The Engine Builder: Using Marketing Operations as Strategic Advantage

In this episode of The Metamorphosis Moment, Nancie McDonnell Dougherty sits down with Kristin O'Boyle, VP of Marketing Operations for Pharmacy Services at CVS Health, to explore how marketing operations turns strategy into real world impact.

Drawing on her engineering background and experience in highly regulated industries, Kristin shares why marketing operations is far more than a support function. It is the infrastructure that allows strategy to become action.

She also shares practical insight on managing complex technology stacks, encouraging experimentation and creating cultures where teams are empowered to test, learn and improve.

Kristen explores the shift from operator to strategist, the leadership mindset required to guide teams through rapid technological change and why curiosity is essential as AI continues to reshape the marketing landscape.

If you lead in a complex environment where precision, trust and accountability matter, this conversation offers a grounded look at the systems that make modern marketing possible.

Curious how strategy, story and proof come together in your own organization? At Noetic Consultants, we help leaders align strategy, story and proof. 

Learn more at ⁠noeticconsultants.com⁠.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

You really have to have an appreciation for why the regulations exist. And so I once fielded a question from somebody who said something to the effect of like, how do you get around regulations? And I was like, You don't. You embrace the people in your organization who are on those front lines, who are making sure that we're compliant with all the different laws.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Welcome to the Metamorphosis Moment, where marketing transformation takes flight. Hear from Noetic's brightest minds and the industry's game changers as we envision the future of marketing, focusing on the strategies and tools that truly make brands strong and leaders impactful. We're serving up actionable insights that'll have you rethinking everything you thought you knew about marketing and leadership. In times of change, old playbooks just won't work. Learn how to gain new wings and fly. This is the Metamorphosis moment where change isn't just embraced, it's the main event.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

As VP of Marketing Operations for the Pharmacy Services portion of CVS Health, Chris leads the infrastructure that connects millions of Americans to the medications and the care they need. She manages the Martech stack, she manages building out the systems that turn data into action, and she creates the operational backbone that lets marketing scale. Her work touches everything from campaign execution to technology roadmaps to team capability building. Chris brings an engineering mindset to marketing. She studied mechanical engineering at Cornell. She earned an MBA in strategic management and is Six Sigma Greenbelt certified. She knows agile methodology, design thinking, and how to build systems that work under pressure. She has spent her career proving that operations is where competitive advantage actually lies. In this episode, Chris is sharing why marketing operations has become one of the most strategic roles in modern marketing, how to build infrastructure that accelerates rather than constrains, and why the best operators often become the best strategists. Many marketing leaders don't think about operations all that much until something goes wrong. Perhaps the email doesn't send, the campaign doesn't track properly, the data doesn't connect. But the best leaders actually know that operations, when done well, is truly a competitive advantage. Chris O'Boyle is VP of Marketing Operations for Pharmacy Services at CVS Health, where she builds the infrastructure that connects millions of patients to the medications and care they need. She manages the Martech stack, develops technology roadmaps, and leads teams that make marketing scalable and measurable. Her engineering background from Cornell and her Six Sigma certification means she approaches marketing with precision and strategic vision. What stands out about Chris is how she's elevated operations from support function to strategic driver. She knows that great operators make great strategists because they understand what's actually possible. I personally met Chris at a conference just a few months ago and had the chance to watch her operate on a panel. And what impressed me was her thoughtful leadership and her passion and truly her dedication to being a lifelong learner. Chris has the courage to say, I don't know when appropriate, which in my experience is rare at senior levels. And I was also struck by how she collaborates with her Martech lead. And that partnership is worth exploring. We're going to get into that a bit here because it says a lot about how she builds teams and about how she shares her leadership. Chris, I am so happy to have you here. Welcome.

SPEAKER_03 4:17

Hi, Nancy. I'm so excited to be here today. I'm really looking forward to talking about how marketing operations really is a strategic partner. And when the foundation is built right, marketing operations really becomes the engine that powers real impact for all of our audiences.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Yeah, really well said. And I think this is something that a lot of senior leaders really need to understand better. I have to, though, start by like asking you like degree in mechanical engineering and then move into marketing. Like tell us about that. That's a that's a slightly unusual career path. So we'd just love to have our listeners understand that a little bit more.

