Podcast: Human-Centered Ops on Ops in Motion

I think it's easier to look back on a career and see all the common threads than to plan a future career. I know that if anyone looked at my experience on LinkedIn, it would look like a wide variety of jobs, industries, and company sizes. The short answer is that I love learning. I love doing new things. The common thread has been the operations-focused work in all of those jobs. Even though some jobs look creative on the outside, the day-to-day work of the jobs that I chose was more operations-focused.

 

For example, I would say my first career was in print graphic design, including a daily newspaper, weekly magazine, a weekly circular coupon insert at a big retail company. It was all fast-paced, high-volume work with deadlines, mailing subscriptions, requiring extensive project management, template creation and use, and other tool efficiencies. I think my first three jobs involved a software migration from Quark to InDesign as the primary daily software. Also, these jobs involved streamlining the approval process and solving problems quickly.

 

So, looking back on it, that is a lot of operations work for somebody with an art degree. Those are skills that translate between careers. Then I was directing photo shoots for those design jobs, which sparked my interest in photography. So, a second career was starting a photography art business. As you know from founding a business, it involves creating many processes, running everything, and doing it all yourself as one person. I really liked learning about business and marketing because those were things I never thought about before. So then I went back to school to get an MBA to learn more about business and about companies larger than one person.

 

I really liked marketing. I thought maybe my third career was marketing, for a little bit. But then I started working at Remotish, a HubSpot operations agency, right when they were getting started. I eventually helped build the business, build the operations foundation, when I learned about this word called operations. I thought that sounded like what I've been doing the whole time. I just didn't know the word.

 

Kawal said that happened with many of us. For example, if you worked on some part of marketing operations but didn't know it fell under the marketing operations umbrella at the beginning. Later, you learned this was all connected.

 

A few years ago, I left that agency to help more people faster, or using one of our favorite words (scale), to scale my efforts helping operations people across many different companies. I've been diving deeper into instructional design to help create better education. I just finished a master's degree in that.

 

I think one more thing I wanted to mention about all those career changes, besides my interest in learning, is that technology has disrupted many of those careers at a faster pace, including print design, photography, and marketing. So I know that's going to keep happening, and it's related to a later topic in our conversation.

 

I would love to hear about your career journey, Kawal. You've worked with some large companies and then co-founded a marketing operations agency. Tell me about your journey.

Kawal said it was nice to work with different organizations on the corporate side, which taught operations at scale. There were very complex processes, multiple stakeholders with differing opinions, and the importance of aligning tools, people, processes, strategy, technology, and everything else. It was a lot to learn, and she really enjoyed it. 

 

"I still remember those experiences, such as when we had a new tool we had to set up (Marketo)... There were stakeholders in different parts of the world, and every region has its own requirements. I was part of the global team. So I had to talk to all the regions to understand what they would like to do, because nobody wants change. Change is not easy. Nobody wants to adopt it, the new tool coming in. New people are coming into the system. All this while the region is managing on its own... So it was very difficult, but there was a lot to learn. I really enjoyed doing that. At the beginning, there was no clarity about who would own which process and how we would move forward with this. But over the period of time, with a lot of discussions, preparing a lot of documents, it actually helps getting into that space where you have different owners for different processes," Kawal said.

 

Kawal discussed how co-founding a marketing agency was a big shift. "Because here you're responsible for everything, end to end. You're the one working, you're the one executing, you're the one sometimes delivering, you're the one talking to the client," she said. Kawal talked about how you have so many things to manage: you'll be the one designing the system, you'll be the one strategizing it, and you'll be the one answering those questions. There are a lot of learning lessons, a lot of things to juggle around, and there are a lot of chances to make those mistakes. You learn from those mistakes.

 

"My perspective really changed in this shift.  In-house, when I was working with those organizations, it was like working on a few processes and I had fewer things to deal with. It was a little easier to manage. There are a lot of challenges when you're working as a founder, and I really enjoy learning those tools and technologies and everything that comes your way: the clarity, the alignment... and supporting the team every day. And of course, meeting with different clients, working with different sorts of clients, that's really interesting," Kawal said.

