In November, I attended and moderated a panel at the MOps-Apalooza conference from the marketingops.com community. This post covers some of the sessions I attended, as summarized for LinkedIn posts and now compiled here for your convenience. The character limit for LinkedIn posts provided a helpful constraint, keeping the summaries concise. A second post will follow with the second half of the sessions I watched, so you won't need to scroll for an hour in one post!
See the LinkedIn post here.
Mike Simmons presented this workshop for Day 1: Camp MOPZA. This was the first time I met him and his wife, Jennifer, in person, though we've been connected online for a while, including a talk they invited me to do for their Leader Lab community.
What are the desired next steps
When there is misalignment, think about your visions of self:
How do you see them?
How do they see you?
How do you see you?
How do they see themselves?
Where is the alignment, where can you agree?
To check alignment in meetings, say: “So we’re on the same page, I'm going to reiterate.”
Say it another way, and rephrase it so they don’t see it as an attack.
“I’m interpreting that as…”
“My memory is bad, so I’ll summarize, tell me it’s what you meant, or correct me.”
Be mindful of the timing of WHEN communication happens.
Does it need to be said?
By me?
Right now?
Problem-solving frameworks:
5 whys to target the root cause.
Some people jump from ‘what’ to ‘how’ – this creates lots of risks.
What is the problem
Who has the problem
Why is it important to solve
How
Use this tool in conversations to solve problems.
Problem-solving like this can be a team-building exercise.
If you are a leader asking your team for something, preface it with:
“Don’t assume I know what you’re already working on.”
“Don't assume I want you to drop everything to work on this.”
When there is a problem, such as a lack of clarity on goals or urgency, talk about the business and don’t make it personal about them or yourself.
Talk about it as an organization’s problem, not an ops team problem.
Trade ‘needs’ with them: What you can do for them, what they can do for you?
You can disagree, but still commit to doing something to move forward.
Make commitments of who will do what by when.
Thank you, Mike!
Some themes were reinforced later in the keynote, Mirror Mirror.
Melissa McCready taught this workshop at Camp MOPZA.
GTM (go-to-market) mission:
Bridging the operational gap between sales, marketing, and customer success with an actionable, repeatable, measurable GTM framework that scales with the end in mind.
One team, one goal, with shared metrics & a regular cadence of communication.
Exercise: Identify 3 shared metrics to own together.
Building your GTM ops playbook:
Gap analysis
Definitions and processes:
ICP (ideal client profile) development & segmentation
Lead management & scoring
Campaign planning & execution
Sales process design
Handoff & SLA (service level agreement) management
Pipeline management & forecasting
Revenue attribution & reporting
Performance measurement & KPIs (key performance indicators)
Enablement & training
Budgeting & resource allocation
Data management & governance
Tech stack administration
Playbook development
Post-mortem & continuous improvement
RASCI modeling
RASCI stands for responsible, accountable, supported, consulted, informed.
Having this model documented makes GTM operations run smoother by defining who’s driving, who’s helping, and who needs to know, so nothing falls through the cracks.
Eliminates role confusion
Improves accountability
Aligns cross-functional teams
Streamlines decision-making
Scales easily
Strengthens governance
A gap analysis identifies the difference between the current state and the desired future state, then creates an action plan to bridge that gap. It helps prioritize actions to improve performance, optimize resources, & achieve organizational goals.
Enablement & communication:
Project charters
Centers of excellence
Project management
Ongoing training and communication
Clients now want to eliminate this and “just roll it out,” so everyone is expected to take care of training themselves. This is not a good plan.
We need to be documenting at a deeper level for AI governance.
Melissa's prediction: In the next 12 months, we'll need governance for AI processes for regulatory audits.
