The Rise of Marketing Ops from Execution to Strategy with Mike Rizzo

Marketing operations has transformed from a behind-the-scenes support function into a strategic growth engine for modern organizations over the past two decades. This roundtable explores three major shifts driving this evolution: technology moving from explosion to consolidation, data capabilities expanding from reporting to decision-making, and governance advancing from speed-focused to scalability with compliance. Learn how marketing operations professionals become the backbone of data integrity, cross-functional collaboration, and alignment between marketing, sales, and RevOps, connecting tools, teams, and insights that drive measurable impact and scalable growth.
 

Mike Rizzo

He is the founder of MarketingOps.com, a community of thousands of marketing operations professionals. He started his career in marketing automation and operations at B2B SaaS companies and created the community in 2016-2017 to help marketing ops professionals connect, learn, and grow. He also founded Mopspalooza, an annual event dedicated to the marketing operations profession.

Transcript

Kawal: Welcome to the next episode of our roundtable, Ops in motion.
Kawal: I am Kawal, co-founder and CEO at Digital DI Consultants, and in this episode, we are guiding our conversations around marketing operations.
Kawal: We will chat about how marketing professionals work tirelessly to improve an organization’s operational efficiency.
Kawal: And marketing operational professionals play a vital role in marketing effectiveness and scalability.
Kawal: They bring data, team, technology, and processes to ensure everything runs smoothly and delivers measurable impact.
Kawal: Today I’m joined by Mike Rizzo.
Kawal: I don’t think you need an introduction.
Kawal: He’s one of the known faces in B2B marketing and especially for what he does in the marketing operation world.
Kawal: Hey Mike, good morning.
Kawal: And thank you for joining us Today.
Mike: Yeah, no, thank you so much for having me join.
Mike: It’s humbling for you to say that my face is recognizable.
Mike: I do my best to stay outside of the posts and all the things that I, that I still have to do, I think, You know, that the whole point of the community though, at the end of the day is, is to bring all of the outstanding expertise together from, from those practitioners out there, and I’m just happy to be involved.
Mike: So, yeah, glad to be here though.
Kawal: Thank you.
Kawal: I think I’m not being humble; you’re being humble by saying that.
Kawal: So, yes.
Kawal: I think you begin your career at, like, you know, a sports goods company as an account manager, and then transition to marketing, and now you are heading one of the marketing communities in the B2B world.
Kawal: Mike, I would love to hear about your career path.
Kawal: How did you begin?
Kawal: What was your journey?
Kawal: I mean, really exciting to know about it.
Mike: Sure, sure, yeah, happy to share more.
Mike: Believe it or not, I knew I wanted to be in marketing from a very young age.
Mike: I was probably, I believe, 6 or 7 at the time.
Mike: So yeah, it’s, it’s a bit of a strange story in that regard, because I don’t think kids that young think about those things.
Mike: I don’t think, but I had an idea for a commercial. My idea for this commercial involved sort of two brands: Pepsi, the drink Pepsi, and the most popular video game at the time, which was the James Bond 007 game.
Mike: So, someone described to me that my idea for this commercial was marketing, and so, lo and behold, I was like, Oh, I’m going to be a marketer one day.
Mike: And so I really, I really did go from once I started my professional career, I was Fortunate enough to pick up a role for the very first time.
Mike: As a result of being in that account manager role at Chick’s Sporting Goods.
Mike: I met one of my customers.
Mike: They offered me an opportunity to work for them at what is now known as a SaaS company. I ended up helping them actually do a couple of migrations between CRMs and marketing automation platforms within the short amount of time that I was there. Inbound at the time was on the rise in terms of that sort of go-to-market motion.
Mike: And before I started at this organization, I actually got a really healthy respect for marketing on the digital side because I started in ad tech.
Mike: And so I, I was able to take what I learned from the ad tech side, you know, we do a bunch of display ads all over the web.
Mike: I was learning a little bit about code and how to format those for displaying on our ad servers, and I took that respect.
Mike: And desire to learn more code in this B2B SaaS company, and I helped them effectively figure out how to send a newsletter.
