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Future-proofing the humans behind the tech. Follow Phil Gamache on his mission to help marketers level up and have successful careers in the constantly expanding universe of martech.
Philippe Gamache 0:00
What's up everyone. Today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Debbie Mahan, head of marketing operations at Logitech. Deborah got her start at Debbie got her start as an international project manager, where she led big IT projects and later pivoted to international mark on projects and business development. This led me to a pivotal role as marketing and comms manager at Encyclopedia Britannica, where she would spend seven years managing marketing activities in Latin America and Brazil. She also spent five years as a marketing automation project leader at Molex where she was focused on optimizing tech stack and lead gen processes. And today, Debbie is Head of Global marketing operations at Logitech where her Team Drives operational excellence for logistics b2b marketing team focused on strategy and automation, segmentation, ABM, and probably a bunch of other stuff, too, Debbie, thanks so much for your time today pumped to chat.
Debbie Mayen 0:56
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm super excited to be here. One of the most
Jon Taylor 1:00
fascinating things I find with interviewing guests is how many folks end up in mops and martec. Who did had no idea that they'd end up here, you're no different. You've written about becoming a diplomat practicing international law. But somewhere along the lines, you fell into Mar tech, walk us through the nonlinear path that led you here, and how you fell in love with martech? Yeah,
Debbie Mayen 1:21
so Well, initially, you know, my desire to be an international lawyer or diplomat kind of came from my nomadic lifestyle, my father's career, he worked in oil, and we moved around a lot. I mean, there were times where we moved every six months, right to different countries. So it was sort of something I've always had kind of a multicultural, multilingual upbringing. And I was naturally attracted to that continuation of that international aspect of my life in my career. But this was, by the time I went to university, I realized that, while exciting to move around all the time, it is exhausting. And it can be difficult on family life. So I decided now I'm just gonna stick to a more rooted living situation. But I still love being involved with international entities and sort of that multicultural aspect. And so that's kind of how I ended up in international business side, and particularly an Encyclopedia Britannica working with the Latin American market. It's it was an extension of almost a flick my identity, right. And it was, I'm thrilled that I ended up there, because while I was there, I was in charge of a huge area, right? All of Latin America marketing, but I had a really small budget, and this was back then around like 2009 2010, one martec, there was only English, there was less than 200 Martic vendors out there, right? It was, and so it needs. But despite that, we were actually early adopters. So we had silverpop. Back then there's a blast from the past. And I used it and I really leveraged it to make it work, right. I had such a huge geographic area that we were charged of that I had to get the biggest bang for my buck. And so that's I leveraged what martec We had. So I kind of always that kind of forced my way into it. I fell in love with it. It really, I loved the idea of being able to measure what I was doing, I was able to go to my stakeholders and show the results of our campaigns of our work without having to expand our team too much, right, because we just didn't have that budget for it. So that's kind of how I ended up I landed in martec was out of necessity. But I also started really early and so that it was much less complicated back then. So it was easy to fall in love with it very quickly. Yeah,
Philippe Gamache 3:46
the landscape jars from Scott Brinker were a bit smaller than and there was a couple of years where they like almost felt like they got smaller a little bit. There was some consolidation like silver Bob was acquired by, I believe, yeah, there's Pardot that got picked up by Salesforce. So there's a lot of players coming on the scene. How was it being someone that early at like the dawn of martec, if you will seen all these tools coming out? I feel like we're getting a taste of that today with AI like AI for martec sled explosion of those tools. How wild was it back then?
Debbie Mayen 4:20
It was. I think, in one respect, I think it made it easier for me, right? Because today it's overwhelming the landscape, right? There's no there is no way anybody can know all of these tools that are out there. There's just no way. Whereas when I started it was it was so limited. I felt like it was an advantage for me. Right? It was I had to make do with what I'd had. Right. And so it made it easier for me to dive deeper into those resources and well so I've worked with because of that I've worked with four different marketing automation platforms now Now, because I really dove deep into the marketing, automation platform, discipline, because that's pretty much all that we had back then it was very limited, right. And so because I deepen my knowledge into that one area, it made it easier for me to expand beyond it, when everybody else was kind of diving into the different platforms. I was already past that. And then it also made me think a little more, it made it a little easier for me to kind of see through all the noise, right? Everything. I started out with more of that smaller view into more tech. And so I've never allowed myself to expand too far beyond that, because it overwhelming. What is it that no, it's got breakers, that lighter? I think last year was at 8000, we noticed that now. You can't, it's very easy to fall into that trap on the shiny new logic. And I think starting so early, has allowed me to prevent myself from falling into that and sort of more grounded because of it when it goes to market. Pretty
Philippe Gamache 6:05
cool. Yeah,
Jon Taylor 6:06
I want to just do a follow up there. Because I think there's some wisdom here that we can unpack for our listeners, right? The focus the finding the signal through all the noise, like What lessons do you think that you impart upon your team? And for the listeners who are thinking about this galaxy of martech tools, that's a constantly exploding, there's still nuts and bolts at work, like the meat and potatoes of martec is still fundamentally the same? I think for a lot of organizations. How do you sort through it all? How do you find value in your martech tools today?