What drives GTM success:
Dependent upon team alignment and change management. Change management is the #1 thing that will kill projects over anything else
Know where you are headed and ensure it's clear to all who are involved
Be clear and consistent on team goals, objectives, roles, and responsibilities
Manage projects like a product
Measure 3 times, cut once
Deliver a regular cadence of communication across different internal channels
Recognize people and their accomplishments
Top 10 GTM tactics:
short-form video dominance
AI-powered personalization
niche influencer marketing
interactive, immersive content
community-led growth
purpose-driven and sustainable messaging
first-party data and privacy-centric marketing
brand and performance balance
content repurposing and distribution strategy
event-led GTM campaigns
Thank you, Melissa, for the shoutouts about documentation! 😊
At MOpsApalooza, Marketing Ops Community leaders Mike Rizzo and Audrey Harze gave the opening remarks with a theme of MOps (marketing operations) Reloaded, like the Matrix Reloaded movie.
We’re at a turning point.
AI is not an experiment; it’s an expectation.
But how SHOULD we use it responsibly?
Act 1: Welcome to the system
Slow down to see the system, code, & how to make it work.
AI without MOps is chaos.
AI with MOps can scale.
We're being asked to implement AI with no direction from executives.
Hype is everywhere, but adoption is messy.
More than seeing tools, we need to see the entire system.
Companies are reacting, not leading.
Without leadership, AI takes over like Agent Smith.
Without governance, the systems start to run the company instead of the company running the systems.
But AI isn’t the villain; the lack of leadership is.
Act 2: Seeing the System
Zooming out to influence strategy.
Zooming in to make it scale.
AI tools are coming down from the peak hype cycle of inflated expectations to the trough of disillusionment.
Zoom out by remembering the tech adoption chasm, the journey from hype to habit.
How do we get there?
By mapping it.
In every new tech wave, there is a gap/chasm between innovators and others.
Marketing ops bridges that gap.
Turning potential into process.
Turning hype into habit where measurable value lives.
Act 3: The weight of connection
Every bridge has 2 connections to balance, distribute the pressure, and hold the weight.
MOps is that bridge, connecting the business vision with the capabilities of technology.
We’re carrying and distributing the weight of people, systems, and processes that keep the company flowing.
MOps makes what leadership imagines possible, so you can cross the chasm and reach the next stage or new lands.
You’re designing how it all works.
Success isn’t measured by pipeline anymore; it's measured by progress.
We’re not support.
We’re architects of scale.
We’re not a revenue team.
We’re an infrastructure team that enables revenue at scale.
We’re not GTM engineers.
We’re GTM architects.
Every engineer needs an architect.
Act 4: You are the one(s)
We’ve seen this martech movie before; this is the sequel.
Companies buy first and plan later.
It’s what gave birth to MOps.
We’re at the same crossroads.
We can design what comes next.
Executives need people who understand systems end-to-end.
People who have seen martech explode over the years.
You are the best person to prove the tech stack can achieve ROI (return on investment).
Run the stack like a product.
MOps is the leadership companies need to write that next chapter.
Act 4.4: The human experience
AI can’t see around corners.
Only people can.
AI trains on public info.
It sees success stories.
It doesn’t see what didn’t work, the trial and error.
Only humans can apply it with integrity, nuance, and purpose.
AI doesn't change the game.
MOps does.
We don't adopt the future.
We design it.
By building the bridge that every business needs.
The opening keynote on Monday was given by Mike Simmons of Catalyst.
If you’re looking for leadership, start with a mirror.
Mindset = Attitude + belief + clarity of definition
Attitude: leaders build leaders, and leadership begins with self.
Clarity of definition: the ability to move forward.
Learn, think, and act to help the self, team, and organization move forward.
The purpose of a process is to achieve an outcome.
Most people have too many tools and overemphasize tools.
Mindset is greater than skillset, which is greater than toolset. Mindset > skillset > toolset
We forget this and look for tools first as the answer.
We put the tools in front of the team and expect them to perform, but this only complicates things.
Systems are comprised of processes, people, and tools.
Systems can start to grow and compound, and people don't know where they are, where they fit, and what’s next.
They reach a point where they have lots of data but are starved for insights and perspective.
PTSD = process, tools, systems, data
We create PTSD.