SPEAKER_03 4:58

Yeah, I'm still trying to explain this to my parents. They still don't understand how I the path that I've taken in my career. But my path from mechanical engineering to marketing might seem unconventional. But in retrospect, for me, it was quite a logical path because it was always rooted in problem solving and a passion for building things that work well. So my engineering education taught me how to break down complex challenges, how to design systems, how to think both in terms of precision and balance that with possibility. And really, the timing of my education was quite fortuitous. I graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering just as the internet was transforming how we connect, how we communicate, how we do business. And suddenly marketing wasn't just about big campaigns and broad messaging, it became about data and personalization and real-time engagement. The internet made it possible to measure impact and test ideas very quickly and reach people in ways that we'd never imagined possible before. So, really, for someone with an engineering mindset, it was a dream come true because marketing became a field where you could experiment and you could optimize and you can build systems that scaled.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Yeah. So yeah, it really, you know, it I think it's hard for many to imagine those who were not in their careers, you know, prior to the internet. Like just I think it's just hard to even put words to it that can help people imagine. But it was a very different discipline prior to that time. And it really opened up, as you well described, it just opened up a whole other range, particularly in far more measurable channels. And you are leading marketing operations at CVS, and this is a heavily regulated, you know, data intense kind of work where, you know, execution done well and accurately really matters. I mean, people are relying on it, right? They're dependent on upon it for proper access to care. So I want to start here. Like, what does marketing operations actually do for those who may be murky on that? And why do you think that so many marketing leaders and and perhaps others underestimate how strategic it is? And then as a follow-on, I want to talk a little bit about like how you manage that further in what is a highly regulated and need for accuracy kind of industry.

SPEAKER_03 7:33

Yeah, it's a great place to start. Marketing operations, which is was a term that didn't exist 10 or 15 years ago, but it really encompasses the backbone of everything that happens in marketing. It's the discipline that connects the strategy to the actual execution, whether it's publishing a web page or launching a test in any of the digital channels. It brings strategy to life and makes sure that the ideas that our marketing strategists have actually reach the people that they're relevant for. So it's really all about building and managing systems, the technologies, and those processes that allow us to deliver, as we've all heard before, the right message at the right time to the right person, all while staying fully compliant with regulations and ensuring that we're protecting our sensitive data.

SPEAKER_01 8:31

Yeah, which is which is no small thing. And it is such a critical, critical area. Oftentimes we are having conversation and doing work with senior marketing leaders that are having a lot of trouble making that connection between strategy and execution. You have like big strategic things happening over here and then a lot of doing happening over here, and that connection can oftentimes be, you know, quite a quite a struggle. So when you think about marketing operations and and how it gets viewed or construed or perhaps even misunderstood, what have you done to elevate the function and and help people see it as an essential to strategy, not sort of just a quote unquote support function? I mean, I don't know if if within your current role that's even been a challenge, but I think generally that's a challenge in the industry.

SPEAKER_03 9:27

No, I I think that's right. A lot of people think that marketing operations is just keeping the trains running. So making sure that emails go out and campaigns launch on time. But I have found that it can be and should be so much more than that. When it's done well, marketing operations is a strategic driver because it enables innovation, it supports measurement and optimization, and it creates the infrastructure for creativity to really flourish. So we really balance speed with precision and innovation with compliance. It's you know, it's definitely a push-pull.

SPEAKER_02 10:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:05

I think that the fastest way to elevate marketing operations is to make it clear that operations really is where strategy comes to life. It's the function where ideas are transformed into reliably delivered, measurable experiences for all audiences.

SPEAKER_01 10:25

Yeah, super, super well said. And speaking of that, that push-pull, and I think this is even getting more complex, you know, by the moment right now, that Martech stack. So, you know, people talk about it all the time, and there's more tools that get added, tools that perhaps don't talk to one another, more complexity happening. How do you decide, you know, what to add, what to cut, what to actually use? Like what overall approach have you used to managing the stack, knowing that there's always, you know, there's this constant evolution happening.

SPEAKER_03 11:02

Yeah, uh the stack is always under pressure to do more. Our job is to make it do the right things and have those things done reliably. So I try to use a disciplined approach to how we assess and manage our stack, and it really starts with outcomes and we're back to ensuring that the effort across the organization ties back to a business objective. So we need to make sure that we fully understand the problem that we're looking to solve and the outcome that we're looking to achieve and the result that we need to deliver. And if a tool can't be traced to one of those specific objectives, or a KPI in our plan, or a strategic imperative, you know, it gets left on the cutting room floor. Shiny objects can be a huge distraction. And there are a lot of solutions in the Martech space that solve problems, but not necessarily problems that our organization, our business unit, our our clients, our audiences actually have.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

Yeah, or that are you know highest priority, right? And and tying to strategic objectives. And it it's so true because I mean, like tech is tech is amazing. Tech can do so many things, and it can do this and it can do that. And sometimes that G Wiz factor can just get in the way of but but what is it that we need it to do?

SPEAKER_03 12:30

That's right. That's right. Yeah, we we really have to force the technology to to be assessed through a litmus test, back to you know, maybe some engineering terms, back to some chemistry terms. And you know, the litmus test is what is this, what is this tool going to deliver? And then of course, there's always the assessment of well, how much is it going to cost? Because those tools aren't free, and they're certainly not an expensive.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

They're not free. No, none of them. So we really have to do the first 30 days just to suck you in.

