For a long time, I thought being “strategic” in Marketing Ops meant knowing every tool inside-out.

I thought strategy was knowing every Marketo quirk, every lead lifecycle nuance, every conditional flow, every endpoint.
The more technical I became, the more “strategic” people would see me.

I was wrong.

That realization didn’t come in a classroom or a certification.

It came the moment I was hired as the first and only Marketing Ops person at a company that had never had MOPs before.

There was no analyst to bounce ideas off. No RevOps partner to triage the mess. No inherited process to follow.

Suddenly, I was both the architect and the factory worker. The person who had to make the system work and explain to everyone why the system mattered.

There’s nothing like being the only ops person in the room to teach you what “strategy” really is.

Strategy is not intelligence — it’s perspective

I once worked at a company as one person in a 12-person MOPs org.
That role was purely strategic, not technical. I barely touched Marketo.

And at first, I hated that.

I wanted to be “hands-on.” I wanted to solve every workflow and fix every routing edge case. I wanted to be the person who could say “I built this.”

What I didn’t realize at that time was: being strategic sometimes means building nothing at all.
It means understanding why something should happen, who it serves, what it costs, how it impacts pipeline, and how to help others make decisions around it.

As I grew in my career, I started moving up the ladder. I became a team lead.
And suddenly strategy wasn’t theoretical — it was survival.

I couldn’t just know the technical details. I had to explain to my team why our roadmap was shifting to support business goals, and then explain to leadership why we had to stick to the roadmap to actually deliver pipeline and smooth sales handoffs.

That tension — that duality — is where strategy is born.

The moment I realized I wasn’t speaking leadership’s language

This one still makes me cringe.

As a solo MOPs person, I tried to convince the CEO of a ~120-person startup that we needed one MAP over another.

So I did what every technical operator does when they’re trying to be impressive:
I made a long presentation about features, capabilities, campaign automation, efficiencies — every nerdy detail I was proud of.

I didn’t even make it to slide 3.

He interrupted me and said: “Skip the tech. Tell me how this helps the business.”

And I couldn’t.

Because at that moment, the only story I knew how to tell was: Look at all the cool things the tool can do.

He didn’t care. He cared about where we were trying to go, and whether the system would help us get there faster.

I left that meeting feeling embarrassed.
But it was the moment I realized:

Being strategic has nothing to do with features.
It has everything to do with consequences.

That lesson has shaped every decision since.

The questions I ask now that I never asked before

These are not complicated questions. They are deceptively simple — but they are strategic:

Who will notice if we don’t do this?
Who will notice if we do?

This forces prioritization. It exposes vanity projects. It eliminates “nice to have” and reveals actual impact.

How much time will this save you?

If you can’t quantify the benefit, it’s not a business decision — it’s a hobby.

But is that what matters?

This one is my favorite. Ops people fall in love with elegant solutions. Leadership falls in love with profit, velocity, and predictability. They don’t always align. “Beautiful” doesn’t always matter.

What I wish senior leaders understood about MOps strategy

Marketing Ops isn’t about tools — it’s about relationships.
Everyone likes to reference the classic Venn diagram of people / process / technology, but what most leaders miss is the circle around it:

Communication.

That’s the part Marketing Ops lives in every day.

We sit between sales, product, marketing, data, customer success, and legal.
We translate ambition into architecture.
We take a founder’s big idea and turn it into a sequence of workflows, dependencies, approvals, and handoffs.
We’re the connective tissue between “What we want to do” and “What will actually work.”

Without communication, none of the other three matter:

• Technology without communication becomes a graveyard of unused features and broken integrations.

• Process without communication becomes bureaucracy people work around.

• People without communication burn out, duplicate work, or point in different directions.

Marketing Ops is the function that prevents that chaos from turning into company culture.

We’re not the “automation team.” We are the people who keep the business coherent when everything else is pulling it apart. And that’s why leadership needs to understand us. Not because we know the tools better than anyone else. But because we know how to make the tools serve the people, the processes, and the outcomes the business actually cares about.

Strategy doesn’t begin in a dashboard

It begins with a small, uncomfortable shift:
Stop asking “What can we build?” and start asking “What deserves to be built?”

That’s the lens I try to pass on to every mentee — not how to impress people with automation, but how to build systems that actually move the business forward.

Because anyone can touch the tools.
A strategist understands why.