The answer is not adding more, it’s less.
Reduction, simplifying, eliminating, to accelerate.
The answer is when we come together across teams and see the entire picture since we’re not operating inside the frame.
There are things said, things heard, and things remembered.
Not many are all three.
Communication can help to shift perspective and create leverage to move the world.
4 ways of seeing:
How does the
Bear see the bear?
Wolf see the wolf?
Bear see the wolf?
Wolf see the bear?
What do people in your family think you do in marketing ops?
What do people in your company think you do?
4 steps to better meetings
A call plan involves:
Who
Anticipate their objectives, then ask the person you’re meeting: what do you want to get done here in this meeting?
Back into our objectives
End meeting
3 steps to aligned problem-solving:
What is the problem? Define it.
Who is involved? Who has the problem, is impacted by the problem, and cares about the people impacted?
Why is it a problem?
You need to figure all that out before thinking of HOW to solve it.
Don’t jump from what to how.
You need all the information to avoid risk.
Don’t attempt to solve a problem without complete information.
Ask yourself what you’re missing.
We are better together.
As an aligned group, we can do more.
ROLFE reflective model:
What? (job to be done)
So what?
Now what?
Ask the questions in the above order to figure out if data, process, or tools EARN the right to be part of your system.
You can’t reflect on what you’re going to do.
You have to reflect on what’s already been done.
Take action first, then reflect.
Thank you, Mike!
Darrell Alfonso opened Tuesday's sessions at MOpsApalooza with a quote from William Gibson:
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Example: There are already self-driving cars, but only in a few cities.
How do we make sure we’re on the right side of that distribution?
Marketing ops is at an inflection point.
3 forces shaping the next decade:
AI everywhere
Data warehouses - native and composable.
Intelligent Experiences. Arm your go-to-market teams with insights, similar to how a consumer budgeting app pings updates about how 20% of your monthly budget is left, so maybe don’t eat dinners out this week.
Frameworks for success:
The new marketing ops maturity model.
In higher maturities, 75% of activities are repeatable, and 25% are experiments. In lower maturity teams, the percentages are flipped, which is not scalable.
Darrell shared 8 must-have reports.
Think about the data you need to start your week, make decisions, and provide insights.
Updated marketing ops team structure with AI ops.
Sometimes the ideal structure looks different from a real structure. When you work with nice people, you want to keep them around even if they don’t fit into the ideal roles.
Darrell showed a map of marketing enablement and PMO (project management office).
The best tech won’t get you across the finish line.
How you work with people gets you across the finish line.
It’s a big win to get project managers on your team since everything is a project, and you need to know who is going to do what by when.
Having project management and budgeting inside marketing ops makes the team harder to get rid of.
AI in marketing ops:
Darrell shared practical AI use cases in categories of: human agent only, AI agent only, hybrid human and AI agent, and AI agent ecosystems.
Scaling for efficiency:
Tech stacks vary at different stages of companies.
Reasons:
volume of users
stricter security
enterprise workflow capabilities - more approvals, more permissions
money/budget
The new marketing chief operating officer:
In the movie The Devil Wears Prada, the assistant is terrible at first but improves her skills and wardrobe and learns to predict what her boss wants and to take on impossible tasks.
She became the trusted advisor and was then in the inner circle.
For marketing ops, we’re the COO of the marketing team.
We are the inner circle.
Why study leadership?
Darrell used to think tech skills were most important, but he was not seen as a leader and was passed up for a promotion. And then he discovered that studying to improve leadership skills makes you better at everything, as leadership is all about people and communication.
You don’t have to be a people manager to be a leader.
Alignment is a job: Getting people to see we all want the same things.
Call to action:
Experiment boldly
Grow your circle
Keep marketing human
Together, these make resilient marketing ops leaders.
Thank you, Darrell!
Marian - Gabriel Hobinc spoke at MOpsApalooza and started by stating that 2025 is the year of moving faster & building smarter, but quality is at stake.