SPEAKER_03 13:00

Right, right. We're very cautious of those. But I'm I'm very business case oriented. My team earlier this year went through a financial acumen class. So we had the marketing operators, so to speak, really understand the financial dynamics of the business in which we operate. So they understand how we make money, they understand how expenses are assessed, and they understand the types of things that our leaders, our executive leaders, are under pressure to deliver. So that when we assess new technologies or even new marketing strategies, we put them through that litmus test of is it going to deliver incremental revenue? Is it gonna reduce expense? Is it aligned to some long-term strategic initiative that may not have immediate revenue increasing or expense reduction targets? But is this something that we really need to be doing? And we are brutal with our willingness to pull out our Sharpie and strike it through and say, this is not something we're gonna do. We've concluded that this is gonna be, you know, this is a shiny object that could be a distraction test.

SPEAKER_01 14:12

Yeah, I love that. And I love that that you had everybody go through that financial acumen because there is oftentimes this gap in knowledge and therefore insight and frankly context around, you know, why are we making the decisions that we're making? And then when you do pull out that Sharpie, people can really understand, like more fully understand where it's coming from. And it doesn't feel just like a random choice that's being made from on high. That's right. I I also wonder in the push-pull of it all, like let's talk for a minute about being agile and and what that really means in a highly compliant environment. I mean, you know, healthcare is highly regulated. There's a lot of other industries that have their own version of that. A lot of, you know, a lot of rules to follow. You can't just like move fast and break things. How do you build agility into an environment where you know compliance and precision are not up for debate?

SPEAKER_03 15:14

Yeah, yeah, I love this. I I joined the healthcare industry after spending over 20 years in financial services.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

So And that's that's a very free-flowing, no, no regulations there.

SPEAKER_03 15:26

Right, exactly. But I I know I will have to say the the team members that we have found are the most successful within our space are those who have an appreciation of how regulated we are, and they have to have an appreciation for risk management and ensuring that all the things that we do as a marketing operations shop are are assessed in terms of risk now. It's called risk management, not risk elimination. Right.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

And so for people who who haven't had that in their background, I have a I have a close contact right now who has moved into a highly regulated industry and hasn't been in that world before. And it it's quite a it's it's quite a shock to the system.

unknown 16:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:12

Yes, yes. You you really have to have an appreciation for why the regulations exist. Yeah. And so I once fielded a question from somebody who said something to the effect of like, how do you get around those regulations? And I was like, you don't, you embrace the people in your organization who are on those front lines, who are making sure that we're compliant with all the different laws. I mean, there's state laws, federal laws. There's it's a very complicated landscape out there. And I have a tremendous amount of respect for the folks in our compliance and our legal organizations who are consistently looking out for our best interest and helping us understand what the risks are of the work that we're trying to do. And there's always a healthy amount of tension between what we would like to do, which typically, you know, pulls too far, maybe in one direction, and then we bring in those legal and those compliance partners to help us understand why the things that we want to do might be adding risk that we don't want to take on. So, you know, I think that the first, first and foremost, you have to appreciate the fact that if you operate in a highly regulated industry, there's an excellent reason why you have legal and compliance teams to keep the organization compliant with the rules and the regulations of that particular industry.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

Yeah. That said, I found storytelling can help in that space. Not that you want to ever do fear-mongering, but like when you're trying to help people understand what the risk really looks like. Sometimes when you share some anecdotes, like real anecdotes of what can happen or what has happened to others, you know, people start to see the light.

SPEAKER_03 17:58

Yes. And I've been around long enough that things have happened. Yeah. It's how I ended up in one of my first roles in marketing operations. There was uh an organization that had a little bit of a mini disaster with emails being targeted to the wrong audience, and that created some regulatory issues because the message in that email was highly irrelevant and a regulator might say harmful to those audiences. And it was a very simple, easy mistake to make. But sometimes it takes one of those disasters to for an organization to realize that process matters and you have to have an appropriate risk mindset and really evaluate how you do things to ensure that you have the right controls in place. So sometimes agile, you know, you have to lower you have to make the A lowercase because sometimes I think the capital A, agile methodologies are challenging for an organization if you don't have members from Legal and members come from compliance sitting in your pod, which are often difficult to do. So you kind of have to mash your gears, like your agile gear like runs really fast and small, and your waterfall gear, which is how the rest of your business operates, is like larger and slow. And they just they don't really match up really well. The gears grind when you try to match up those things. So you kind of do the best you can to sit in the middle and appreciate all the good things that come with the agile methodology while acknowledging that not all business units are going to sign on to that methodology. Kind of have to make it work.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

I love that visual of it. And Ann spoken like a true mechanical engineer with it as well. But yeah, no, it makes sense. And and that, you know, what you what you expect around the agility portion of it, but but that also can lead to a great deal of creative, you know, creativity in and of itself, right? Okay, so this is, you know, this is what we're trying to accomplish. This is the outcome we're trying to get to. What creative problem solving do we have to try to get to that while not flouting the regulatory needs? Yeah. And the answer sometimes would be like we can't, but but sometimes it's just getting a little bit more creative. I I did want to ask you as well, the other thing that you know we hear so often around Martech and and even just technology adoption in general, is this struggle, as it can be, particularly culturally, around adoption. So there's there's the need to have compliance in how people are using, but also just the sheer motivation and being equipped to use. I'm curious if you can talk to us a little bit about the challenges in that space of you know, getting teams to adopt new tools or processes, like what you've seen in that space that's been difficult and then how you have helped solve for it.

