The path from Marketing Ops to Marketing Leader | Jason Widup (Metadata, Workfront, Tableau)
How an Ops background can help you get a seat at the table
Individuals working in Marketing Operations usually pride themselves on being the people you go to if you need a question answered. However, if you want to stump most people currently in Marketing Operations roles, ask them about their career path. Even if you ask them to project only 5 years into the future, my experience has been that you will get a wide variety of answers, most of them including something like “Well, it depends”.
Perhaps part of the reason these career aspirations are so ambiguous is that there are quite a few different directions Operations skills can take you in your career. You could manage a Marketing Ops team, try to grow into an overall Marketing leader, branch off into RevOps or Sales Ops, or even move out of the GTM org to a role like Business Operations.
Individuals working in Marketing Operations usually pride themselves on being the people you go to if you need a question answered. However, if you want to stump most people currently in Marketing Operations roles, ask them about their career path. Even if you ask them to project only 5 years into the future, my experience has been that you will get a wide variety of answers, most of them including something like “Well, it depends”.
Another factor playing into this is that there is not a significant, established pipeline of Ops-minded individuals growing into leadership roles in GTM functions. Especially on the Marketing side, there isn’t a well-defined path past a Director or VP of Marketing Ops role.
Many of us are familiar with CMOs who come from Brand or Product Marketing backgrounds, and VPs of Sales, and CROs who grow up through the ranks as individual contributors and then sales leaders.
Jason Widup, former VP of Marketing at Metadata.io, also had roles as a Marketing Operations leader at organizations like Getty Images, Tableau, and Workfront, and has navigated the uncharted path of coming from a technical background full of Operations roles and moving into a more general leadership position.
In this week’s interview, Jason touches on some of the essential lessons that he learned to help him progress from individual contributor to people leader, develop his prioritization muscle, and expand his leadership skills.
He begins by talking about how he ended up in a Marketing Operations role (almost before knowing exactly what the entire role entailed), and then how that role expanded to give him his first taste of other marketing functions.
From his time leading larger Marketing Operations teams, he shares insights into how an individual contributor can navigate the personal challenges that might come from an aversion to delegation and enable others to focus and prioritize effectively.
As someone who has made the jump from an Operations background to a more broad leadership role, Jason also shares his advice for others looking to do the same.
Make the most of your current role
Some of us may fall into the trap of “biding time” in a role, especially if our ‘ideal’ role is still a couple of steps away. We end up viewing it as more of a temporary arrangement that we’re passing through, instead of what it is - a critical opportunity for growth.
After his first role at AT&T, Jason moved to a consulting organization for a chance to get exposure to more parts of a business.
Jason said, “There was a part of me that wanted to see a lot of different businesses, but not have to go work at a bunch of different businesses. I just wanted to see, like, how does all this stuff work? How do different companies do different things?“
As he got started in his new role, Jason was quickly involved in a project for a large customer migrating from a homegrown website analytics platform to Omniture Site Catalyst (now Adobe Analytics).
Like most of us, Jason’s entry into Marketing Operations was fairly organic. “I became this Omniture expert on accident. and I started getting onto forums. I became aware of this community of people doing web analytics and web marketing.”
As he continued to get more involved in the web analytics community, he realized a universal truth - Marketers typically have more fun than IT. At this time, most Marketing tools were administered by IT out of necessity. The trend of tools becoming more accessible to non-technical Marketers was just barely starting to pick up steam.
“I am confident in my technical chops more than my creative chops,” Jason said. “And I really liked being in a creative group. I didn’t like to be in IT, so Marketing was the perfect fit for me.”
That experience was Jason’s first taste of web analytics, something that would become his foot in the door for an eventual Marketing Operations role.
TIP: Every role is a chance to learn something.
If it isn’t obvious what you should be learning (if you’re not handed a new tool like Jason was), you need to be intentional about finding something you can learn.