Mike: That was my charter, so to speak, and the rest sort of grew from there.
Mike: I fell in love with the inbound motion.
Mike: I fell in love with marketing automation and CRMs and operations in general, given the two migrations that I had to do while I was there, and I just forged like full steam into what actually became known as the marketing operations role, typically at B2B sort of SaaS companies and startups like earlier stage companies.
Mike: so that’s that’s kind of the brief history of me and how I got into marketing ops in general as a category.
Kawal: OK, nice.
Kawal: That’s, ‘s really lovely to know about your love for marketing that you had at the age of 6.
Kawal: Kids do not think about having a career in anything at that age.
Kawal: That’s really interesting.
Mike: Yeah, I can’t pretend like I was really thinking about my career.
Mike: I just had an idea for a commercial, and someone told me that that was marketing, so it’s not like I really knew that I wanted to be a marketer, but as I think back on my life, I must have sort of gotten my affinity for marketing basically at that point.
Mike: So anyway, sorry.
Kawal: That’s fine.
Kawal: So lovely.
Kawal: Thanks, Mike, for, I mean, nice, and thank you.
Kawal: And I love to, I mean, I loved hearing from you the way you spoke about your childhood and your, you know, career transition and all that.
Kawal: That’s, ‘s really lovely.
Kawal: So Mike, at what point, you feel that marketing operation really started becoming its own role, rather than just a collection of extra tasks on someone’s plate, you know.
Kawal: How it was earlier, like, one of the tasks was given, you have to create the report, you have to send this email out, you have to, you know, create the list.
Kawal: Was it a moment when you felt that companies began recognizing mops as a dedicated function, with some influence or real influence?
Kawal: So what, how do you think the role of marketing operations started?
Kawal: So what’s, what was your view on that?
Mike: Yeah, so, Marketing operations by practice, by title, and, and sort of functional area really has been around for about, we’re coming up probably on about 20 years, I would say in formality.
Mike: The start of marketing operations as a practice, I think, really a lot of the credit goes back to sort of like Eloqua.
Mike: And really, Marquette
Mike: When Marquette got started in 2006, that was a platform that is definitely more structurally organized in terms of campaign infrastructure and repeatable programming, tokens and all of those things, and You know, obviously over time it added more features, but to use it, it wasn’t necessarily built for like what I would refer to as the marketer, right, someone who’s just sort of a generalist marketer, and this was the era of marketing automation, right?
Mike: And, and they were making waves alongside some of the other players.
Mike: What ended up happening is marketers were being sort of given the task, similar to me, right, like figure out how to send a weekly newsletter, etc.
Mike: Basically, marketing automation was on the rise, and what needed to happen rapidly was setting up the infrastructure to be able to do marketing automation in any scalable way.
Mike: And you know, 20 years later, we’re still talking about a lot of the same problems, but a lot of us figured out how to do, do all that stuff.
Mike: So I would say, you know, it.
Mike: Really started and was amplified.
Mike: Truly marketing operations, I think, was owned from a topic and sort of category perspective by the Marketo Nation and like all their super users and stuff like that.
Mike: And after it got acquired by Adobe, we started to see a bit of a shift in the market in terms of who was talking about marketing ops and that RevOps was on the rise and all these things, so.
Mike: Yeah, I would say that’s when it really started to become more formalized, but, you know, I don’t know, like, what about you?
Mike: So you’ve been in marketing, I don’t know, for quite some time now, right?
Mike: I imagine.
Mike: I’m sure you’ll be able to share a little bit of your history.
Mike: I’m sorry that I don’t know it by heart, but like, what evolution have you seen in like the past 7 or 8 years, so, you know, roughly half of that time, like, I don’t know, what’s your perspective on it?
Kawal: Sure, thanks for asking the question.
Kawal: I would say, like, I’m always biased, and I feel marketing operation professionals are the people whose role is like, you know, adding a lot of impact and creating revenue in any of the organizations, so.
Kawal: We are like, you know, and when I look back, like a decade ago, when I started in marketing operations, the role seems to be very different from what it is Today.
