20 insights from 12+ years in Ops
20 insights from 12+ years in Ops
Lessons and strategies you can apply today
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Imagine someone asks you to build a house. You’ve never done this before. They hand you a set of tools, deliver materials, and give you the blueprints before leaving. You work but you’re highly inefficient, waste time and materials, and have to go back and redo things often.
This is the situation many new Marketing Ops pros find themselves in when they begin their career. They have an end goal, a few resources and tools to help them get there, and no idea what they’re doing.
I remember feeling lost quite a few times early in my career. It still happens to me on occasion.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve come to realize some universal truths about Marketing Operations as a career. Today, I’m sharing some of these in hopes that they’ll benefit you and help make your path to career progression a bit easier.
These are the things that have stuck with me and I find myself referring to at least one of these ideas every week. I’ve broken them out into four different groups:
Concepts that can help you progress in your career
Ideas that will help you build a sharp and clear operational mindset
Reminders that even Ops pros are human
Tactical tips that will make each day run a bit more smoothly
Career Growth
Grow your career more by doing less (at once)
You’ll get more work done by doing less at a time. It’s a tricky balance to find. If you’re consistently delivering high-quality work, no one is going to question how you’re getting the work done.
Prioritization is a key skill here. The first step towards knowing what to work on is recognizing what tasks lie at the intersection of high-impact and high-priority.
The hardest part is then working only on that project until you’re able to get it complete. I know it will be impossible to only work on that project - our professional lives just aren’t structured that way. However, committing to intentionally focusing and structuring your week to get as much deep work as possible will help you stay on track.
Talk about your work
So much of Ops work is behind the scenes that if you don’t talk about it, no one would ever know that it happened, or why it was important.
To avoid this black hole of invisible work, you have to cheerlead for the projects you’re working on.
Update your manager and other stakeholders, present in broader team meetings, create documentation, send an announcement email, conduct a training - anything you can do to help highlight your efforts.
Bringing attention to the value you’re creating can only help when it comes to career progression. It also helps you learn to be a confident advocate for yourself in many other career situations.
You never know where the next lesson will come from
Always be open to learning and participate in activities that will give you the chance to learn.
I can think of multiple situations where I saw something on a webinar, or something came up in a conversation and I couldn’t wait to try it for myself.
If you plan on doing the same things you’ve always done the same way you’ve always done them, you’ll eventually find that the evolving Marketing Operations landscape will leave you behind.
Ops mindset
No one is coming to save you
Operations teams are often small and under-staffed. Because of this, you have to be resourceful.
When you run into an obstacle, you may have to think creatively to find a solution. You might have to “hack” some things together in order to get an automation working.
Don’t be opposed to being assertive when it comes to solving problems, because in many cases, everyone is looking to you because they’re not sure what to do.
Process should dictate technology, not the other way around
Some operators fall into a trap of thinking of everything as a use case for a specific tool. It doesn’t really matter what the tool is. But where you start to get into trouble is when you tell someone that they need to do something differently because the technology doesn’t support what they want to do.
Being locked into the way a certain tool does things is like
One area where this can easily manifest itself is when evaluating new vendors for a potential purchase. Sales teams will push their unique approach to solving a business problem and recommend you use that paradigm to evaluate all of the other vendors.
You’ve got to know what your process is beforehand and evaluate the vendors based on how well their capabilities match up with your expected needs.
Lead with curiosity
Make being curious your default.
It’s so easy to have a preconceived notion when you’ve experienced a situation multiple times before.
You might be hearing about a data issue from a stakeholder who is always bringing up problems. Instead of going into the conversation slightly annoyed or irritated, try to be curious about what the actual problem is and how it’s impacting their ability to do their job.
You might be skeptical about participating in another demo for a tool you’re not convinced you need, but there may be a small insight that emerges during that call that you can apply to your own processes.
Being curious means you’re listening to understand and asking questions, both of which will help you learn quickly.
Mistakes are expected
Every Operations pro is going to make a mistake. They will upload the wrong list, send the wrong email, have a typo in the subject line, change a data value on the entire database — the list goes on and on.
I’ve been on some teams where a mistake was almost a punishable offense. Something “bad” happened and someone was going to have to pay. I’ve lost evenings and weekends with my family worried about something that I goofed on, and that is a stressful way to live.
Most mistakes are fixable, and they’re not widely noticed many times.
Sometimes the biggest part of moving on from a mistake is being able to trust yourself again. A lack of confidence can be a tricky emotional state to work in, because of how much Operators have to handle and how often they’re working at scale.
My go-to is to acknowledge that the mistake happened, document why and how things will change in the future because of it, and move on. Don’t dwell on it, don’t broadcast your Moops moment - leave it in the past where it belongs.
American sports coaches talk about wanting a quarterback or a baseball pitcher with a “short memory” because if that player makes a mistake like throwing an interception or allowing a home run and then dwells on it, they’re more likely to make another mistake again. Same with Ops folks - trust your processes and move on.
Success depends on being able to differentiate between what’s interesting and what’s important
Many of us got into Ops because we like to build and tinker. We got into Ops because it’s in our nature to come across a new tool or find a new problem and want to dive right in and explore.
The difficult thing is that these rabbit hole detours are often unplanned and often focus on low-priority tasks.
Having the self-discipline to pull yourself away from something interesting is an important muscle to build. Knowing when you need to put something on the back burner and move back to tasks that ultimately have a higher impact will help you stay focused.
Be a human
Nobody has it all figured out
I remember interviewing for a couple of jobs in my local area and I’d assumed that the Marketing and Marketing Ops teams would have everything all figured out, based on how well the company was performing.