20-25% of all marketing campaigns have a mistake.
broken registration process
accidental test emails
missing unsubscribe link
This is why a good QA process is important.
It helps you meet established quality standards AND meet customer expectations.
Mistakes aren’t just embarrassing.
They lead to a lack of trust from customers.
Quality protects revenue.
Quality preserves brand trust.
Quality accelerates delivery at scale.
Quality is a cultural signal.
Framework: The triple constraint or iron triangle.
Cost, time, and scope are three sides of a triangle, three constraints.
Quality is in the middle.
A change in one side/constraint affects the other two, requiring trade-offs.
At scale, quality is often the first to suffer.
We want to think outside the box, or outside the triangle.
Quality should be around the outside of the triangle, in a circle, instead of inside the triangle.
We can then flex scope, time, and resources, without bending or breaking the quality circle.
Quality becomes the guardrails.
How to create a QA culture:
Assign ownership of quality & performance
Empower specialists to take pride in their work
Foster accountability
Practice continuous improvement
Their team's tactics:
Designed end-to-end campaign lifecycle with QA as a separate process
Wrote down what good looks like in QA scoring & evaluation
Made the QA process simple & automated
Defined reporting & maintenance
4 steps to define a QA process:
Create bi-directional communication between the campaign creation process and QA process
Define roles and responsibilities - the QA people are the same people who build the campaign. Change management is huge since this seems like a lot more tasks. The burden is higher at the beginning, before you can automate some tasks.
Create a checklist of tasks that need to be verified. Build the QA tasks into your project management system as task list templates in each type of project (dynamic), so the tasks can easily be created and assigned to each person, with communication & approval in one place.
Define and track QA Process KPIs
QA reporting:
Collect real-time insights on QA scores per assignee.
Create reports to show average scores per week/ month.
What’s next for their team:
Updating scoring and categories, to define complexity and see the weak points of campaign production process.
Automate as many QA tasks as possible.
Increase AI usage to better forecast and see trends.
You will always make mistakes, but QA ensures you don’t make the same mistake more than once.
Thank you, Marian!
Courtney McAra and Julz James discussed how the biggest gap in career paths lies between the Sr. manager and director levels. Courtney and Julz interviewed marketing ops leaders with director and VP titles to understand how to fix this gap.
In the job level matrix, there are 6 title/role levels:
Specialist
Manager
Sr. Manager
Director
VP
CMO
And 4 categories of responsibilities:
Leadership & people
Strategic Thinking
Operational Excellence
Communication & Influence
Specialist = execution of tasks
Manager = managing a team, still executing
Sr. manager = cross-functional strategy work, some execution
Director= “shouldn’t” be executing, managing managers
VP = collaborative
3 big rocks to accomplish:
Genuine curiosity in the entire business.
Ask business questions, and people start thinking of you as a business leader, not just the Marketo girl. Get invited to participate in annual planning.
Career growth through curiosity and adaptability:
Use curiosity as a catalyst. Wanting to know how things work leads to accelerated growth.
Non-linear growth. It may not be climbing the ladder.
Experimentation mindset.
Adaptability across different company sizes, in both structured and fast-paced environments.
Building relationships and navigating transitions:
Be transparent and build trust. Open communication helps in role shifts.
Leadership relationships matter — mentors, sponsors, and supportive managers ease transitions.
Timing and succession. Knowing when to move and preparing backfills.
Never burn bridges.
Organizational awareness. Understanding headcount, company timing, and personal brand plays a role in how effectively one can move laterally.
Expanding skillsets:
‘Sales is Project Management with Jazz Handsʼ - Abbey Solnet
Moving between departments creates hybrid perspectives of the full revenue cycle and connects teams, tools, and strategies seamlessly
Proactive career management and managing up:
Speak up to your boss to get promoted and mentioned.
Your boss’s peers should know you have a desire to move up.
Career Growth considerations:
Personal choice - Life Happens
Chasing or Not Chasing Titles and Promotions - Both are Valid
Family Setup - single, partner, kids, parents?