SPEAKER_03 21:04

Yeah, this this hits home. What I will say is that change is hard. And so solid change management approaches are like they go a very long way. And uh sometimes change is hard not because people aren't willing to change, but because people are set in their ways, and you know, there are only so many hours in the day, and they have things that they need to do, goals that they need to achieve, and there's a tried and true way to achieve those. And uh trying something new can you lead to potentially a missed goal.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

So one of the things that I try to say is just a loss of efficiency. Correct. I don't I don't think that I need a new or better way, even if there is a new or better way, like I'm kind of With what I'm doing?

SPEAKER_03 22:01

Yeah. Yeah. There's some complacency there. It's tried and true, and they have a high degree of confidence that they're going to be able to deliver on what's expected of them because of the fact that they've got muscle memory with the existing tools. I've often challenged people to look at a problem and come back with a set of different solutions that may or may not work. So there's the tried and true solution, which is typically people's go-to, but there are probably more or different ways of doing things. And kind of by forcing people to take a few steps back and think about other ways of doing things. And giving them the flexibility and the openness to fail is exceptionally important because nobody wants to fail. Nobody's comfortable failing. But to experiment with new technologies and find new ways of doing things means that you have to accept a certain likelihood that things aren't going to go well the first time around. And if you create a culture that enables people to feel comfortable coming back with a failed result, then while that particular scenario may have failed, and maybe the next nine fail as well, eventually you're going to get to something that works. And you wouldn't have gotten there if you hadn't been accepting of the fact that the first many attempts were unsuccessful.

SPEAKER_01 23:38

Yeah, absolutely. It's like that idea of, you know, I haven't gotten there yet, but but if I don't like try and keep attempting, you know, how how can I? I have been leaning into learning the creation of bots in the AI world. And it can be tricky and it can be frustrating. And I was I was speaking with my my young guru who is helping me on this, who is my daughter, one of my daughters. And she said, look, you know, if you are learning in AI and you think it's just simple and great, you're not doing it well. Like you really gotta be in the struggle and the muck of it, because that's where you're really gonna figure out like the true power of what you can actually do, which is just another way of you know, violently agreeing with you that you know, you just have to, but but then importantly, as you said, make it a safe space to fail and even go so far as to celebrate those.

SPEAKER_03 24:43

Yes, exactly. And so I have worked in some organizations in which we've had an award for the biggest failure, you know, during a specific time period. And we celebrate that and we socialize that because that one person's or or one team's lack of success can lead to success in other places and it also prevents other teams from making that doing that same thing and experiencing the same unsuccessful outcome.

SPEAKER_02 25:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 25:12

So, you know, I I think that celebrating successes is important and so are celebrating and socializing the things that don't go well.

SPEAKER_01 25:19

Yeah, absolutely. So, so in thinking about the successes side of things, can you can you talk to us about a system or a process that you have built, you know, could be in your current role or or former role that that that you feel like was a success that that did really, you know, transformed for the better how marketing was operating?

SPEAKER_03 25:42

Yeah, I'll go way back deep in my career to a time when I worked in financial services. I worked at a large retail bank. And we had bankers who sat in 500 branches who had their book of business, had their clients that they knew really well. And we were building this centralized, we called it a decision engine. Today, these days, I think those take on the name of next best action. You'll hear that a lot, right? Out there. But and we were looking to, from a centralized perspective, figure out how we could overlay data and analytics to our mainframe-based customer information file and funnel leads or opportunities to the team members in the branches. So, what I just described sounds old-fashioned, I would imagine, in in today's day and age, but we're talking about the 1900s when we were doing this, right? It's back a long way. Yeah, it's person buggy, guys. I mean, yeah, that's exactly right. We wouldn't have been able to do a podcast back then. The internet bandwidth was not wide enough.

SPEAKER_01 26:57

We're using telephones that were attached to the wall. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 27:00

Indeed. Indeed. So much so, in fact, that while we were able to build this engine to identify opportunities within our client base, we were pretty limited with how we were able to get those opportunities over to the folks in the branches.

