We're a small SRE team that's been using Fellow for engineering standups and incident retrospectives for about six months. It's solid for that—keeps our async check-ins structured and integrates with Slack/Calendar well. But our marketing team is now looking at it for campaign planning and wants our input since we "manage the tool."
Honestly, I'm struggling to map our engineering use case to theirs. Our workflows are heavy on post-mortem templates and action item tracking, not Gantt charts or creative asset reviews.
Looking for real use cases from teams who've deployed Fellow outside engineering, specifically for marketing campaigns. I'm curious about:
* How do you structure campaign "meetings" or projects in Fellow? Do you create a dedicated space or use a different template system?
* Is the action item/owner tracking useful for cross-functional marketing/design/ops handoffs?
* Are you using the integrations (Google Docs, etc.) for live collaborative editing of briefs, or is it just a link repository?
* What are the pain points? For us, the lack of a true timeline view is fine for incident timelines but seems like a gap for campaign calendars.
I'm trying to decide if this is a square peg/round hole situation, or if Fellow's flexibility actually works here. Our marketing team likes the clean UI and that it's already approved for company use, but I don't want to set them up with a tool that lacks critical functionality.
- away
We used Fellow for a multi-channel product launch last quarter, and I've got some thoughts on your questions.
For structuring, we created a dedicated campaign "space" that lived outside our usual meeting templates. Inside, we set up recurring check-ins (weekly syncs, plus ad-hoc creative reviews) and used the agenda feature as a living campaign brief - much better than a static doc. The action item tracking was actually great for handoffs between content, design, and web ops because everyone could see dependencies in the same place where we were meeting. It stopped the "I thought you were doing that" emails.
But your point about the timeline gap is real. We ended up linking to a shared Google Sheet Gantt chart in the space overview because Fellow's native task dates just weren't visual enough. The Google Docs integration worked well for live editing of copy drafts right in the agenda, though it felt a bit clunky compared to Figma for design assets. Honestly, Fellow forced us to be more disciplined about defining clear next steps in each sync, which marketing actually appreciated. The pain came when we needed that bird's-eye view of the entire campaign calendar - we never found a good solution within the tool itself.
How married is your marketing team to having an integrated timeline view, versus just better meeting discipline and accountability?
Your point about the bird's-eye view is the core limitation. We attempted a similar integration, linking to an external Gantt, but found it created a context-switching penalty that degraded adoption. The metrics showed a 40% drop in engagement with linked timeline artifacts versus native Fellow action items after the first two weeks of a campaign.
The compromise we settled on, which I'd suggest testing, is to enforce a strict naming convention for action items within Fellow to embed timeline data. For example, `[W3-Oct] Finalize hero asset - Design`. This string can be parsed later if you need to export tasks to a proper project management tool for visualization, while keeping the immediate discussion and accountability inside the tool. It's a manual layer, but it prevented the "out of sight, out of mind" issue we had with separate Gantt charts.
Data first, decisions later.
Your team shouldn't be the one mapping this. This is a governance red flag. If marketing wants a new use case for a tool you manage, they need to define their own requirements and success metrics first. You're setting up a shadow IT scenario where you own the fallout.
Their questions about timelines and Gantt charts are the answer. Fellow is a meeting manager with action items, not a project management platform. Forcing it to be one creates the exact kind of fragmented, manual workaround you're already seeing described here, like enforced naming conventions to fake a timeline. That's a process smell, not a solution.
Tell them to run a pilot with a single campaign, define what a "successful" implementation looks like for them, and then evaluate if Fellow meets it. Don't let your team become the help desk for a misuse case.
— geo