Temporary Office-Marketing

Lawson Products•Chicago, IL

5d•Hybrid

About The Position

Since 1952, Lawson Products has worked hard to make our customers' jobs easier by improving their operational efficiency, productivity and overall performance. As a leader in the MRO industry, we partner with customers to make sure they have the right maintenance and repair parts on hand when needed. We are looking for a hands-on temporary Marketing Project Manager to bring structure, speed, and accountability to how work moves through our marketing organization, from first request to final delivery. Our marketing team is fast-paced and performance-driven, operating in a cross-functional, account-focused, vertically-integrated B2B environment. This role is central to our broader effort to elevate the marketing organization's operating maturity. Reporting to marketing leadership, this role owns intake, traffic, and process, partnering day-to-day with leadership on budget, vendor, and portfolio-level decisions that fall outside this role's scope. This is not a fit for a traditional project management purist. We need someone who understands the business and what the marketing team is working to accomplish, not just how to track it against a plan, and who is genuinely comfortable operating hands-on alongside the team at every stage of a project. The role owns the intake, prioritization, and traffic process end-to-end: running Gate Meetings, managing the day-to-day flow of projects through Asana, and serving as the connective tissue between marketing, creative, sales, and other stakeholders. It also shapes how that process works over time, refining workflows, setting documentation standards, and building the reporting that gives leadership real visibility into what's moving, what's stuck, and why. Our corporate headquarters is located in Chicago, IL. This role operates on a hybrid work model; employees spend three days working in the office and two days working remotely.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree (B.A.) required, preferably in Marketing, Project Management or a related area, with at least 7 years of proven project management experience, ideally in B2B, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
Asana power user required — deep, hands-on experience configuring projects, dependencies, automations, and reporting, not just task-level use.
Experience supporting a B2B marketing organization, ideally in a performance-driven or account-focused environment.
Experience coordinating multiple concurrent marketing projects in a fast-paced, cross-functional environment.
Experience facilitating project intake reviews or Gate Meetings, including capturing decisions and driving accountability.
Strong understanding of marketing campaign development, creative production, digital marketing, and content workflows.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to coordinate across departments and stakeholders at all levels.
Highly organized and detail-oriented, with strong follow-through and the judgment to know when to escalate versus solve.

Nice To Haves

Experience in the distribution and/or manufacturing industries is a plus.
Experience in project management tools similar to Monday.com, Basecamp, Asana, Trello.
Experience in working with Jira and Confluence.
Experience with Workfront, Monday.com, or similar is a plus.

Responsibilities

Serve as the first point of contact for incoming marketing requests, gathering and documenting objectives, scope, timelines, deliverables, and approvals before work begins.
Own and continuously refine the intake process and Gate Meeting framework, including prioritization criteria used to resolve competing requests.
Coordinate, prepare for, and run recurring Gate Meetings — presenting intake information, timelines, and resourcing needs, and capturing decisions, approvals, and priority changes.
Evaluate incoming requests for strategic fit and organizational capacity, flagging tradeoffs to leadership before projects enter the pipeline.
Act as the organization's Asana power user — building projects, task structures, timelines, dependencies, and checklists, and continuously improving how the team uses the tool.
Manage the day-to-day flow of projects across the marketing team, proactively following up to keep work moving rather than waiting for status to be reported.
Identify bottlenecks, resolve scheduling conflicts, and escalate issues that put delivery at risk.
Assign projects and tasks following Gate Meeting approval based on team capacity, skill set, and priority, adjusting in real time as priorities shift.
Partner with the Marketing Calendar owner to keep project schedules, campaigns, and key milestones aligned and accurately reflected.
Set and maintain standards for project documentation, approval thresholds, and escalation paths across the marketing team.
Audit adherence to intake and workflow processes, identifying and fixing breakdowns before they become recurring problems.
Recommend and drive process improvements that increase throughput, visibility, and team efficiency — this role is expected to improve the system, not just operate it.
Partner with Marketing, Creative, Sales, Product, Operations, and external partners to keep everyone aligned on objectives, timelines, and deliverables.
Communicate project changes, risks, and dependencies clearly and early to stakeholders at every level.
Serve as a day-to-day escalation point for delivery risk and scope questions, looping in marketing leadership on issues that require budget, vendor, or executive-level decisions.
Schedule meetings, coordinate reviews, and drive approvals to closure on time.
Collect, organize, and validate creative assets, campaign information, and marketing briefs, ensuring everything required is in place before production begins.
Build and maintain dashboards and status reports that give leadership real-time visibility into project health, resourcing, and upcoming deadlines.
Establish reporting cadences and formats that make portfolio status easy to digest at a glance.