Geographic location - commute?
Annual Career Review
Thank you, Courtney and Julz!
Britney Young and Ellie Cary presented a Clueless movie-themed session about ideal customer profiles.
Like the movie plot about going to a party in the valley to meet your ideal match, we want to find our Ideal Customer, so we get into the car (meetings) with those we think are our ideal customers. If we discover they are not the right one, they leave us stranded on the side of a road. You didn’t engage the right profiles, they marked you as spam, and you’re out of budget.
Finding the right fit is complicated.
Decision dynamics are changing, 11+ people buying groups
Buying cycles 4-6 months longer
53% of interactions & decisions made before seller contact
Similar to the matchmaking in Clueless, you need to match the ICP fit.
Persona check: Time to dust it off and refresh.
The difference between buyer persona and ICP:
ICP:
Defines the type of organization that’s the best fit for your product/service
Firmographic + technographic traits
Used for targeting, segmentation, and planning
Guides who to sell to
Buyer persona:
Describes the individuals who influence or make the buying decision
Motivations, goals, and behaviors
Used for messaging, content strategy, sales enablement
Guides how to sell and communicate
ICP is the neighborhood you sell in, and the buyer personas are the people living in the houses.
ICP benefits are improvements to:
Efficiency
Win Rates
Retention
Alignment
Common pitfalls:
Defined Too Broadly
Treated as One-Time Project
Built in a Marketing Silo
Forgot to define who is NOT a fit
Not connected to revenue outcomes
Static accounts chosen for you may NOT be the right fit.
Data is disconnected
Visibility lags
Consensus got harder
AI has raised the bar for speed
ICPs are evolving for real-time buying groups.
You need a dynamic ICP that shifts in real time.
Makeover montage: How do you refine your ICP?
Rethink ICPs from laminated (unchanging) to living.
Assign Ownership
Build with Cross-Functional Input
Create a Roadmap
Launch & Enablement
Measure Success
Iterate with Feedback Loops
How to Transition:
Capture->compare ->curate->circulate
Document in a Central, Accessible Hub
Start with Data, Not Opinions
Use AI and Analytics to Keep It Current
Create Feedback Loops
Establish an Update Cadence
Tie ICP to Measurable Outcomes
How does ICP fit into Customer Journey Mapping?
Defines who the journey is being mapped for
Helps refine which stages of the journey matter most
Guides what messages, offers, and experiences should exist at each stage
Ensures you invest in the channels your buyers actually use
Remember the Paul Rudd principle: Always relevant, always improving, and impossible to dislike.
An ICP adoption path from crawl, walk, run, and fly was shown, explaining that human oversight is necessary, and to start small!
Thanks, Ellie and Britney!
See the LinkedIn post here.
Cory Huff presented the one AI session I attended to support San Diego Marketing Ops Community chapter leaders! 🙂
What is an AI agent?
A tool that acts autonomously once you set it up.
It needs a specific task and outcome.
Example: An agent to search 100s of daily Instagram DMs for testimonials.
The agent logs into Instagram & finds phrases like ‘I love,’ ‘product name,’ or ‘thank you.’ Then it pastes those into a Google sheet with the account handle.
This used to take a human 1 hour a day.
It took 2 hours to set up the agent.
More agent examples:
Data Analyst that helps you write Python
Email Builder that integrates with automation platform, adds copy & images.
Data cleaning agent that normalizes customer data
Agent connected to Sharepoint – “go find all docs about X and summarize them”
Agent building tools:
Chat GPT or Agent Mode
User-facing chatbots
Back-end agents with complex integrations
Another example: Coaching/therapy prep agent
Four agents doing discrete tasks used together instead of one agent doing 4 things.
Understands the question to direct to the right next agent
Self-rescue system: Agent walks through 4-step conversation to prep for a difficult conversation
What am I feeling? A mini agent trained to help users understand how they’re feeling
When the workflow ends, subscribe the user to an email list integrated with marketing automation platform
Agent Stages
Goal: Build the next mini-agent
Steps:
Define what the overall agent or agent cluster will do.
