Squad Model
Branding & StrategyAlso: Squad-Based Structure · Cross-Functional Squad
Quick definition
A squad model is a way of organising a marketing team or agency into small cross-functional groups, each owning a specific outcome, campaign, client or product area, rather than splitting people by discipline like design, copy or paid media into separate departments.
How it varies across Australia
Adoption of squad structures varies widely across Australian agencies and in-house teams. Larger organisations with multiple brands or clients tend to move toward squads first, while smaller teams often stay functionally structured until headcount forces a change.
See how Australian marketing teams are structured →What it actually means
A squad is a small team built around an outcome. A designer, a copywriter, a media buyer and an analyst sit together and own one client, one campaign or one product line from start to finish. Compare that to the traditional agency structure, where all the designers sit in one department, all the media buyers sit in another, and a client's work gets passed between rooms like a relay baton.
The appeal is speed and accountability. When one team owns the whole outcome, there's nowhere to hide when a launch underperforms and no handoff delay between strategy and execution. It also tends to sharpen how a team thinks about conversion rate, retention rate and other outcomes that cut across disciplines, because the squad can't blame the next department down the line.
The model isn't free of tradeoffs. Squads can drift into inconsistent quality across a business if there's no shared standard for craft. A copywriter working alone inside a squad has fewer peers to sanity-check their work against than one sitting inside a full content team. Most organisations that adopt squads still run a lightweight discipline lead across squads to hold the craft bar, even while day-to-day ownership sits with the squad.
A squad without shared ownership is just a silo with a nicer name.
How it shows up
Squad structures show up in how work gets briefed and reviewed. Instead of a brief travelling through separate design, content and media departments, one small team takes the brief and delivers the finished work. It also shows up in reporting lines. Squad members often report to a squad lead for day-to-day work and to a discipline lead for craft development, which is the main structural difference from a purely functional org chart or a classic agency-of-record retainer team.
Where people get this wrong
Related terms
Common questions
What's the difference between a squad model and a traditional agency structure?
A traditional agency structure groups people by discipline, so all designers sit together and all media buyers sit together. A squad model groups people by outcome, so one small mixed team owns a client or campaign end to end.
Does the squad model work for small teams?
Small teams often already function like a single squad by default because there aren't enough people to split into departments. The squad model becomes a deliberate choice once a team grows past roughly a dozen people and starts feeling the drag of handoffs between departments.
Where did the squad model come from?
It's most associated with Spotify's engineering organisation design from the early 2010s, which grouped software teams into small autonomous squads. Marketing and agency teams have since adapted the same logic for campaigns and client work.
What roles typically sit inside a marketing squad?
It depends on the outcome the squad owns, but a common mix is a strategist or lead, a designer, a copywriter, a media or performance specialist and an analyst. Larger squads sometimes add a dedicated project manager.
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About New Rebellion
New Rebellion is a marketing intelligence consultancy. We build tools, score Australian businesses on how their marketing actually performs, and publish Debrief every day. This dictionary is part of how we work in the open.
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