If you’re having a hard time finding something to do to learn, a great idea is to look for ways you can help out on the Marketing team. Help with an event, talk to an analyst, jump on a call with a customer, or run through a demand gen campaign. These experiences will give you more context and insight for when you work with those specific teams again.
Succeed as a new leader and empower your team
Jason’s foot in the Marketing Operations door was web analytics. He was able to leverage that experience into his first true Marketing Operations role, leading Marketing Ops at Getty Images as the Director of Marketing Operations.
“Analytics is how I got into Marketing, and my role at Getty Images was the first one where I was out of analytics and into Marketing Operations. That’s where I learned about things like Marketing Automation - we were using Eloqua there,” Jason said.
Now managing a team, Jason began to develop his leadership style and approach.
“Honestly, it was looking at the negative experiences I’ve had that taught me who I didn’t want to be as a leader. I had a couple of pretty bad experiences, and they framed for me who I didn’t want to be. I also had some really good managers as well - so for me, my leadership style grew from seeing what I like and taking it and piecing things together.”
Learning to let go
Jason also tackled one of the biggest challenges an Ops pro may face when making the jump from individual contributor to leader - letting go of doing the work himself.
“I think a lot of ops people struggle with this - they really want things done perfectly, and they like to control it. When you’re starting to lead a team, that’s part of the challenge. You like the people you hire, and you think they’re great and smart, but in the back of your mind you know they’re still going to mess something up,” Jason said.
Even knowing this, and knowing that it’s typically going to be faster and easier for you to do something than to teach it, there comes a time when you must start handing things off to be a more effective leader.
“You have to get to the point where you feel comfortable delegating,” Jason continued “And then once you get to that point, you think ‘Why haven’t I done this my entire life?’”.
The very thing that makes great Ops people, including those who are promoted to lead, is ownership - the drive to make sure that everything is done correctly and in the way it should be. But that trait can get in the way of our career growth if we can’t bring others in to help. A manager who does all of the work for their team isn’t doing anyone any favors.
TIP: Getting comfortable with delegation can be difficult.
One thing that can be helpful is to remember that is that as a leader you should be most concerned about the result or the outcome and less focused on the specifics of how your team gets there.
There are probably a few specific items that your team needs to be aware of as they’re working on a project, but if you document those clearly for them, it will make it much easier for them to include them in what they’re doing.
Be clear about what matters - and leave the rest to them.
It’s possible to grow “out” of Ops and lead a function
As you focus on continuously learning and work on getting comfortable with delegating work to your team, hopefully, you’ll find yourself making tangible progress toward your career goals.
What remains for most Marketing Ops team leaders in or around the Director-plus level is that elusive jump to a more broad leadership position.
After stops leading teams as a VP of Marketing Operations at Tableau Software and Workfront, Jason landed an executive role leading the entire Marketing team at Metadata.io.
He shared some ideas that helped him lead the team that helped grow ARR from $1.5m to $16m in just over three years.
How do you know where to spend your time?
A critical item is knowing what is important and what is not.
“You've got to realize, everything can't be an emergency. Everything can't be a dire critical issue,” Jason said.
“A lot of that is required now to become a good strategic leader is to be able to see what is important and what's not - what should I care about? What should I not care about? I think that's where a lot of Ops people can grow in their careers by just letting some of the stuff go.”
“We get all wound up about something and what can happen is that other people in the company see that and they don’t see why that particular item is important. They might think we're catastrophizing things, and nobody really likes that because it can cause some stress and confusion across teams,” he added.
Ops leaders looking to take the next step need to be sure to carefully understand and define priorities for their team. Getting sucked into the trap of making something unimportant a big deal because of external pressure may indicate to others that you’re not truly a strategic leader yet.
There are different approaches to defining priorities across different teams and organizations. To the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and to the Ops person, everything that seems broken looks like a problem to be solved.
With experience, and a focus on aligning to company metrics, you can start to narrow your focus to the things that will move the needle, and learn to ignore (or at least deprioritize) some of the items that might have caught your attention in the past.