Kawal: The marketing operation role was like a support function, so you heavily rely on just sending campaigns, right?
Kawal: You’re like, we have this bunch of campaigns that need to go out next month.
Kawal: So let’s plan it out, have this list.
Kawal: These are the audiences that it has to go and maybe just think of scoring models and just build something into it.
Kawal: So those things.
Kawal: was the thing that, you know, we used to do.
Kawal: We had tools like MailChimp, so they were, they kind of provided the platform to do that was sufficient, but then it was not giving, you know, an entire holistic, you know, process that I think operations is that’s being done Today in the marketing operations worldwide.
Kawal: So I would say that this role has matured to a way that we have become like a strategic pillar of marketing.
Kawal: We are no longer like people who just push the button to send the email out to push the button to, you know, list import it and clean those lists, you know, working on the Google Sheets to get this on the drive and, you know, push it through this tool to that tool.
Kawal: So that was like happening, and there was alignment.
Kawal: So we have like evolved in a way that we have brought alignment.
Kawal: to different teams, we have built them together, so marketing, sales and customer success can see the same information across different tools, you know, at the same point in time.
Kawal: Earlier, it was not possible.
Kawal: So the syncing has an issue, and integration was an issue.
Kawal: We had to build so many, sometimes I have, you know, I have started learning code.
Kawal: I’m not from a coding background, but I had to do that because that was a requirement of the.
Kawal: Especially rendering of emails, like, it was not very easy to fix the rendering of emails.
Kawal: You just have to go, and you have to write some kind of code.
Kawal: So yeah, having said that, I have seen three kinds of, you know, significant shift that I would say like technology or explosion to consolidation.
Kawal: So, like, I would say early on, when I started, I was juggling with different tools, like 15 or 20 of them together.
Kawal: I feel like, you know, you’re.
Kawal: Trying to tape them together with a duct tape and put them together.
Kawal: You’re trying to put them together.
Kawal: They’re not together, so that was a specific problem that we used to have so many tools, but they are not well integrated.
Kawal: They’re not synced together.
Kawal: But Today, when we talk to any C-level or any executives, they talk about consolidating technology, we talk about reducing costs, and we don’t, you know, talk about driving efficiency, but that was not the case earlier.
Kawal: We were just trying to add a tool on top of another tool to get things done for, to solve one specific problem, which is, which has now evolved.
Kawal: So I would say that that really adds a lot of value to the financial and strategic decision maker also.
Kawal: So MOPs has also become a, is also playing a role there because it’s, it’s helping them reduce the cost and making things better.
Kawal: And now there’s more focus on integration.
Kawal: consolidation and getting more value from the stack, just like, you know, not adding more and more tools on top of each other.
Kawal: So the second shift, I would say, is like data and insights to decision-making powers.
Kawal: So, Today we are expected to surface insights.
Kawal: So, you know, everyone is expecting some insights out of the report.
Kawal: We can add some value to the strategic decisions or even in the forecasting, right?
Kawal: Or leadership can sit together and understand what is happening right now and how they would like to proceed in the future.
Kawal: So that’s, that’s a good part that a mops is playing.
Kawal: I used to spend a lot of time working on Excel, getting those reports together and putting them together to just show what happened last month.
Kawal: I really remember those days, but those days are gone.
Kawal: I’m pleased about it now.
Kawal: I’m expecting, expected to provide insights like why this campaign or why this source generated the most leads, and we are able to do that and what it means for the pipeline and what we should do next.
Kawal: So this shift is also good because it’s providing or shaping marketing operations, you know, being perceived like over the years, and now coming to governance and efficiency to scale, like with the rise of privacy regulations.
Kawal: AI coming in, global teams, governance processes, and scalability have become just as important as campaign speed.
Kawal: Like it’s not just running the campaign.
Kawal: We have to have these things in place for the campaign to go out, right?
Kawal: So this is the kind of structure of infrastructure that we have.
Kawal: So, mops professionals have become the guardians of, you know, guardians of data integrity.
Kawal: They are looking at compliance.
Kawal: Making sure the operation is excellent.
Kawal: I mean, you name it, and we do it right.