 

Kawal changed the topic to discuss how many people are asking about the evolution of AI in marketing and RevOps, and how it will add value. Kawal said her agency has adopted it into their processes and asked how AI can make our lives better, and what I think about that.

First, I will just say I don't usually talk about AI, but I answered Kawal's recent survey about how AI will shape B2B marketing. I'll make an exception because I wanted to add some human-centered perspective to these AI predictions. I was asked a similar question at the marketing ops event in person here in San Diego this same week. 

 

The hope is that AI takes on some of that boring, repetitive work or the complex technical work to reduce human error, and, in theory, that will free up operations people's time to do more strategic, higher-value work that achieves business goals. So I guess freeing up that time might be where AI could eventually add value.

 

If ops people are going to be doing this more strategic, impactful work, then communication and change management will be even more important for them to master. Ops people are that glue in between all departments. The people overseeing the architecture of the human work and the AI work together. That is a new layer of alignment, and changes will keep happening faster and faster, as we talked about earlier.

 

One more note: the value of AI lies not in content creation or in spamming people better. Creating more bad content faster is not adding value to the business. I was listening to Kawal's other podcast episodes, and I heard her great answer on Mo's episode about AI amplifying the mess if data and process are a mess.

 

Kawal, you probably see more firsthand use of AI in your agency than I do from secondhand knowledge,  reading, and theory, but where are you seeing AI add value in reality?

 

Kawal said AI can help you surface some patterns when you're working with a client and perform the ground-level analysis to prepare a report for the leadership team. It can give you reports on whether the funnel is leaking, whether there are processes, or whether the data is not syncing well from one tool to another. Those kinds of things can be highlighted by the AI. Also, some of the groundwork, the framework, for the content, and then humans build upon that and use that in a way that resonates with the audience. You cannot use the things just given by AI and then published. But it can give you some guidelines that save you time compared to starting from scratch. Kawal sees the value in how it summarizes and spots issues early on, helping the business or its leaders make better decisions.

Kawal said that in marketing operations, you often do not find the documentation and training materials you need to better understand the processes. There are so many processes and so many things to talk about in this field that when you browse the internet for operations topics, you find things that are either very technical or only have surface-level information. You do not find the things that you need to know to be good at that process, ones that give you confidence. That's the gap Kawal sees between practicality and the educational or documentation that's available.

 

Kawal asked: What is your overall assessment of that? How do you think that having more of those education programs can really help people in this space?

 

I think my overall assessment of the state of operations training and education is that, at the university level, it is still few and far between. There aren't many, if any, classes on digital operations; you see maybe only one standard manufacturing and supply chain class in MBA programs. Thankfully, I've been seeing operations communities trying to fill that gap by creating excellent operations education. It's great to see. It gives more options and more visibility to operations people and benefits operations as a career. So more people choose it intentionally rather than falling into operations after realizing they are already doing this work.

 

I hope the education I create brings visibility to operations. That helps show it's a career path people can follow. And some of the education I create, like the RevOps bootcamp, is free, so that's accessible to people earlier in their career to explore, people changing careers, or career curious people. We don't talk about HubSpot software in that class; it's just about the RevOps foundation: process mapping, project planning, strategy, prioritizing, handling requests...things useful for any job, really, but super important for ops roles. 

 

I also offer classes about process documentation because I saw a gap in operations topics in education, which I think Kawal mentioned, education on topics that are not software-related or sponsored by software companies. Software changes every day, but the skills I like to teach are more evergreen and won't be obsolete anytime soon. So, that's why I want to create more digital operations classes, maybe for universities in the future, to give people exposure to operations earlier in their lives. Even if they don't go into operations jobs themselves, maybe they see the value of operations earlier in their careers. So when they become a leader in a different department, they'll know that operations isn't just software admin or supply chain work.

 

Kawal, since you hire young professionals at your agency, you might have more direct experience with this. Is there anything you would like to add?