Communicate this test with marketing / IT/ in-house legal team
Build the MVP for the first mini-agent
Validate the outputs
Refine prompts, integrations, and access
Tell the agent to leave a part blank if there is no answer so it doesn’t invent information. Never ask an agent to make up what the answer should be. Give it a picklist to choose from.
Audience idea: Agent for quality checking (QA) emails
Design prompt
Ask AI to ‘help me design a prompt for an AI agent that performs email QA, I’m uploading a knowledge document that will define all the things that need to be checked.’
Copy the output (prompt template) into a Word doc and edit to improve it.
Put that prompt into a workflow creator that creates chatbots that integrate with LLMs, which processes info back and forth to LLMs to write the answers.
Add human check-in steps to make sure the agent can proceed to the next step without inventing information or confusion.
After you’re confident in the workflow, the human check in can be removed, maybe after 100 times running the workflow and iterating to fix issues during that time.
Chat GPT agent mode records videos of what the agent did so you can see where mistakes were made and where to tweak it.
To decide on a good first agent to build, look at what you are doing in your job that is repetitive and boring. How can you automate that?
Thank you, Cory!
Kyle Edmund Hayes spoke at MopsApalooza about marketing ops working with partnerships.
Definitions:
Direct - Revenue generated through your sales team.
Indirect - Revenue generated through 3rd parties who influence/close the deal.
Partner Ops - Structures & runs systems, processes and data that enable partners to generate revenue with you.
Partner Programs - Rules, benefits & incentives that define how partners make money with you.
RevOps - The team that aligns sales, marketing, CS & Channel around one revenue engine.
Channel Ecosystem - External companies you co-sell, co-market or co-deliver with to reach and serve customers at scale. (A new term for partners)
Partner Ops → Runs the machinery for indirect sellers
Marketing Ops → Runs the machinery for marketing to generate demand for direct selling
The Uncomfortable Truth that nobody wants to say out loud:
Operations functions, systems, & data are disconnected from each other
Marketing data is not being used in decision-making
MOps functions are not at the strategy table
KPIs in sales are not discussed with MOps
Partner source is not being captured
All that data is not flowing through your Marketing Ops engine.
You can't MEASURE what you can't SEE 👀
Choose Your Own Attribution Adventure:
Every department gives different stories about the same deal.
This isn't a people problem, it's a visibility problem.
Create revenue evidence rather than anecdotes.
Marketing To them
Enable & communicate to partners so they’re prepared
Marketing With them
Co-fund & co-run campaigns together with pre-set success criteria
Marketing Through them
Give partners assets & funds to execute
Co-Sell with them
Work the opportunity together using partner intel & rules of engagement
Integrating PartnerOps Without Chaos
Step 1:
Connect with Partner Ops
→ Map where partner motions touch accounts & opportunities
→ Clarify who owns the source of truth for each motion
Step 2
Establish shared definitions
→ Agree on what counts as partner-sourced vs partner-influenced
→ Document the rules that govern attribution
Step 3
Connect the data
→ Bind systems with shared keys and campaign IDs
→ Surface attribution in dashboards RevOps already uses for forecasting, the same pipeline reporting as everything else.
Step 4
Align incentives
→ Tie reporting, planning, and compensation to the same defined rules
Partner motions are measured against revenue metrics, not engagement metrics.
If you take only ONE action:
Go to your Partner Ops Person and ask how they measure success.
What metrics define partner-sourced and partner-influenced revenue?
How is ecosystem attribution tracked?
Which partners are actually moving pipeline?
How is co-marketing impact proven?
If you don’t know how Partner Ops are tracking success you can’t align marketing to those targets or create the tracking to support them.
Thank you, Kyle!
Read Part 2 here. (coming soon!)
Learn more about MOps-Apalooza here.
In honor of the new Brigerton episodes releasing this week, here's a photo with EMMIE Collective's Lady Effington at the conference: