Building Sustainable Marketing Ops
7 Jan 2026 update: watch the recorded conversation here.
I recently joined Alok Jain on Mavler’s Marketing Insider Series to talk about one of my favorite topics: how to build marketing operations that actually work — for the business and for the humans running it.
We covered a lot: data hygiene, migrations, European marketing ops, experimentation, creativity, and my personal favorite thread… how to stay in this career without burning out.
This article is a recap of that conversation, with a few extra reflections now that I’ve had time to let it sink in.
You’re Not a “Ticket Taker” — You’re a System Builder
When I walk into a new organization as a consultant, people often think they’ve hired me to “fix Marketo” or “clean up Salesforce.”
That’s never where I start.
I start with people:
- I go make friends in sales ops, customer ops, product, and data.
- I ask them how the systems are really stitched together.
- I listen for the gaps between what leadership thinks is happening… and what’s actually happening in the tools.
Most early-stage or scaling companies don’t have documentation. That’s not a failure, it’s just a phase. So your first job as a marketing ops person is to rebuild the map of reality by talking to humans, not clicking through menus on your own.
Ops is not about working alone in a swim lane. It’s about holding a shared picture of how things fit together and inviting other people into that picture.
Clean Data Without Slowing Everyone Down
In startups and scale-ups, the accelerator is jammed to the floor. Campaigns are running, people are experimenting, and “data hygiene” often sounds like a luxury.
My approach is simple:
- Protect the point of entry.
Most bad data starts at forms. Are the picklists standardized? Do they map cleanly to the CRM? Can we give marketers freedom inside a defined framework? (“Play with any fields you want, but if you use Country, Industry, Revenue, here’s exactly how that needs to be configured.”) - Stabilize new data first.
Don’t start with giant retroactive cleanups if the house is still on fire. Fix the new data so you’re not adding more chaos every day. - Collaborate on where the cleaning lives.
Not all normalization has to happen in the MAP. Sometimes it’s cleaner (and safer) in the CRM or a dedicated tool. You only learn that by talking to sales ops, data teams, or whoever owns the other pieces.
Data hygiene is not about saying “no” to marketers. It’s about quietly building guardrails so they can move fast without breaking everything.
The Most Underestimated Part of Any Migration
From my experience, the easiest part of a migration is the actual move: exporting, transforming, importing.
The real work is everything that happens before and after:
- Before: deciding what to move, what to leave behind, how to map values when systems disagree (e.g. “US” vs “United States,” “client” vs “customer”).
- During: planning a realistic grey zone where marketers stop using the old system but aren’t fully ramped on the new one yet.
- After: enabling people. Teaching sales how to find their leads again. Rebuilding dashboards. Explaining why the fields are called something different now.
A migration is not just “moving data from A to B.” It’s packing boxes, labeling them, and then unpacking them so people actually know where their stuff went.
If you’re planning a migration, give at least as much attention to communication and enablement as you do to mapping fields. Your future self (and your team) will thank you.
Templates Are a Love Letter to Your Future Self
I joked on the podcast that my main “hack” for speeding up campaign execution is something everyone thinks they’re doing, but very few are doing deeply enough:
Template everything.
And by “everything,” I mean everything from:
- Campaign briefs
- Project management tasks
- Marketo/HubSpot programs
- Email and landing page designs
- Salesforce campaign types and campaign member statuses
- Post-campaign analysis documents
- Reports and dashboards (where you just swap the campaign ID or timeframe)
If 95% of your campaigns follow repeating patterns (and in most companies they do), then your job is to remove as much cognitive load as possible.
Templates don’t make you less strategic. They create the space for strategy, because marketers aren’t burning cycles reinventing the same operational wheel every time.
European Marketing Ops: Full of Possibility
One part of our conversation that surprises people:
I genuinely believe marketing ops in Europe is years behind the US and Canada.
In much of Europe, “marketing operations” isn’t even in the vocabulary yet. Instead, you see:
- CRM Manager
- Lifecycle Manager
- Digital Product Owner
- Growth Marketing Manager
…all doing marketing ops work without naming it.
This creates two realities at once:
- It’s frustrating, because finding a true MOPs role in a European company is still rare.
- It’s exciting, because there is so much foundational work to be done. The “European world is our oyster,” as I joked on the show.
That’s part of why I’m helping lead the European MarketingOps.com community and why we’re planning MOpza Europe 2027 in Barcelona.
We don’t just need events; we need language, identity, and community for the people already doing this work under different titles.
Creativity Belongs in Ops Too
Ops often gets framed as the “boring” side of marketing: logic, process, systems.
But at MOps-Apalooza in 2024 and 2025, some friends and I decided to challenge that with a session called “Throw the Dice.”
We took a classic panel format (four people, four chairs, predetermined questions) and… gamified it:
- We brought a giant inflatable die on stage.
- Each side of the die had a category (career advice, charades, Pictionary, etc.).
- We threw it into the audience, and they chose the category and asked the questions.
Did we share any secrets that have never been said in marketing ops before? I’m not sure, pobably not.
But people remembered it. They laughed. They learned. They saw ops as a space where creativity and play are allowed.
People rarely remember exactly what you said — but they remember how you made them feel.
You can bring that same spirit into your team without a conference stage. Try gamified training. Pictionary with MOPs terms. “Roll the dice” office hours where the questions are random. Make the work more human and a little less heavy.
Let’s Talk About Burnout (and Boundaries)
This is the part of the conversation that matters most to me.
Marketing ops is a high-pressure space. We’re often sitting between sales, marketing, product, and data — expected to translate everything, fix everything, and do it quietly.
I’ve been through burnout. I’ve been laid off. I’ve had to rebuild what work looks like for me.
Here’s what I’m intentional about now:
I design my days around joy, not just output.
As an independent consultant, I block time for:
- Networking with other European MOPs (because community fuels me)
- Learning something new (because curiosity is a big part of why I love this work)
- Being away from screens
In the warmer months, that looks like stepping into my garden in the south of France to pick tomatoes and green beans on my lunch break.
It sounds small, but it’s not. It’s a reminder that I am a human who exists beyond my inbox and project board.
I practice saying “no” — or “not now.”
Burnout is almost impossible to avoid if you never say no.
The way I make “no” easier (especially when in-house) is by having a clear roadmap. When someone comes with an urgent request, I can say: “Here’s what’s already on the roadmap. If this is more important, let’s discuss what we remove or delay.”
It shifts the conversation from personal (“Why won’t you help me?”) to prioritization (“What’s most important for the business right now?”).
I believe asking for help is a strength, not a failure.
If you are already in burnout, you do not have to navigate that alone.
Talk to someone you trust. A colleague, a manager, a mentor, a therapist, a friend. You don’t earn extra points for suffering quietly.
Protecting your mental health is not a “nice to have.” It’s the only way to build a sustainable, long-term career in this space.
A Gentle Challenge for You
If you’ve read this far, here’s my invitation:
Pick one of these to try in the next month:
- Template one more thing so your future self can breathe a little easier.
- Reach out to someone in sales ops, data, or product and start a new collaboration.
- Block one small “joy slot” in your calendar each week, even 30 minutes.
- Say “no” (or “not now”) once, and back it up with your roadmap.
- Add a tiny dose of play to your next enablement session or team meeting.
Marketing ops will always be complex. There will always be migrations, dashboards, campaigns, and “just one quick request.”
But how you move through that world — the boundaries you set, the creativity you allow, the community you build — that’s where your power really lives.
And if you ever need a calm force in your messy stack or someone to remind you that burnout isn’t the price of being good at your job… you know where to find me.
