11 Helpful Tools for any Operations Professional
My favorite Operations resources for inspiration, best practices, and research
Over the last 15 years, I’ve made it a practice to curate a list of thought leaders and resources that I can reference time and again for ideas and inspiration when working through an ongoing project or trying to decide what’s next for me and my team. After all, it’s much easier to start a project if you’re not staring at a blank page.
This list is my go-to when seeking inspiration or trying to understand how other teams are addressing similar problems or opportunities. Some of the resources offer templates or examples to be used in developing and executing plans, which helps me accelerate through the “busywork” of finding an effective format to use to communicate my ideas.
With Marketing Ops luminary Sara McNamara launching her newsletter, “The Marketing Operations Strategist” recently, it seemed like a good time to review and share my go-to resources for accelerating your career growth.
One critical skill for any Operator is to be able to translate learnings from an example or case study, extract the key principles, and then apply them to their own situation.
This cycle of abstracting concepts, translating them to your organization’s needs and approach, and then putting them into practice can open up your world to a whole host of inspiration and new ideas to try.
Newsletters
There’s nothing like getting a focused blast of Ops wisdom delivered to your inbox regularly. These newsletters are all written by leaders who are in the trenches daily.
Most are published weekly. Some of them feature interviews and advice from individuals in the GTM/Operations world, and some focus more on sharing advice and ideas from personal experiences.
Sara also curates a Marketing Operations Salary dashboard that is a great resource for benchmarking your compensation. With close to 1,000 unique responses, the dashboard allows you to view salary and total compensation information and slice it by title, industry, location, years of experience, and even gender. Contribute your information and help grow this tremendous resource for the Marketing Ops community!
Other Resources
Reforge
Career-focused learning provider Reforge has a ton of great resources, including cohort courses and live events. While the membership pricing may be out of reach for many folks, they do offer a lot of free resources as well.
One of my favorites in their Artifacts section. With a free account, you can view and download all types of templates, process documentation, and frameworks developed by some of the best thinkers out there.
Some of the ones I’ve found the most helpful were put together by Austin Hay, previously Head of Marketing Technology at Ramp.
There are a ton of invaluable resources available here, and it’s a great place to check when starting a project.
Teknkl blog
If you’re using Marketo, or just really want to go down a few (or 100) technical rabbit holes, Sandford Whiteman’s blog is required reading. To say he understands the technical underpinnings of Marketo would be like saying Leonardo da Vinci is a well-known painter.
If you have a question about how to do something in Marketo or are running into an issue with the Marketo API, velocity script, tokens, or literally any other Marketo feature, Sanford has written about it in extreme detail on his blog.
ChiefMarTech.com
I’ll keep this one short and sweet. 95% percent of you are probably reading Scott Brinker’s blog. The other 5% of you should be reading Scott Brinker’s blog. This is essential-level stuff at this point.
First Round Review
This recommendation is a bit unique - the First Round Review is a blog run by VC investment firm First Round, which has worked with companies like Notion, Roblox, Uber, and Square, to name a few.
The posts on the blog aren’t usually specific to Marketing or Operations, but they do an excellent job providing resources to help navigate the ups and downs of working at a startup, and how to do so successfully. During my time working in startup organizations, I referred to their posts often and found them to be insightful and actionable.
Google Sheets Expertise
I know Excel is the gold standard for Operators in the spreadsheet world, but I can’t deny that I’ve switched most of my workflows to Google Sheets over the past few years. I still jump back to Excel when I need that raw processing power, but the speed and ease of Google Sheets is hard to match.
While many things are an easy 1:1 translation from Excel to Sheets, there are some differences. There are also some tricks Google Sheets offers that Excel can’t currently match. Ben Collin’s website and newsletter have been a tremendous help in getting comfortable with the formulas and keyboard shortcuts I need to quickly get work done in Google Sheets.
GitLab Handbook
Have you ever wanted to pull back the curtain and watch another Operations team work in real-time? Teams at GitLab operate in an extremely transparent approach and document everything in their own tool. The Marketing Operations section of the GitLab handbook is a live, up-to-date wiki with documentation related to their processes, metrics, strategies, tooling, and more. It’s an eye-opening view into how a team of 11 supports the broader Marketing team, with all sorts of interesting details and a definite “behind-the-scenes” feel to it.
The overall handbook encompasses the functionality of the entire business and is a fascinating read if you’re curious about how the different parts of a large company function.
Wrap-Up and Next Steps
In my opinion, resources like these are great for a couple of reasons:
In a world where there’s never enough time to get anything done, it’s great to be able to find a starting point that isn’t “zero” and to have a level of confidence in the advice you’re reading through or the template you’re looking at. It’s a shortcut to getting to meaningful work.
Reading about high-level work is exciting, and it fosters the creation of new ideas that are unique to your role and responsibilities. It’s an exercise that can lead to unexpected but beneficial ways of looking at and thinking about your work that can help level up your impact.
Do you have a resource that you’d add to this list? Share it in the comments and we’ll build out an even better list for next time!
Thanks for the mention Jeff! Love that you mention the GitLab handbook, I also find it super cool. It gave me some inspo for my own knowledge base.