Jason continued, “That's how Leaders have to think and how they have to strategize, and they can't worry about everything. They really do have to operate at a pretty high level.”
Don’t skip this - planning is a key skill
In discussing things that would have made his transition to Marketing leader even easier, Jason admitted that he wished he’d spent more time learning about and putting together plans.
“I'm really good at operating, just getting stuff done and executing, but ask me to plan, and I didn’t know where to start,” he said.
Some may view Operators as natural planners, but like Jason said, many of us like jumping right to the fun part - the execution. There obviously is value in the actual doing of work, but it’s important to balance that with some strategic thought and organization up front.
Especially if you’re going to be leading the work of a team, you want to ensure that there is a clear plan in place that is well communicated and easily understood, to prevent everyone from jumping into mindless work and getting nothing meaningful done.
If you’re not leading a large team today, this can easily be applied on a personal level. Look at your days and weeks. How are you spending your time? Are you reacting to whatever happens to be on your to do list for the day? Do you find that high priority items get stuck in the backlog while you put out the day’s fire?
Take a few minutes and attempt to block out some time in your day for the most important thing you need to get done. Be strict about using that time only for the work you’ve planned on doing. Jason is a big advocate for timeboxing.
“When you don’t understand prioritization and you don’t understand timeboxing, you could end up spending hours on something that has zero impact,” he said.
“Timeboxing helps you know when enough is enough - you get it to a solid point and then move on to the next thing,” he continued.
The exercise of adding blocks of work time to your calendar dedicated to specific tasks is a forcing function - at some point, you run out of time, so there are things on your list that you’re not going to get to. If you spend that time on the highest-priority projects, you’re more likely to have a positive impact on the business.
How does an Operations background give you an advantage as a potential leader?
When asked what Ops pros bring to the table as potential Marketing leadership candidates, Jason was quick to hit on a key point - he credits a lot of his ability to transition to a leadership role to his ability to understand and draw conclusions from the data his team was generating.
“It’s so important to just know your data. If you don’t, or you’re not smart about it, you’re just going to get eaten up. The sales leaders you will work with are typically very strong with data, and if you don’t have a handle on it, it weakens your position at the table,” Jason said.
A benefit of being so data-driven is that you have a much clearer picture of what is working and what is not, helping determine where you and your team should focus your efforts.
One last item that Jason highlighted was the ability to tailor your communications to the audience that you’re working with. Because the Marketing Ops team typically owns much of the reporting for the Marketing team, we’re often providing insights and analysis.
Because we like to be thorough and complete, we can sometimes overthink our communications, trying to answer questions and head off objections along with the report.
“I think clear and direct communication is an important skill for an Ops person because they're probably already a little more on the verbose side of things. Learn what's the right level of information to give to somebody, because the thing you’re talking about might not be a high priority to them. Even if it is, there’s probably a crisper way of delivering it,” Jason said.
TIP: When you become a leader, you have to act like a leader. As you move from maker to manager (and beyond), your role changes. Your experience with and expertise in Marketing Ops makes you valuable, but your ability to positively influence and lead your team makes you an impactful leader.
With each career transition, examine how you’re spending your time, and how you communicate. Taking time to get out of the weeds will enable you to begin to look at things with a strategic lens. Focus on a few projects at a time, and help get them through to completion.
Wrapping up
It was great reconnecting with Jason - I was on his team briefly at Workfront and even though we didn’t work together for a long time, I was impressed with how he approached his work and his leadership style. I’ve enjoyed staying connected with him and been impressed with his journey, especially the work he did at Metadata. He put his stamp on the Marketing efforts of that organization for over three years and saw some great successes and achievements.
It’s encouraging to see the success that Jason and others who have come from Operational backgrounds grow into leadership roles. They’ve set an example and proved that it is possible for Operators to move into GTM leadership roles and do the job well.
If you’d like to connect with Jason, you can connect with him in any of the ways below:
Some quotes have been edited for clarity in the written format.