Between Teams is Karen Godin's independent consulting practice — brought in when responsibilities, systems, or handoffs between functions have stopped lining up, and someone needs to build the structure that gets them working together again.
Four recurring kinds of engagement — usually some combination of these at once, since the problems that show up between teams rarely stay inside one lane.
Understanding how an organization actually runs today — not just how the org chart says it does — and building the practical structure to close the gap between the two.
Strategy and hands-on execution for new systems and platforms: discovery, requirements, migration planning, and the operational work of getting a rollout to actually land with the people using it.
Restructuring teams and clarifying ownership when responsibilities have drifted, grown ad hoc, or were never clearly defined in the first place.
Workflow design and AI-enabled tooling that removes friction from day-to-day operations — grounded in how the work actually happens, not a generic best-practice template.
At the Star Tribune, Karen led Digital Advertising Strategy from 2019 to 2025 — a role whose title understated its actual scope, since she built and evolved the function around what the organization needed. The team supported more than $40M in annual digital client spend, and the group handling it was structured as generalists, with no clear separation between the different kinds of work coming through.
She reorganized the generalist analyst group into specialized functions — media buying, campaign management, and advertising coordination — so ownership matched the actual work instead of everyone doing a bit of everything. In parallel, she led the implementation and ongoing operational ownership of the TapClicks Order Management System, working across Product, Technology, Finance, Sales, and editorial stakeholders to get the new system and the new team structure working together rather than as two separate projects.
The multidisciplinary team she led grew to as many as 13 people at its largest, with clear specialization instead of a flat generalist pool, and an order management system that matched how the reorganized team actually worked. The structure held up through six years of change in the digital advertising business.
"The fix usually isn't a new system or a new org chart on its own — it's making sure they're built to work together."
Every engagement starts with a statement of work covering scope, timeline, and deliverables — sized to fit the problem rather than forced into one standard package.
For focused questions, second opinions, or ongoing light-touch input where a full project scope isn't the right fit.
A clear deliverable and timeline — a reorg plan, an implementation roadmap, a process redesign — scoped up front.
Continued operational involvement for teams working through a longer transformation or implementation.
Currently taking on select advisory and project engagements. Get in touch to talk through fit before anything is scoped.
Between Teams is Karen Godin's independent consulting practice. Karen has spent 25+ years in operations and transformation roles across broadcast media, digital media, publishing, and enterprise systems — including implementation leadership at TapClicks, running digital advertising strategy at the Star Tribune, and revenue operations at Cordillera Digital. The throughline across all of it: she's repeatedly the person brought in to make sense of ambiguous or newly-formed responsibilities, find where people, process, and technology have stopped lining up, and build the structure to fix it.
Looking for the full career history? Visit karengodin.com.
The best next step is usually a short conversation about what's actually going on before anything gets scoped.