SPEAKER_01 27:17

Yeah, we've we've done a lot of work in financial services, and like you can't target, so to speak, right? You can't use the term. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 27:26

Right, right. And we wanted to pilot this, and we deliberately chose two branches that had the biggest naysayers for this type of work. I love it. And we sat down with them, spent a lot of time getting to know them, getting to know their business, getting to know what their pain points were in their roles. And then we went back to the decision engine and looked for opportunities that would assist those, those bankers with information on their clients. And we won them over in a pilot phase. And it was really low tech, let me tell you. We were we were like sending files to them in the most embarrassing way. And they would they would do what the engine was telling them they should do, contacting clients, you know, talk about specific messages. And this is this is how far back it goes. They would fill out a piece of paper to tell us how things went, and they would fax it back to us. And we hired a tech who would skip the fax machine and he would pull the fax out, and then he would type in like the disposition of how this went. This was very early days to the, you know, the the quote next best action infrastructure. But the reason, partially the reason that it worked on a large scale, was because once we worked the kinks out and we listened loudly to the two naysayers who were participating in this pilot, they saw the value and we invited them to the launch when we were ready to extend it. And their peers sat in the audience and listened to like people, two people who were typically perceived as curmudgeons in the organization, and they were up there saying, This is great. You guys can't believe how helpful this is going to be for you. You're gonna love this. And it was a very easy rollout, but we invested the time and the energy in the pilot and you know, one over the detractors, and then used the moved the detractors to promoters and then use the promoters to fuel our rollout.

SPEAKER_01 29:32

Yeah, so I I I love that story, not not just because I haven't talked about or thought about a fax machine in a long time, but but also because you know what you're what you're shining a light on in change management and gaining alignment, and you're and we do a lot of alignment work, and we often say to our clients, talk to us about the people who are skeptical, and let's really understand what those concerns specifically are. It can be very tempting within organizations, particularly if you're going to run a pilot on something, to try to go to the advocates first and have the advocates become the evangelists because it's like, well, they all they're already, you know, they already have the tendency toward, right? But really, if you flip it around the way you did, that is where you find the most power. But you do have to, you know, start slow to be able to go fast because people who are who are naysayers and had a have a lot of obstacles and a lot of concerns, it's gonna, it's gonna take longer. But man, when you win them over and they see the true value, then they bring along more people than you know, natural evangelists ever could. Not not that I have anything against people who are natural evangelists, but it it does absolutely make a huge difference. I love that. I love that story from the 1900s. And so taking us back into the the the 2020s here, you know, it just wouldn't be a marketing conversation if we didn't talk about AI. I'm curious if you can share what has been exciting for you. You talked about this a bit on the panel where you were, you and I met together. What's been exciting and and what's been challenging for you and your role so far with AI adoption? Kind of a big question, but anywhere you want to take that.

SPEAKER_03 31:25

Yeah, my gosh, I I can't believe it we it took us this long to cover AI. Good for us for not taking a bait early, starting there. Yeah, look, it's a game changer. So, like I was talking earlier about the internet coming to life at the beginning of my career, that turned out to be a monumental change in how we operated, how commerce occurred. And I don't think that anybody could have imagined the role that the internet would play in our daily lives. And I feel the same way, if not more, about the We're limited by our imaginations. Yeah. And somebody just asked me yesterday. I I did a leadership panel for my organization, and somebody asked me to if I could share how I thought AI was going to reshape the marketing organization in 2026. And I joked and I said, I have no idea.

SPEAKER_02 32:23

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 32:24

It's gonna happen. And 12 months from now, I don't think that the way that we operate as a marketing organization will resemble how we operate now. There's things are just happening so quickly. I feel like 2024 was the year of generative AI, and we all started to get comfortable with gen AI tools, and then they became available to the public through you know, Claude and Chat GPT and Gemini. And then in early 2025, I started hearing about agentic AI. It seemed like that was the next phase.

SPEAKER_01 33:01

Yeah, I don't know that we heard much about that prior to this year that we're in. I mean, by the time this is airing, we're in we're into 2026, right? Tail end of 2025. But I really don't think that we had heard about agentic at all prior to 25.

SPEAKER_03 33:16

And I didn't even know what it was. Right. And then people would explain it to me, and it sounded like still didn't know what it was. Right. I was like, oh, the Terminator is actually now happening, right? That movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger, all those years ago. It seemed hard to it seemed science fiction-y and it seemed unrealistic that it was actually gonna happen quickly. And now that was maybe nine months ago, I was really digging into agentic AI. Now I have a team of people who are creating agents.

SPEAKER_02 33:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 33:47

We didn't know what agentic AI was nine months ago, and now I've got people with a non-technical background. These are not like software engineers, you know, these are writers and designers and folks with creative backgrounds who are very easily coming up to speed on how to create agents in, again, commercially available AI platforms. So I don't I don't know entirely how AI is going to continue to take shape, but I know that we have to be really focused on figuring out what the options are. Because if you blink, the progress is made so quickly that you know you're gonna get left behind if you don't stay up on these things. And what you try in AI today that doesn't work, by definition, the LLM is gonna learn. If you try that same thing two weeks from now, you might get a different result.