Kawal: Over the years, we have been taking on and on and on, and we have been thriving through it.
Kawal: So, in short, I would say the most significant evolution is that marketing operations have gone from back-end executors to becoming business-critical strategists.
Kawal: I think this shift is going to accelerate more with AI and the automation shaping the next wave.
Kawal: So, really excited for that.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, I totally agree.
Mike: I mean, I’m sure you’ve heard me talk before about some of these things as well, you know, to, to just sort of like pull on the thread a little bit further, you know, what I would interpret what you’re saying, Kawal, is you’re really a steward.
Mike: Of translating the unique go-to-market motion of any business, right?
Mike: So like every business has their own hypothesis of how they wants to go to market, inbound, outbound, paid, organic, a mix of all of those things, events, webinars, podcasting, you name it, and everybody’s hypothesis is different, and so you need to adapt those go-to-market motions, right?
Mike: Those you sort of have to first and foremost understand them, what their sort of core values are and how an organization might want to track the success of those things.
Mike: And then you need to create an environment that translates that unique sort of go-to-market hypothesis to the art of the possible with technology, right, and create a buyer’s journey.
Mike: That ultimately no one else really focuses on, right?
Mike: It it’s, it’s genuinely.
Mike: A unique role in that we are trying to identify visitors and intent, and signal.
Mike: We’re trying to do all of that before I even know your name, right?
Mike: We use UTM parameters to track efforts and campaigns and watch what’s working or what’s not working, and so we are looking before you even enter the proverbial funnel, you’re looking for signal, and we are looking at the end of that funnel when you become a customer, and when you try to buy again or you decide to upgrade or whatever it is.
Mike: We’re looking at the entirety of that journey, and really, no other role does that.
Mike: But not only to your point, not only do we have to think about that, you know, understanding that entire funnel from before we knew you two, you became a customer who hopefully bought again, we’re also responsible for the safe and compliant manner in which we need to do that, right?
Mike: So we have to have opt-ins and GDPR and all of those things.
Mike: So that means data integrity and cookies and all of those things, and then on top of all of that, there’s your internal stakeholders, which are also your customers, right?
Mike: And some people don’t like the term internal customer.
Mike: You can call it whatever you’d like, but at the end of the day, those are all your users and your product is made up of many products.
Mike: Thankfully, they are being consolidated to your point, right?
Mike: And what we’re working hard on at the marketingOps.com community is what does it mean to be a certified professional in this field, and how do you get recognized for your strategic value.
Mike: To your point, well, I agree with you, we are being seen as strategic leaders, and we’re translating that unique language to the art of the possible technology in what I would call the go-to-market tech stack and the go-to-market product, right?
Mike: And so really we’re becoming what we hope will be the certified GTMPM, the go-to-market product manager, and that’s what we’re working hard on at marketingOps.com.
Mike: I love everything you just said.
Mike: said that is definitely in line with, it’s just like another vote of confidence and it encourages me, because you’re a member of our community, obviously, encourages me that we get to keep sort of forging a path together and helping educate the, the organizations out there on the criticality of having someone in this role inside of their organization or a team for that matter, right, hiring an agency or consultant.
Mike: Sometimes it’s better to do that.
Mike: But, OK, so we’ve talked about your history.
Mike: I love it.
Mike: You have these like shifts, these 3 pills.
Mike: I just wanted you because I get to talk about this all the time, but could you maybe highlight the value that MOPs is bringing to the table Today?
Mike: Like, what do you think are some of the more poignant things that are happening?
Kawal: Sure, absolutely.
Kawal: I would love to talk about it.
Kawal: So, for me, the value of marketing operations really comes alive when I look back at moments where marketing MOPs have entirely changed the track of how a team was functioning or working.
Kawal: They have really changed it totally.
Kawal: So I can think of examples like the market.
Kawal: Imagine marketing and the sales team are always, you know, fighting or juggling over lead quality.
Kawal: Marketing feels that they don’t get the credit.
Kawal: Sales says that, OK, we are driving the entire revenue.
Kawal: You’re not adding any value there.
