4 Resolutions for Ops in 2024
4 Resolutions for Ops in 2024
Start things off with a bang
Start things off with a bang
Happy New Year! Here’s to an amazing 2024 for all of us. 🥂🥂
As is common this time of year, I thought I’d share some ideas on potential resolutions that could help in our collective journey to progress in our careers.
Here are some of the things that are top of mind for me in 2024. Rather than setting them as true “resolutions” or goals, I’m trying to build systems that will result in these outputs.
Doing… Less with less
I think this quote from Steve Jobs does a tremendous job illustrating the value of saying “no”.
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
We’ve talked about why saying no is an important skill to learn in the past, but I’m thinking about it a bit differently this year.
While the common (true) cliché is that we’re all getting fewer resources and need to do more, I want to flip that on its head. In this case - doing more doesn’t mean having more of an impact. Much of “more” is low-value work or at least low-impact work.
In this case, doing less with less means finishing more. And finished work is impactful work.
Another way to think about it is in terms of starting - if you add constraints to the number of projects you can start, you’re forced to go through the process of really defining and understanding the priority of each project.
Sometimes we skip over this part because it is additional work, and it’s not always easy. It can involve working with stakeholders to compare items against each other. In some cases, you will have to say “no” to some things. That isn’t always easy.
The era of doing things because other Marketing of Marketing Operations teams do them is coming to an end.
Everybody has a nurture campaign, so we need one. (But do you? Do you have the resources to support it? The capability to measure it?)
We need a new tool in our stack. (Why do you need one? Have you checked to see if you can do this with our current tools? Is this even in the budget?)
We need a magic attribution model. (First of all, this doesn’t even exist. If you had this, how would you use it? Would anything change? Can you achieve this from a technical perspective?)
Get used to asking hard questions and being prepared to make difficult decisions.
There are additional benefits to having fewer “in-progress projects”:
Fewer stakeholders to keep looped in
Less context switching
Increased quality and accuracy of work
Increased confidence in delivery timelines and deadlines
More control over your calendar
Focus on Impact
Continuing some thoughts from the first point, Marketing Operations teams need to move away from using project completion volume (or percentage) as a key success metric.
I’ll say it again. Project Completion is a vanity metric for high-performing operations teams.
I know, I can hear you right now, “It’s too hard to tie ourselves to metrics - we’re always a level or two removed from actually being able to influence the metrics.”
If you’re not impacting a specific metric, your work should have a direct link to something that another team does that impacts the metric. You should directly be able to influence their ability to hit their metric.
What does that look like?
Well, if I had the perfect solution, I would certainly share it here.
I think that in part, the answer lies in the overall expectation for our teams.
What “do more with less” really means is that you need to do MORE of the RIGHT things. This requires us to be more innovative and strategic.
For example, successfully sending a monthly newsletter just to say that the newsletter was sent is a moderate to high effort but low-impact task.
Think of the time you spend corralling copy and images, building the email, and getting approvals. What is the outcome of the newsletter? Is it worth all of your time and effort?
I understand that in some cases, it may not be your call. At that point, all you can do is educate and inform, and ensure that you’re prioritizing correctly. But if we’re going to demonstrate our strategic thinking and abilities, things have to start changing, and that starts with us. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.
Play Long-Term Games
If you want to understand where you stand on the spectrum between tactical order-taker and strategic partner, look at the shelf-life of the majority of the projects that you’re working on.
Things like emails and ad-hoc reports are typically forgotten not too long after you’ve completed working on them.
Projects like tool integrations, lead scoring model implementations, and dashboard creation are great examples of something that has a bit more staying power.
Most of us aren’t in the position to get out of email sending and report building entirely. But we can look for ways to automate much of the work, delegate where possible, or even enable others to do those tasks on their own.
Sometimes the short-term projects feel good because we’re getting things done. There’s a bit of a dopamine boost when you check something off of your to-do list. The trouble with those little projects is that they typically don’t build on each other, there aren’t any incremental gains toward a larger objective.
Allowing yourself to get caught up in the whirlwind of short-term tasks doesn’t help your team in the long-run, and it doesn’t do you any favors either. The next time you get a request, consider the chances that someone is going to remember that this task was completed 6 months, or a year from now.
Finding ways to make those smaller ad-hoc tasks easier to complete, or finding a way to reuse or build on that work is a great exercise to go through at the beginning of the year.
Upleveling the work your team does is a key exercise towards demonstrating impact, which makes conversations around resources easier as well. “We need someone to support the attribution model we’ve built and to work with the SDR team to ensure leads are being followed up on appropriately” is a much more compelling reason to hire someone compared to “We need someone to send more emails.”
Keep in mind, that even if you do complete a larger strategic project, like lead scoring, businesses change. You may have to scrap everything you’ve done and start over, no matter how much time you invested into the project.
Needing to make a change due to external factors doesn’t mean the project wasn’t worth completing, and it doesn’t mean that you focused on the wrong thing. In some ways, it’s indicative that you’re on the right strategic track - the project was around long enough that a change to the business dictated a change to the project. That doesn’t happen with emails and ad-hoc reports.
Be Your Own Cheerleader
Make 2024 the year of you - literally. This year needs to be all about you and the work you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and the positive impact it's having. No more shy wallflowers in this Ops community - we’re confident we’re working on the right things and not afraid to share it.
Decide right now what approach(es) you’re going to use to share things with your team. You could:
Send weekly email/Slack/Teams messages to your manager and stakeholders
Quickly pull together a recurring nurture series with emails that include updates on you and your team’s achievements
Present in team meetings
Hold formal training sessions and office hours
Share Loom videos with progress updates
Track personal achievements for usage in performance reviews as well as on your resume and LinkedIn profile
Share something you’ve learned on social media
Contribute to existing internal communications programs (like emails, blog posts, or Slack channels)
If you’ve nailed the first three resolutions, then this one should be a piece of cake. Working on fewer, more impactful, long-term projects means you’ll have a lot to share, and you’ll look forward to it!
It can be uncomfortable to shine the spotlight on yourself, but you need to know that no one else is going to do it for you. You may have a great manager that will highlight some of your accomplishments, or be asked to present in an all-hands meeting, but most of the time, no one is coming to save you. You need to make your own luck. So if you’re serious about progressing in your career, you need to be proactive in showing why you should be “progressed”.
Wrap Up
I’m excited for this year and the potential it holds. There’s a lot to do, but we’re the right people for the job.
Before we know it, it’ll be late 2024 and you’ll have a minute to look back on how the year went for you. I believe that keeping these four resolutions top of mind will benefit you personally as well as the teams that you work with. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. These are skills that will be continuously beneficial as you progress in your career.