SPEAKER_01 34:45

Yeah, you're likely to get you're likely to get a different answer if not if not a completely different result. I have done that a couple of times where I write it, you know, over time. And one of the, you know, of course, I'm reading things and experimenting all the time as as we all are. One of the bit of advice that I recently heard that I I would love to amplify because I think it's really important for all leaders what we're whether we're talking about the marketing space or any other industry, is this expert was asked, like, what's what are the top things that you need to be thinking about as a leader with AI advancing as quickly as it is? And his answer was get clear about what you want humans in your organization to be doing and to be good at. And I thought that was a really, really great lens on it because AI is going to come in and fill in so many capabilities, gaps. And we don't want people to get lost in it, not just because it feels existential, but because we really want to make sure that we're caring for what's going to be best for the organization, the purpose of why that organization is there and what value they're bringing to the marketplace. You need to really be thinking, not like if you know, if we're going to have AI right alongside us as humans, the AI is going to do what the AI is going to do. But what is it that you want the humans to do? Because humans are going to need direction. Humans are going to need inspiration, motivation, skill building. So anyway, I just thought that was a very interesting lens on it.

SPEAKER_03 36:26

Yeah, that that that's helpful.

unknown 36:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 36:28

I think a lot of people are concerned, you know? I feel like while we while I mentioned some of the folks on my team who I call our AI sorcerers because they're out there just like slaying it with what AI can do, we certainly have a quieter group of folks who are on the other end of the adoption spectrum who are passively watching, maybe with a bit of trepidation, on what is this going to mean for me and what is this going to mean for my job. And, you know, part of my perspective there is that that's not going to go well for you if you're if you're just sitting and watching the AI train pass by you. It's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy if you don't jump in and get your hands dirty and figure out how you can make this life-changing technology work for you.

SPEAKER_01 37:19

Yes. One of my favorite like business and life books is The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. I don't know if you're familiar with it. Big, big fat book. It's 15 commitments, so it's fat because 15 is a big number. But their overall premise is that in our lives and the way our brains are wired, we have this tendency, they call it like this invisible line, and we tend to live below the line in fear. And what is above the line is curiosity. And because our brains are wired for fear and to protect us, it's not our fault that we default to fear, but we need to be aware and then push ourselves up above that line. I don't know that that's ever been more true, Chris, than it is now with AI coming on so strong because we are so aware that we don't know. And it's very, it it can be very provoking. And so I think we're all, you know, we're all kind of like, ooh, I want to, you know, I think our tendency to want to protect ourselves from the unknown is is a very strong human driver, but we can't sit there. So even even the people who are the biggest gurus, they still have their moments.

SPEAKER_03 38:36

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 38:37

Sure, you know, for sure. So it's just like, where are you at? And can you can you push yourself above? I want before we go, I want to make sure that we have an opportunity to have our listeners hear some of your leadership wisdom. You know, you've just been on a wonderful journey, you have such a fascinating background. So, you know, I have a handful of questions for you around how you lead. And so, you know, first if you like look back across your career, is there a piece of wisdom about marketing operations that perhaps you once believed and and now you see it differently, perhaps with the advent of technology or maybe just with the wisdom of experience?

SPEAKER_03 39:20

Yeah, I think I was one of those people who, in the beginning of the realm of marketing operations, viewed it as an operational partner. I was uh I was part and parcel of just tell us what to do and we'll go do it. That was my comfort zone again as an engineer. That was I was good at solving problems, but someone had to give me the problem.

SPEAKER_01 39:41

Yes, yes. What do you want me to build? What do you want me to solve? Yeah, and then I'll do it.

SPEAKER_03 39:44

Right, right. Something's broken, great, I'll go fix it. And it took me some time to realize that my impact would be greater if I didn't wait for the problem to come to me, if I would I would seek out where a problem might be in the future. And sometimes that happened because I had the thought in my head and I didn't express it. And then a period of time would go by and the problem happened, and I went, why didn't I say it?

SPEAKER_01 40:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 40:14

I knew that it was gonna happen, I but I didn't trust myself, you know, didn't trust my gut, my instinct to to speak up. So some of that was just a bit of confidence that led to me kind of moving upstream from the place where most marketing operations teams play, and I moved, you know, upstream into the more strategic conversation and realized that I could make a bigger impact that way.

SPEAKER_01 40:37

Yeah, love that. And I I you read my mind because I was gonna ask you, well, how did you realize you know that you needed to do that? And it was like the lack of speaking up and then seeing it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Came back to Britney. I should have said it. Yeah. Yeah, I should have said it. So in the wisdom space and knowing that the Martech stack is just a constant challenge, you know, it's exciting and it can enable so many capabilities, but it's also a constant challenge. Is there like one thing you would advise senior marketers as they're approaching their stack that they should focus on or ask themselves?