Kawal: So as a mops consultant, one can really rearchitect the lead scoring model, or they can, you know, clean up the routing process, and this can actually help in conversion rates to be better, and these two teams can be aligned together so they.
Kawal: Follow one definition of qualified.
Kawal: So that’s the value MOPs bring in by turning this friction into flow.
Kawal: I mean, it’s not as easy as I said it would be, but it can definitely be done.
Kawal: And another example I can think of is an organization that is paying for 20+ tools or 50+ different tools.
Kawal: Maybe not all of them are utilized effectively.
Kawal: So by running an audit, we can see where we can cut redundancies and where we can consolidate licenses.
Kawal: So then organizations.
Kawal: You can save a lot of money by, you know, doing these changes in there.
Kawal: But beyond cost saving, it also gives them a cleaner and more integrated system that the team can trust.
Kawal: That’s also important for the team.
Kawal: And one more, leadership can think of how important, I mean, they can understand what pipeline, a specific campaign is really generating, right?
Kawal: So, and what is the forecast, or why is the forecast off?
Kawal: But thanks to the processes and the reporting framework that MOPs own Today, one can.
Kawal: Just tell about these values or these metrics, but it can also show or, I mean, show like or how the future is shaped based on these strategies, and that’s when you realize that MOPs isn’t just keeping the lights on, but they are enabling, you know, smarter decisions across the businesses.
Kawal: So, just to consolidate, I would say that MOPs can connect the dots between tools, data, teams, and processes, and so the rest of the organization can actually focus on growth.
Kawal: And without these foundations, I think, even the best marketing ideas can’t scale.
Kawal: So we need to do that.
Kawal: So, so we spoke a lot about marketing operation roles, profile, careers, and, you know, different shifts and how Mops is evolving, what is the growth evolution and how it is adding value to the organization.
Kawal: I’m very curious, you know, like, what inspired you to start a community dedicated to marketing professional operations, right?
Kawal: Because I have not seen many.
Kawal: Of these titles or roles have a community, but it’s really nice to have that.
Kawal: Thanks for, you know, starting this community because it’s, it’s really, I mean, proud to say that we have a community for marketing operation professions, right?
Kawal: And we are heading to the events, we are networking with the people, we are, you know, writing blogs for it.
Kawal: There’s so much that we can do, and it really adds a lot of value being, OK, I am from marketing operations, right?
Kawal: So, I thought I could ask you this question Today since you are here in front of me.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, totally.
Mike: No, thank you for asking.
Mike: Honestly, the community started as a very selfish endeavor.
Mike: The challenge often with being in a smaller organization is that you’re, you’re usually a team of one when it comes to marketing operations, so.
Mike: It was about 2016, 2017.
Mike: Slack was still pretty new to everybody at that point, and our organization was still struggling with whether we were going to move to HipChat or one of the other tools.
Mike: and so along the way, we discovered Slack was kind of an up and up and comer.
Mike: And I, I realized that you could open a public channel to really anybody, right?
Mike: And, and so I said, hey, as I ventured off, I was at a B2B.
Mike: Startup, I was running field events and marketing operations, so I was effectively doing what you typically see, which is wearing multiple hats, demand gen, marketing ops, all the things, and I would get an opportunity to meet folks like yourself at these conferences, and I would say, hey, if you want to stay in touch, like I started this little thing on this thing called Slack, right?
Mike: And I wrote a blog post about it.
Mike: People started to find that blog post in 2019, and they started to ask me very regularly to join.
Mike: So there was a shift in the market.
Mike: I think people were tired of feeling alone.
Mike: They were trying to figure out how to go through marketing ops and navigate this world of the technology explosion that we were going through, and we were just stumbling and fumbling our way through all of these things and figuring it out, right?
Mike: And so as people endeavoured to join, I said, Hey, I’m a marketing automation nerd.
Mike: I’m going to figure out how to streamline this process a little bit, and I did that.
Mike: In 2019 and as more people joined, it really just turned into a labor of love.
Mike: And so none, none of it was planned.
Mike: I didn’t say, Hey, I’m going to do this, and here’s my vision for what it’s all going to be, but it started to build on itself.