Debbie Mayen 6:36
I mean, I'm very much in doubt, mentality of simpler is better, right? Because what happens if you're, if you start letting yourself be enchanted by by all of these, all the promises of these different texts, and all of the sort of the value that they say they can bring to you? And I'm not saying they don't, I'm just saying that you have to make sure that you fully understand what your company needs. So break it down to as simple as possible, right, is an added piece of tech that you add to your stack. You're adding potential debt to it. And so you, that's what you got to be mindful of. It's not it's really a cost benefit analysis. What is it worth it to bring out this added element to our processes to our systems, the overall architecture? Does that bring it on does that outweigh the risks that we're going to run down the road where we have to adapt it to what's in evolution of business needs, the evolution of the company's goals. So I'm, I'm very much obviously, I'm a proponent of martech. I'm in marketing operations. But I also like to take a very practical approach to it needs, it has to be, the benefits have to very much outweigh the cost, from every respect from workload for my team, that's very important work life balance is a huge priority for me for my team, right? It's very easy for most teams to kind of get overwhelmed. So that's one thing, how well does it integrate into our current architecture? Are we going to end up having issues with bollocks because it doesn't necessarily fit in well enough with our current systems? Is it gonna have to waste resources? Making updates and integrations, et cetera? Right? These are all things that I look for, when I'm considering a new piece of tech. And I consider myself the old school Martic. Person less is more. No, I
Philippe Gamache 8:42
don't think that's old school at all. I think that's the great answer. I love your point about tech debt, like thinking about that as you're adding a new shiny object to the stack. But yeah, I really like the point about the work life balance and being mindful about the fact that marketing ops folks can get overwhelmed pretty quickly by supporting a bunch of different teams. And I'm curious to learn a bit more about that at Logitech. I know there's several different groups and different brands across different markets covering a bunch of different products. Also, as a marketing ops team at a big company like Logitech, I'd love for you to talk about the challenges of supporting different groups with a bunch of different needs.
Debbie Mayen 9:23
Yeah, I think that Well, the biggest challenge comes from the fact that marketing ops to to a large extent is a service arm, right of the business. We have our internal stakeholders as well as our external stakeholders when it comes to customer experience, but on an internal perspective, we our customer, is every one of these business groups, these marketing groups, so we we also have to be mindful of the fact that they are aware of what each other is asking for, right we're kind of the central point that needs but they're not aware of what everybody else is asking for. And so what that point that I always emphasize to my team is, yep, two things, one, processes, right, we're a very process oriented team. And I always tell my team, it is in order to not only protect the quality of the work that we deliver, right, it's sort of the the promise that we're making of quality is contingent upon us having enough time to do it. But then also empowering them to be able to say, to push back on a request, and then as long as they do so with clarity, right. And so I, the key is always I think, clarity, and communication. Those are the two that go hand in hand. Most I've found that most marketers young, all of them really are reasonable, as long as you if you say, look, I we can't carry out this request at this time. And here's why. But here's an alternative. We can do it at a later time where if you've Can you extend the deadline a little bit, right? If you're that's the, that's a valley that I like to really instill in my team is to have that dialogue with their stakeholders, don't be afraid to push back, we have to be marketing ops teams have to be empowered to to challenge requests, again, because of that very reason that the different marketing groups aren't always aware of what each other is asking for, right? We, at any given time, we've got five or six different fires that we're trying to put out, while building something solid here. And then somebody else asked for something else. Here we are at the point where it all converges. And so if you communicate that clearly, they tend to understand and just come always, if you're going to say no, don't just say no with an alternative to it, it tell and say why you said no. I think that's sometimes missing in today's mops teams, they're afraid to say no, they take everything on, and then what happens? A burnout, quality goes down, you lose trust in the Mopsy. And it becomes a vicious cycle. So that's those are the guard clarity and communication. I
Jon Taylor 12:03