Boy, I was wrong.
Even teams that seem like they have everything put together have room for improvement and things that need to be changed or updated. Especially with all of the external factors everyone has been dealing with for the past 18 months (and really, the past 4 years), there’s plenty of work to do. This ultimately leads to job security for someone who can do it well, so there you go.
Get invested in other people’s wins
Wanting to help your stakeholder teams succeed will help you be more directly involved in your work. You’ll be more motivated to find a way to make something possible and more excited when a goal is achieved if you’re interested in helping others succeed.
Being in a constant state of overwork can make it seem like you don’t have the time to stay up to date with what everyone else is working on if you aren’t participating in their projects.
Take the time to be part of the team, celebrate successes, and acknowledge wins. It will contribute significantly to building important relationships.
Empathy is a highly underrated skill
You’re going to deal with all sorts of emergency requests, poorly planned projects, and things that go off the rails for one reason or another.
Usually, this is the result of someone’s actions, or lack thereof.
It’s easy to get frustrated and lose your cool, but ultimately, that doesn’t solve the problem, and it’s likely to contribute to new problems down the road.
Focusing on fixing the problem or finding the answer to the question can help take your attention away from the reason you’re in that particular situation.
What goes around comes around, and you’ll want people to give you the benefit of the doubt when you end up making a mistake. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes can go along way toward building trust.
People don’t know how much you can help
In my experience, there’s usually a fairly decent knowledge gap about what marketing operations is, what it entails, and most of all, how it can help make life easier for other marketers.
Sitting down with someone who is dealing with a question or a really manual process or a data question is one of my favorite things. It is the moment when we come to the shared realization that not only can we help them, but it’ll be faster and easier than they thought it would be.
Finding ways to bring this up is an important skill, without stepping on anyone’s toes.
Ops Life
A “toolbox” to keep handy resources is essential
Keep a cheat sheet of everything you find incredibly useful. This includes Google Sheet/Excel formulas, definitions of complicated concepts, links to useful tools, inspirational social media posts - anything that you think you might want to review in the future or use again.
Don’t worry too much about the format, but store it in a way that it’s easily searchable and editable. You don’t want to spend a lot of time searching for what you’re looking for, and you want to be able to quickly add things that catch your eye as well.
Plan, but be flexible
Plan your quarters, plan your months, plan your weeks, even plan your days. But realize that your plan was dictated by what you knew then, without the benefit of what you know now.
So many external factors can influence or outright change your plans. You can adjust your planning timeframes and schedule accordingly as you get comfortable in an organization and understand the rate of change and how significant those changes usually are.
There is no exact one-size-fits-all approach
Webinars, ebooks, and case studies are great, but keep in mind that just because something worked a certain way on another team or in another company, it doesn’t mean that it’ll have the same result for you.
A key skill of any Operator is to be able to separate the relevant details from a process someone else shares and then apply those in their own situation.
Often, best practices are thought of as carved in marble when they should really be aluminum foil. Any new process or tactic applied without a level of customization cannot and will not have the desired outcome.
Snapshots and undo buttons are your best friend
It’s always a good idea to make sure you know how you can undo everything if you need to any time you’re going to do anything in bulk.
For example, if I’m planning on changing the data values in two or three fields via a list upload, I will download the current values of those fields along with a key or ID so that I can quickly revert if things do not go as planned.
If you’re working in a tool that auto-saves any changes, which is very common these days, it is helpful to have a safety net by deactivating anything that might be impacted by your changes as well.
You may not always have access to one, but working in a sandbox can also help reduce the risk of causing an irreversible issue.
Always get a second set of eyes on a project
If you have the luxury of asking someone else to take a look at an email before it gets sent, or an automation before it gets turned on, use it!
It’s tempting to just want to complete the project so you can move on to the next thing, but “familiarity blindness” is a real thing. You have all of the context and knowledge about how and why you did things a certain way.
Often, a fresh set of eyes will catch something you may have set up as a temporary workaround or a placeholder, or even just an honest mistake. Taking the time to have someone else review your work and ask questions can save you from frustration and stress, not to mention all the work you’ll end up doing to fix the problem.
Documentation is like planting a tree; the best time to do it was 20 years ago, the second best time is now
We all wish that we had done a better job creating documentation and that we had documented more things. Maybe AI will make that easier in the future.
Until then, we can find our own best way to document.
Personally, I prefer short walkthrough videos with an accompanying doc with links, process details, and steps to take if something breaks. That may not be your preference.
I do know that documentation has saved me countless hours of time that I would have spent trying to remember what I’d built in the past.
Imagine that - I built it, and six months later I couldn’t remember all of the details! If I needed documentation, just imagine how much someone with no prior knowledge of the process would need an explanation.
It may seem like there are better uses of your time, but I believe documentation is a huge time saver over time.
Sometimes, the only way is through
When you’re starting down a spreadsheet with hundreds or thousands of rows of data that needs to be modified or analyzed, it can be tempting to spend time trying to find the most efficient way to automate at least some of the work.
At the end of the day, sometimes the fastest way to complete the task is to throw on some feel-good tunes and get the work done. Don’t get so caught up in trying to find a way out of the work that the work itself doesn’t get done.
Wrap Up
I hope you came away with some helpful ideas from this post. Which ones stuck out to you the most? Would you add any?
As a follow up to this post, I strongly recommend finding a way to document (and share) your own lessons learned along the way. So much Ops knowledge and ideas are wrapped up in our heads, and we can benefit others by sharing them.