Mike: Questions were being asked in the community, and it gave us directive and direction, right around that 2021 time frame, 2020, 2021, that community-led motion was really popular.
Mike: Popular.
Mike: I actually had been asked to come back to that SaaS company where I was running field events and marketing ops, and I was asked to help them build their customer advisory board in their community.
Mike: And so I was very community-minded, and so here I was building this community of practice, marketing operations, marketingops.com, and I was building this customer community for this software company, and eventually I was given the chance to focus a bigger chunk of my time on marketing ops.
Mike: What is now known as marketingops.com, and I’m really like thrilled that we all get to do this together, as I sort of said at the top of the call, you know, I’m here to help amplify the sort of voices that are doing all the incredible work these days.
Mike: I don’t get to practice marketing ops quite as much as I used to, but that’s OK because we’re no longer alone, right?
Mike: I like to say you can kind of go from a team of one or just a few to a team of thousands because we have thousands of people in our community that you can.
Mike: Immediately engage with and say, Hey, here’s what I’m thinking about,, or Today we saw a post, I’m looking to get a new webinar platform to integrate with Marketo.
Mike: What, what’s the latest and greatest, right?
Mike: And there’s a series of people talking about it, so it feels good to be able to do that and not really feel so alone anymore.
Mike: So yeah, I was, I was inspired by being alone, I guess.
Kawal: Yeah, I mean, that’s really true, and it actually resonates with what I faced, to be honest.
Kawal: When I started my career with Marketo, there were significantly fewer documentation videos available online, so you had to just practice on the sandbox and just, you know, do whatever you had to do.
Kawal: And there was no one to, you know, ask to understand until you have a, you know, a colleague of your own or your friends who is working or doing the same stuff, what you’re doing, right?
Kawal: So it was like always trial and error.
Kawal: I mean, sometimes you just get stuck.
Kawal: There was a small kind of thing, like some people are good at something and some are good at something else.
Kawal: So if we are all joined together, like connected, like a community, you can ask these questions.
Kawal: So definitely you get answers, you have different options, different ways to try things.
Kawal: earlier it was like a lot of time.
Kawal: I think individuals are spending a lot of time on their systems, you know, to solve this on their own.
Kawal: I mean, we were able to solve, but we could have taken like one day to solve one piece or one puzzle.
Kawal: But then if we all are.
Kawal: Connected, it takes less time to, you know, solve all of these things.
Kawal: So yes, I really see the importance of having a community.
Kawal: That’s really, really nice.
Kawal: So, so that, I mean, it’s really exciting to have this community, and I see about MOps-Apalooza, right?
Kawal: So I have seen it, through virtual.
Kawal: I haven’t attended that.
Kawal: So I would be running it for the first time this year.
Kawal: Do you mind telling us more about MOps-Apalooza and how it has evolved over the years, how it has grown, grown over the years, right?
Kawal: And how is it helping the marketing operations profession?
Kawal: I mean, I know some of it, but I think it was a good one to highlight more.
Mike: Sure, MOps-Apalooza was born out of the community.
Mike: So when we talk about community-led, like I mentioned a moment ago, we really do build based on what the community is asking for.
Mike: What happened with MOps-Apalooza is that Adobe acquired the Marketo Nation and the Marketo product.
Mike: Many of those Marketo champions who loved to share their expertise were no longer able to do so, at least not in the sort of quantity of speaking opportunities that they used to have.
Mike: And so many of those champions came to me and said, Would it be possible to host an event that gives us some of the places to speak and share our knowledge?
Mike: And, my natural response, you know, now is obviously yes, I would love to do that, but we will be.
Mike: An agnostic event, so we won’t just be focused on one platform like Marquette or HubSpot or any of the others.
Mike: Well, we’ll go broadly to help talk about the profession and the career and support each other.
Mike: And so MOps-Apalooza was born.
Mike: We did the events just two years ago for the first time.
Mike: We had 3.
Mike: 50 people show up, in the very first year, in person.
