Introducing CMO180: An Free Tool to Help CMOs Onboard or Transition

Over the past few weeks I have been looking deeply at the available advice, models, and my own experience in how new Chief Marketing Officers / Heads of Marketing transition into new organizations. You can read my analysis in "Why CMO 90-Day Onboarding Advice Missed the Mark" and "Six Failure Modes that Frequently Compromise CMO Onboarding."

My conclusion is that the old-standard linear "90-day onboarding plan" is obsolete in today's age of AI, constant disruption, and radically evolving marketing needs, skillsets, tech, and CEO/Board expectations. I am a big believer in the idea of looking at CMO onboarding over a longer 180-day period, bridging into execution, and through three overlapping lenses: The Revenue Engine, Quick Wins/Burning Buildings, and - most critically - Organizational Reality.

To push and refine my own thinking and put this model into practical use, I built a tool to help any CMO/executive marketing leader facing a new role or major transition navigate those critical first couple of quarters: CMO180.

This is entirely free, no upsells, no ads, no tapping your data for anything at all. Login with a magic link or Google. I designed it for my own use, around how I think and my own experience through several onboardings, and wanted to simply share it with others in the event it's useful.

Some features to make a new CMO's life a bit easier:

Stakeholder Tracking and Intelligence
Any onboarding experience involves 1,000 conversations and keeping track of all the different stakeholders can be a nightmare of OneNote entries. Define and grow your list of stakeholders. Then track them all in one place: alignment levels, skepticism (are they an ally or not?), emerging themes, and blind spots.

Dump & Go Conversations
Those 1,000 conversations can be formal or random hallway moments. CMO180 includes a "quick capture" feature to paste in a raw meeting transcript or your scribbled notes and then let AI (Claude via API) do the structuring work for you: extract insights, tag other stakeholders so you can draw connections, and surface patterns across dozens of conversations so nothing falls through the cracks.

Three Lenses Framework
Revenue Engine, Organizational Reality, and Quick Wins run as parallel workstreams, mirroring how the job actually hits you. The AI helps you make sense of it all, look for trends, and identify potential Quick Wins along the way.

Comprehensive Timeline Tool
Start from stratch, pull actions and milestones from an established bank, or adopt the CMO180 44-milestone framework all in one go - then drag and drop to make it your own.

Organizational Diagnostic
Assess your marketing org across the four dimensions of disruption fluency — Leadership Tension, Operational Agility, Sensing & Learning, and Cultural Readiness — giving you a structured read on how the team actually operates. This plugs into my wider Disruption-Fluency Framework and thinking, including all the additional thinking and help on this site.

Not interested in digging in to a new tool?

Feel free to just grab the Guide (PDF) which includes an overview of my thinking but also all 44 milestones and some helpful worksheets, plus a link (bottom of page 10) to an XLSX workbook I compiled you can use in lieu of the CMO180 tool, minus all the fancy AI)

If you try any of this out and find it useful, please reach out and let me know! There are a number of features I'd love to implement - export to ToDo/Calendar apps for example - that I may drop in down the road.

And of course, if you could use some coaching, support, or guidance in your own onboarding journey, I'm always available to help.