[marcosdumay]

> it was often funny to me how little we had to validate the numbers we presented

Yeah, your clients expected you to be the expert, and honestly apply that expertise for their interests. In other words, they expect you to validate those numbers; if they wanted somebody they need to second-guess, they would just take opinions for free from a random web forum.

[zeroego]

We didn't have any clients, it was a marketing department for a CPG company. I was just a peon; I didn't have any say in how things got done. Say all that to say, you would think that at some point VPs of other departments would want to know how all the money that got allocated to marketing was actually benefiting the company. I'm talking a concrete dollars to dollars comparison. I personally didn't get to scratch that itch until I moved into e-commerce.

[marcosdumay]

Well, ok, I misunderstood that part. But the expectation of goal alignment is even stronger for an in-house department.

The people high up expected somebody on your department to validate your numbers and invest on the things that most benefited the company. For an in-house team, it's not rare that this expectation is so strong that nobody ever challenges it. So it's also not very rare that one team or another coast on it and don't deliver much value.

Obviously, none of that is ideal. But that doesn't stop it from being common. Anyway, if your department never checked anything, somebody up from you was doing a bad job, because it's literally their job, not really the random VP (but it is the VP's job to discover if the dept was doing their job) and really not of any other department head.