Mike: we had an online audience as well, so we topped about 650 total people between the two sort of groups, right, the online and the in-person, and, and then if you fast forward to the next year, we actually had 437 people come last year to the event in person, similar numbers to the online experience, and, and this year, To be perfectly honest with you, the thing that I’ve learned about planning events is that it’s a, it’s a total black box.
Mike: You really have no idea what’s happening until you get there.
Mike: I can tell you that we have 250 people already registered to go, but I have no idea if that means we’re going to be at 350 at the end or 550 because, unfortunately, everybody likes to wait until the last, like, you know, 4 weeks to buy their tickets, but Things have been growing.
Mike: It’s been an excellent movement in general for the community.
Mike: It’s a nice manifestation to bring people together and share their knowledge, reconnect with old friends and make some new friends, but ultimately it is really just about continuing to push the career forward, right, the vocation of marketing operations forward in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re being sold products.
Mike: Whole time we hold very true to our values, unlike other events in our space that we’re all very used to, right?
Mike: Inbound, Dreamforce, you name it, even Adobe Summit, those events exist for one reason, really, and it’s to help sell software, and they, and they should exist for that, right?
Mike: It’s a software company that’s putting them on, and their goal should be to try to drive adoption of their products and ideally new sales as well.
Mike: And in our case, we don’t exist for that, and so we hold to those values as best as we possibly can.
Mike: We don’t sell any stage time, and we are really a community-led event, and we let our speakers get on stage and share their knowledge.
Mike: They can talk about product if they want, but generally speaking, they stay pretty far away from specific tools so that we can really help the broader audience learn what it takes to be successful in this career.
Mike: It’s been an absolute pleasure to build it so far.
Mike: I will, I will say on the other side of it, 2.5 years later and 3 years later, I will continue to reiterate that it is both the best and worst decision I’ve ever made in my life.
Mike: I learned so much.
Mike: I’ve, I’ve had a lot of fun building it, and it is absolutely one of the hardest.
Mike: Things that I’ve ever done, but both, both like from a stress and personal, you know, perspective, but also like from a financial perspective, it’s incredibly challenging to host an event the way that we do.
Mike: And for those of you watching or listening to this, we put on, it’s not just like some, you know, pipes with black curtains, like it’s a full-scale event.
Mike: It feels proud to have talked about it in the way that when people showed up to our first year, they went, Whoa, I didn’t, I like I thought this was going to be a conference, but I didn’t realize it was going to be like this, right?
Mike: And that made me feel excellent and happy.
Mike: Our audience deserves that.
Mike: It’s a labor of love, and we have been trying our best to continue to grow it and no matter what, as we continue to build, on MOps-Apalooza and our local.
Mike: Chapters and some of our workshops, whether online or in person, the whole point is that we’re just trying to make sure we cater to the needs of the community and deliver on the value of education and connection, right?
Mike: And so whether it’s MOps-Apalooza or any of those other things, that’s what we’re here for.
Kawal: Well, friendly and sweet.
Kawal: I mean, I really love the way you described it, it’s really lovely, yes, I agree.
Kawal: I mean, it’s really doing the work that the motive, the motive of the MOps-Apalooza event, I think it’s actually doing it, so that’s really great.
Kawal: So, having said that, I think we are at the end of our, you know, episode.
Kawal: So I think we had a nice, insightful and great conversation.
Kawal: What really stood out to me in this discussion is how far marketing operations have come from being drivers of growth.
Kawal: Alignment and efficiency and your stories about community building and empowering mops professionals really show how important it is for us to learn from each other in this field to keep evolving and to everyone listening, whether you are deep marketing operations or just starting to explore it, I hope this conversation gives you a sense of value mops bring onto the table and maybe even some.
Kawal: Inspiration to think about how you’re going to apply these lessons in your organization.
Kawal: And to our audience, stay tuned for the next episode of Ops in Motion.
Kawal: Until then, keep experimenting, keep optimizing, and keep moving ops forward.
Kawal: And Mike, thank you for sharing your journey, your perspective and how marketing operations have evolved and the impact that they continue to make across the B2B world.
Kawal: Thank you.
Mike: Thank you, Kawal.