SPEAKER_03 41:14

Yeah, I would say there they need to find a balance between being curious, like we were just talking about, and open to new ways of doing things, but always make sure that it's technology for the sake of solving a business objective. Like you have to root the technology decisions in the business cakes framework and align it back to what value is this investment going to make on the bottom line? That's and there's a lot of hops to get there, right? Because one piece of technology isn't automatically going to increase revenue or or you know reduce expense. But there needs to be a really defensible tie between those things. And I like seeing business cases, and I don't file business cases away after I see them. I put them in my temporary folder, and I'm gonna come back in a year and I'm gonna ask the people who built those business cases when those initiatives were funded, how are we looking? Did this did this actually deliver what we said it was gonna deliver? And so creating a culture of accountability to kind of go back to those business cases and validate whether they were accurate or not.

SPEAKER_01 42:43

Yeah, I love that. And I mean, you just you you just shouldn't have one without the other. Like even if you're doing that really good upfront due diligence, you have to come back around. And I don't think that everybody remembers to do that per se. We talked a lot about agile and and agile with a lowercase A in in certain circumstances. Is there one principle of Agile that you think every marketing leader should know and adopt?

SPEAKER_03 43:12

Oh that's a good one. I love the concept of the daily stand-ups. People come together 15 minutes a day, quick round robin, what are the blockers, and then hang up and go do what it is that you need to be doing. I find it a highly effective way to maintain progress and identify the obstacles to those progress, to making that progress and ensuring that you know the end result is ultimately achieved. It's it's way better than communicating via email. It's way better than pulling together large groups of people for status updates, most, you know, not most, but sometimes people. Check out of those things. When you're in a 15-minute stand-up, everyone is fully engaged. And I've seen them actually done standing up.

SPEAKER_02 44:08

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 44:09

True stand-ups, right? Nobody sits down, standing around a table.

SPEAKER_01 44:13

Right, stand standing up. And even if you're at your virtual desk standing up.

SPEAKER_03 44:17

That's exactly right. There's more clued in. So that would be my that would be my choice.

SPEAKER_01 44:21

We also talked about and and your own journey too of you know, operator to strategist, right? And and and so if you're if you were looking to lead someone on that on that path and really helping them understand how to think of themselves as strategists, be more of a strategist, what would you tell someone who's trying to make that transition or who perhaps you want to motivate to make that transition?

SPEAKER_03 44:50

This happens a lot in the marketing operations space because I think that the folks who gravitate towards marketing operations organizations are true, are good operators. And you have to break out of some habits in order to make that shift to a more strategic contributor to the organization. For me, I actually had a bit of an aha moment. I was fairly deep into my career and was being mentored by someone very senior in my organization who recommended to me while I was in my 40s that I consider going back to school and getting my MBA, which I thought was a silly idea. What would somebody at my age do with an MBA? And I I poked around and realized this might be the thing that I need in order to retrain how my brain works. And it turned out to be a tremendous amount of work, but a huge, huge unlock for my brain. So I will say the constraints that I could articulate coming from an engineering background is that in engineering, there's always a right answer in the back of the book, right? Whether it's calculus or physics or chemistry or you name the discipline, you learn a rule, the rule of the laws of physics, the rules of thermodynamics, and then you apply them through problems and problems and problems, and you flip to the back of the book to figure out if you got the right answer. And if you get the right answer, it's like, yeah, I got this, and I move on to the next problem. Business does not work that way. There is no right answer in the back of the book. So operators who are looking for validation that they have done things 100% accurate are going to be very frustrated in a more strategic role. Yes. So what I learned through the MBA program was that you really need to make the best decision with the information that you have at the time. You're never going to have perfect information. It's different from those engineering textbooks where they give you, you know, four out of five variables and you got to solve for the fifth. And you put a strong case together using a reliable framework. They're not going to be as firm as the laws of physics, but you can do a risk analysis and you can do pros and cons. You can find reasonable ways to back up your argument for a strategic recommendation that you're going to have to accept the fact that you're not going to get the right answer in the back of the book. No one is going to validate your recommendation with a grade or an accuracy rating.

SPEAKER_01 47:37

And in fact, you may have people actually fight you on it, even if you've done a tremendous amount of due diligence, you know, with tried and true frameworks. I mean, so well said, Chris. And it is the core difference between, I think you just nailed it in terms of the doing to the thinking. You know, it's executing around something where you've been given this is this is what we're going to do, and outcome needs to be X, to strategically deciding how something should be approached. It it's it's not fair to just say, oh, well, it's murky and you know, throw up your hands. Right. There's a whole discipline around it. That's right. But the answer is never sitting there.