Kawal said they hire interns and experienced marketing operations professionals. There's a huge difference and gap because interns don't even know what marketing operations is, or marketing, to be honest. So they have to be taught that marketing encompasses topics such as SEO, SEM, and advertising. So they also do not know about marketing operations. You have to start with those definitions of marketing operations, strategies, and the skills you need. They really need to understand things like why we are doing attribution, what the value is that's going to add, why we are scoring a lead, and what decision-making we can do with that,

 

Then, of course, there are so many different tools. For an intern, it's very difficult to pick and choose which tool to use or which direction to go with it, because there are so many parts to marketing operations. There are no documents, or a good library is not available for many of these tools. Or the education is a very generic overview, but somebody has to understand in detail and connect those dots between process, tech, strategy, business, and all of that. It's too difficult for an intern.

 

So you have to start with those classes with them to give them the basics of what a strategy is, how to align it with a business, how marketing operations fit into that, and what marketing operations does.

 

Kawal said the tools should have more online tutorials or knowledge guides so that anyone who wants to learn them can quickly start, even if they don't have a login. Otherwise, in order to learn, you need to pay for the tool. Not everyone can just pay for it from their pocket and then start learning before they have a job that uses that tool.  So there is this gap. Someone should be able to get these basic credentials or access to learn a couple of things, to just start with a tool.

 

I agree there should be more free learning for software, at least for that first step of a tool for that entry level.

 

Kawal said she remembers working at organizations, and for her new employees, she did some of the training, starting from scratch, the groundwork that they really had no clue about. Kawal discussed how there hasn't been much change in the amount or types of education available, which professionals need to get up to speed on these tools and more.

 

This is Kawal's favorite question across all the episodes: how has the marketing operations function evolved over time, and what do you feel are the long-term career options in this space?

 

I'm not sure I can answer this completely. I know the marketing ops community has reports on the state of marketing ops, which would have more info than I do. One thing to keep in mind when reading those types of surveys is that the participants who answer the survey are the members working in marketing ops. They're not the general public.  I'm not sure if anyone listening has a resource that shows what the general public knows about marketing ops or RevOps? That would be awesome to see. I'm not sure how you would pick those participants for the survey. How would you get those people to answer the survey? As someone who just ran a big research experiment for the degree I just finished, where I had to find participants, that seems difficult.

 

But I'm getting off-topic. My point there was that like 99% of the world probably doesn't know what marketing ops and RevOps are. I know if you go on LinkedIn, it's like an echo chamber, and everybody seems to know. But remember, the LinkedIn algorithm is not the general public. I'm rambling now about research, but the evolution is something I've been thinking about because I've been writing a book about what RevOps is for the past couple of years. I've been very slow, but it's still a relevant question. I've been comparing my research from a few years ago to now, and the fundamentals and foundations of the work are the same. I would say they are even more important now because people can get lost in all the shiny new object distractions of software changes every day. That is a real challenge: people are trying to keep up with all the software changes, which creates stress and urgency. That can make fundamentals like communication less exciting or seem less like a priority than the executive team asking you to use AI without any direction, strategy, or budget.

 

But change is a constant. I think that's the evolution. Hopefully, marketing operations and other kinds of operations will start to get more recognition and respect within companies and industries, and the general public. I hope more companies realize they need it and hire more for it, building enough headcount for ops to be done well. 

Regarding career options, I haven't done research on it recently, but I feel like I've been seeing higher-level operations titles, like more vice presidents.  Again, it might just be what LinkedIn is showing me for my algorithm. It might not be a trend, but I think chief operating officer or chief of staff could be the higher-level operations career paths, depending on company size. 

 

I think a great career path I see more operations people pursuing is fractional work, not just as consultants but also as educators. So that's super exciting to see people offering classes on their own and sharing their knowledge.

 

Kawal, you might know more about this topic. I heard some companies, usually larger ones, have an individual contributor career path so people can keep doing the work they like without managing people. Is that something you see?

 

Kawal said she has seen that as well: a career path for individual contributors in big enterprise organizations, as well as fractional roles, such as a fractional CMO or fractional marketing operations. Marketing operations is part of marketing, and people are learning more about it. I think it keeps all of us excited, and maybe whoever loves technology or loves to align things, strategize, and have those processes, data, and things together would love the career path. I think there are many career options.

 

 

I think that's a great point about the increased number of channels to manage now, internally and to reach the customer, and not just the increased amount of different software used in each company.