I’m one MOPs person who doesn’t get stuck in the middle anymore

By Shae McLaughlin

I’m a Marketing Operations Manager or a MOPs person. I describe my role as creating beauty from chaos in a marketing organization. To be honest, there’s far less chaos where I work now, at Stensul, the maker of the collaborative email and landing page creation platform, than at my previous company.

At my former job, much of the chaos was due to what I’ll call creative tension that formed between content creators and demand generators. The former wanted to change an idea that had already made its way into a template that I spent a lot of time creating. The latter would push back hard, insisting there was no time for changes, no matter how much cooler this refinement to the original idea might seem.

As you can imagine, or maybe experienced yourself, I was caught in the middle, feeling quite a bit of pressure. Instead of it being a thing of beauty, the situation turned chaotic. More often than not, I had to completely rework the template so the new creative vision could come to life in very little time.

That happened all too frequently. It did not make me happy. I could not harness the best possible marketing technology in the best possible way so everyone could more easily produce campaigns that exceeded expectations.

One of the joys I have as a MOPs manager is determining if the technology in a martech stack is the best blend and is optimized to deliver outstanding value. I love finding underutilized elements and then making small changes that can quickly make a big impact.

My idea of a great day at work is one I don’t spend entirely under the hood of a martech stack. While I am a logical, left-brain type who believes quality time includes reading Marketo product documents, working with a marketing team is very enjoyable. It’s fun to help people bring their ideas to life, bringing into play the technology I have at my disposal. 

It’s the pressure that comes from being caught in the creative desires of the content creators and the time-driven demand generators that are decidedly unenjoyable.

Wanting all team members to feel good about what we’re trying to do often makes me feel like I’m a bottleneck to the process. Instead of having time to get the most out of our martech stack, I spend hours tweaking templates and sometimes doing much more than minor adjustments.

I imagine you also feel this pressure as a MOPs person. Production-related activities eat up 90% of the time. In most organizations, checking, fixing, or building email templates often falls to MOPs. It’s thought we’re the ones who know how to do that.

As a result, I cannot do what I’m best at, making the most of the technology I have to help my marketing colleagues launch campaigns that will perform outstandingly well.

Let me say, and without hesitation, I am glad to be at Stensul. The people are great, and so is the product. The Stensul Email Creation Platform lets non-technical people quickly create high-quality, always on-brand emails. Programmable guardrails that protect against using the wrong fonts, images, headlines, and copy that are too long, even colors, make all that possible. If you can drag and drop, you can create an email in Stensul, drawing from pre-made templates, permission-based modules, and a built-in image library. 

Whenever a Stensul marketer or events manager tells me they’re going to build an email, I think back to my last job, and the time an email was this close to being sent. Someone insisted one last tweak just had to be made. I cannot recall if it was a content or demand gen person, but the reason given was weak, at best. Still, it necessitated recreating the entire email. Not much beauty, lots of chaos.

Here at Stensul, I am entirely out of email creation. Only until an email is ultimately approved and ready for deployment, do I touch it. I still deal with the operational pieces of our Marketo platform. However, I never feel like I’m caught in the middle when handling those tasks. I am happy to do them. At Stensul, I don’t spend an entire day building emails and then editing them again and again until they’re finally right; others create the emails. I get to do what a MOPs person should be focused on, getting the most from our martech stack to help our email campaigns perform.