SPEAKER_03 48:23

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 48:24

Yeah. Right. It's kind of like what I love and at moments what I hate.

SPEAKER_03 48:30

Well, I found I found getting my MBA to be incredibly liberating because it allowed me to untether my brain to, you know, needing to needing certainty in what I was doing. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 48:43

And it really helped. I found my MBA to be, I always just say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I mean it was a different experience. I I was in my mid-20s and I went to a very, very, very quantitative program at University of Chicago and I was a liberal arts major. So I also like to say that I got more for bang for my buck than most people who were there because I'd barely taken a single, you know, accounting or finance class. But yeah, the the the the framed thinking, but without an answer that you know you can just find in some sort of a finite way. But I love what you're saying about liberation too. There is there is a liberation to that, there's a creativity to that.

SPEAKER_02 49:28

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 49:28

There is a learn and refine to that, and and an emergent strategy to that too, if you're if you're reflective over time. So we always love to end by asking our guests about a pivotal moment in their careers or their personal lives, or maybe it's a little bit of both, where something happened or you learned something that really changed your trajectory, your path from that moment on. It may be something you felt or regarded as good or bad or neutral, but it made a profound impact. Can you share with us a pivotal moment that you had and and what it led to for you?

SPEAKER_03 50:07

Who I'm not sure I've had a number of moments, I think. That's what happens when you get deep into your career, right? And you and you have the benefit of reflection. I don't know if I would consider this pivotal, but it was meaningful. And it happened very early in my career when it was some advice that my father gave me, which, you know, I was young and confident, which I shouldn't have been, but you know, when you're when you're in your early 20s, you think you've got it all figured out, right? You're you're now in the wild and you're like, great, I've been waiting for this my whole life.

SPEAKER_01 50:41

Yes, I'm a grown up.

SPEAKER_03 50:42

I'm gonna go change the world. And he he taught me the importance of relationships and people and bridges. And I was I was an introvert, still am an introvert. And he basically said, like, you gotta remember that every interaction that you have is like an interview for something in the future. So every every email, every meeting, every time you interact with somebody, you're you're sharing like a data point on who you are and what you stand for. And I didn't appreciate that, certainly at the time. I was just out there being me. But then as I've reflected over the course of my 30 some odd year career, and I think about the relationships that have proven to be most meaningful to me, both personally and professionally, they all happened because of some of those moments along the way. And a willingness to be open to listening to diverse perspectives, and you know, a willingness to admit that I don't know the answer, the right answer, all the time. And if you kind of open yourself up to people and ideas, it's very enriching. And again, it's both personal and professional. So a number of former coworkers have become wonderful friends in my life. And a number of former coworkers have helped me grow throughout the course of my career. Like, you know, people that I haven't really spoken to in 20 years may have made an impact on a role that I took because there were some common connections. So I guess the power of connection is cannot be cannot be overstated, is that my pivotal observation.

SPEAKER_01 52:26

Yeah, I love that. I so appreciate you sharing that. And your dad certainly wise in sharing with that at a at a young age. Chris, I have loved having this time with you and this conversation. I I just so appreciate your your point of view and your vision around marketing operations and the power of being strategic in that space. And also, you know, the path that anyone can take toward being more strategic, the balance with the Martech stack, the focus on outcomes, you know, so many just wonderful nuggets, I think, for our listeners. So if you are a marketing leader listening today and you've been thinking about perhaps operations as the tech people or the people who just get it done, you know, consider them as strategic partners and invite them into your planning conversations. Ask them what's possible. So I just want to thank you so much for being generous with your time and your insights. This has been a true pleasure.

SPEAKER_03 53:25

I've enjoyed every minute of it, Nancy. It's always great to see you too.

SPEAKER_01 53:29

Great to see you as well. If today's conversation resonated with you, maybe you are wrestling with a Martech stack that's too complex, or you're trying to figure out how to move from execution to being more strategic. You are not alone. Marketing leaders know what they want to do, but often don't have the infrastructure quite to do it or don't see the path. Operations teams are capable of so much, but if they're treated as support functions, this is going to be very limiting. And oftentimes there is a gap between strategy and execution, and it will widen if it doesn't get addressed. At Noetic, we work with senior marketing leaders who are ready to close this gap. We help you assess your processes, we help you determine what's needed to enable your strategy. If you would like to have a conversation of what that looks like in your world, please visit us at noeticconsultants.com or connect with me on LinkedIn. I would love to hear from you. Until next time, keep strengthening brands and the leaders who bring them to life, including and especially the leader within you. See you next time.

SPEAKER_00 54:40

Feeling inspired to shake up your marketing game? The Metamorphosis Moment is your launch pad for actionable strategies and real-world results. Subscribe now and fuel your brand and leadership strength with tools and guidance you can use today. Don't forget to explore more game changing resources at Noetic Consultants.com. Now get out there and transform.