The first 90 days of an embedded seat.

An embedded practice sits inside the marketing function. Twelve months, reviewed quarterly, is the usual clock. The first ninety days are where the seat either becomes an operating system or a politely paid guest. This playbook is weeks 1–12: who is in the room, what ships, what you leave on the table every Friday.

It is not a discovery deck. It is not a chemistry lunch. Access, a kill list, a calendar, a weekly that can change the week, and a 90-day readout that is an operating room. The form to start is still on Contact. This page is the shape.

Weeks 1–4 — floor

Week 1: constraint named. Logins. Domains. Who can kill a send or a post. Week 2: diagnose. Theatre journeys, off-claim posts, duplicate queues. Week 3: install architecture, stop rules, legal path. Week 4: something ships under the new rules. If nothing ships in week 4, you are still in a workshop.

Weeks 5–8 — week

The weekly exists without being invented each Monday. Calendar, kill list, numbers page. The principal is in the work, then slightly quieter so the team can take a send. Paid cannot rise to hide a hole. Sales or properties enter the calendar; they do not own it.

Weeks 9–12 — independence

The 90-day readout. What was held. What died. Who runs Tuesday when the principal is quiet. If the answer is still “her,” you have a dependency. Name it. Extend only if independence is the reason — not comfort.

The artefacts are the point. Folders are where programmes go to die. The next owner should already have run a weekly, shipped a week, killed a send, and explained a number to finance. Then the rest of the year has a floor.

Agencies design the first ninety days as a pitch. Freelancers design them as availability. A practice designs them as an ending that has not happened yet — on purpose. Continuity of the programme, not of the vendor.

Related: regional bank and industrial missions cases, anonymized. The note on handing the practice back. The 90-day readout note. Missions catalog for shorter shapes — ESP migration, deliverability rescue, calendar unification — when ninety days is the whole mission, not the opening of a seat.

Write when you can name who runs the weekly in month four. If nobody can, hire a head of channel or admit you want a bench. Do not dress a dependency as a practice.

Week 1 is ugly in a useful way. You will find a forgotten journey, a store post that should never have shipped, three agencies and no calendar, or a preference center that lies. Name it. The constraint in the brief should survive contact with the stack. If it does not, rewrite the brief. Do not invent a second discovery phase to avoid the week.

Access is not a formality. Domains, ESP, social suites, analytics, the legal person who actually answers. If access slips into week 3, the 90-day outcome is already fiction. The CMO can fix that in a sentence. If they cannot, you are not embedded. You are visiting.

The numbers page is chosen in week 1 and not replaced in week 12 to make the slides kinder. Placement, time-to-launch, unsub, assisted revenue, cycle time, duplicate sends, incidents, independence — pick the basket the business already believes. Changing the basket at the readout is decoration.

Teaching is not a lunch-and-learn. It is the team taking the send, the principal quiet, exceptions in the weekly. Count the weeks that ran without a private thread. Count the meetings that killed work. Those are independence. A playbook PDF is not.

Agencies in the room: they enter the calendar. They do not own the agenda. If the first ninety days cannot write that sentence, you will spend the year as a routing layer. Agency unwind is a mission in the catalog when that is the whole problem. Embedded is when you want the function to keep the week after the agencies, if kept, become production.

The 90-day readout is not a sales event. Decision log. What died. What lived. Who owns Tuesday. Score the outcome from the brief. Then the remaining three quarters have a floor — or you admit the seat was theatre and you end it. Ending on purpose is the ethic of a solo practice.

What the principal does in week 6 that she should not do in week 11: privately QA every send, privately rewrite the agenda, privately explain the numbers. If those remain private, the team is audience. Teach in the weekly. Fail in the weekly. The readout then has evidence instead of hope.

What the company must do that a practice cannot fake: name a next owner, keep access from rotting, let the kill list kill. If every exception is a back-channel to the CMO, the calendar is folklore. The first ninety days will expose that. They should. Better in week 6 than in month 11.

Shorter missions borrow this clock. Deliverability rescue compresses diagnose and diet. Calendar unification compresses intake and decision rights. Agency unwind compresses who owns the agenda. The catalog is the menu of shapes. This playbook is the embedded version with a 90-day spine. No prices. Length, seat, artefact.

Healthcare and financial seats add field locks and a named counsel in week 1, not week 8. Consumer and retail add retailer kill lists in week 2. Hospitality adds identity after a merge. The table above does not change. The stop rules sharpen. Sectors pages carry the first-30-day tables for those files.

If month four still requires a private thread for every send, do not buy month five as comfort. End, or name the dependency. MBX will not pretend a retainer is independence. Write the ending into the first conversation. Team, stack, constraint, 90-day outcome, and the person who runs the weekly when she is quiet.

A note on travel and time zones. Embedded does not mean a body in every office. It means decision rights in one weekly. Asynchronous updates can prepare the room. They cannot replace the moment someone says no. Design the room for that moment. The practice will not invent a second meeting to compensate for a company that will not decide.

Ninety days is enough to know. Either the artefacts exist and the team has shipped, or you have purchased commentary. Commentary is expensive even when it is unpaid. Do not confuse a full calendar of status with a week. The table is the test. Fill it, or stop.

Related: regional bank, industrial, and multi-brand hospitality missions, anonymized. Notes on the weekly, handover, and the 90-day readout. Start a mission with team, stack, constraint, and the name of who runs the weekly in month four.