match, everyone walks away frustrated: even if nobody technically did anything wrong.

Three Truths to Bridge the Gap And Build Mutual Understanding

IT Needs Understand That Marketing Is All About Results

If you're in IT, here’s the thing to understand: marketers are focused on outcomes. They don’t necessarily care how the feature gets built. What they care about is launching a campaign on time, delivering a smooth patient experience, and seeing measurable results.

You won’t have time to teach them the technical backend—and that’s not the goal. Instead, find the right analogies to explain your reasoning. Bridge the knowledge gap with clarity, not frustration. That’s what earns their trust. You’ll find that marketing teams are more than willing to compromise if it gets them to where they want faster. 

Marketing Needs to Understand That Technical Teams Deal with 10,000 constraints

There are dozens of ways to build a feature. Your job isn’t to prescribe the method, but to ask questions, clarify business needs, and stay involved. Developers will recommend the approach they believe is best based on scalability, maintainability, and risk.

This is particularly critical in healthcare, where every decision is filtered through privacy, security, and compliance. That’s why, for example, an IT team might resist integrating a third-party platform without a clear review process: because patient data security isn't just a technical concern—it’s a legal obligation.

Your best tool in your toolbox: Ask the question “Is there another way to do this?”

Small frustrations can turn into major pain points

Mistrust doesn’t begin with a big blow-up. It begins with small things:

• A tracking parameter is lost, again.
• The same typo appears in a form field that should’ve been fixed.
• A new tool request is rejected without clear reasoning.

Over time, these incidents harden into stereotypes. Marketing says IT “just says no.” IT jokes that “the problem is always 8 inches from the screen.” You stop seeing each other as collaborators—and start seeing each other as roadblocks.

In healthcare, that’s a dangerous drift. If mistrust becomes the norm, it puts sensitive workflows, patient data, and institutional integrity at risk.

That One Time We Fixed Collaboration By Ditching The Process

You can follow a flawless process and still end up misaligned. We’ve seen this happen when two teams assume that a particular step is “owned” by someone else. The process itself becomes a shield—people hide behind it instead of collaborating through it.

One project sticks in my mind. Developers were returning sky-high estimates for relatively simple design updates. The marketing team, frustrated by constant pushback, began to feel that the creative work was being systematically shut down.

On paper, the process was being followed: tickets submitted, estimates returned, timelines discussed. But in reality, trust was breaking down.

So we stepped outside the process.

We brought designers and developers into the same room—not to escalate, but to understand. Developers showed how pages were structured in the CMS and why custom components added so much overhead. Designers walked through their tools and how they envisioned the changes.

Once they saw each other’s realities, the path forward changed. Designers began mocking up their work using the existing component library, and developers helped identify reusable patterns. Just like that, estimated dev time dropped by nearly 70%.

The process didn’t fix the issue. Conversation did. 

Culture Builds What Checklists Can’t

If you’re a Marketing Director looking to improve collaboration with IT, skip the process audit. Start with a conversation. 

Invite your counterpart for coffee or lunch, no agenda. Talk about how your teams work, what constraints you each face, and—most importantly—why your requests matter beyond the ticket. When people feel heard, they stop defending their corner and start building something together.