love the story that you are the picture that you paint, like the idea in my head that was brewing as conductor at the front of the orchestra, making sure that everybody's playing the peace and harmony, and making sure that everybody knows their role. I think one thing that you hit on that a lot of listeners probably feel a little bit in their souls, is this idea of moths being always reactive, putting out fires and not being in control of their own destiny. I know from just kind of looking at some of the job postings on LinkedIn that you work at, like the intersection of it sales ops and marketing ops, like when we're talking about conducting the orchestra. Like there's some major players here that we're talking about. I know that some of the roles on the IT team are remote distributed in India, and beyond. You're in Chicago and the global marketing operations team. How do you orchestrate all of this? How do you conduct the or the mops orchestra working with all these diverse different groups? Well,
Debbie Mayen 13:00
I mean, again, it comes to it all comes down to you, really acknowledging the importance of it. And sales, aka we are all I see us as we're all legs of the same tripod, right? We have to work together, we have to be aligned. Because otherwise, if I'm not aligned with it, nothing's going to work on my side. If I'm not aligned with sales ops, nothing that we do is ever going to go to flow downstream to the sales team is not going to convert into his in schools. And so we're spread out right Logitech is a global company. I'm in Illinois, my I've got team members in California team members in Ireland, the same things, we're sales ops, one thing that that I really emphasize, is one to ones. So I had a weekly meeting one to one meeting with it. Same thing with sales ops, these are people that I've actually grown extremely fond open, I consider friends even though I've never asked some of them I have never met in person, I've only met virtually right because I got hired during the pandemic as a remote worker. So it's I think it's important to cultivate the relationship not only on a business level, right, in terms of not making decisions in silos, really consulting them and getting asking them for their honest feedback on it. What are their thoughts? So you know, asking for permission, per se, but you are asking for their perspective prior to you making that decision. I think it's really important to cultivate that professional kind of proximity with each of those groups, but also personally that it's the friends with them. These are great people. It just makes your job easier. If I'm fortunate that I'm surrounded with some awesome people at this company. I've become genuine friends with them. So I actually I thoroughly enjoy my one on ones with them. That
Philippe Gamache 14:50
helps a lot. Virgo. Yeah, great advice. I think it goes a long way especially in remote teams like it's so easy, especially in mobs to be heads down and doing the work. in supporting your team and forgetting that there's a massive global team that we can become closer with. And I know that there's such a close overlap, especially in the bigger team and enterprise with sales ops in it, and sometimes the tech stack and the roles are kind of all blending, right. For the startup listeners, this idea that it owns pieces of the Salesforce CRM is just like what it is owning Salesforce. But in enterprise it's yeah, like it's Salesforce is connected and embedded in the org, that it needs to own it. There's a security pieces that startups teams don't even think about. But I'm curious to get your take on this. On the topic of it. And mobs overlap. A question that we asked a couple of our recent guests is this idea is martech. Really, for marketers? Or is it really for engineers? And so this is all coming from Casey winters article, he's done a bunch of stuff. And he's taught at reforge. But he has this blog post on the problems with martec. And why martec is actually for engineers. And he argues that martec faces declined due to in house engineers, and the success of vendors hinging on serving engineers more than marketers, because they're increasingly handling tailored solutions in house. So this whole build versus by debate, I'd love your take, that'd be like, what's what do you think it is? martech actually, for engineers?
Debbie Mayen 16:24
I certainly hope not because I'm not an engineer. You know, it's, he has some valid points. And he has some points that I don't necessarily agree with. So one of the points. I mean, and thank you for sending me that article. I hadn't read it. It's very interesting. Really. One of the points he mentioned was he said that the marketing function in technology companies is usually a response to engineering construct, you don't have enough engineers to build a system to manage bidding for performance marketing, you hire in regular my my point of view, and maybe I'm over simplistic here, but my point of view is, why would you want to build everything internally? Why would you want to reinvent the wheel, you're just gonna lead to customization, bloat. And it it's also, to me at least, it's also a signal from a company that says, We're not going to do anything according to industry best practices. We're going to do everything custom that fits boss, right. And so it's to me, I just, I see customization. But is there a potential for internal builds to start to ramp up a bit? Absolutely. I think that's where AI is going to have a big impact, right? My husband is actually a head of AI at his company, and he's also an engineer. And he can't stop talking about co pilot and how it helps him cope. Like he like there's 10 of him. Right. And so, in that respect, do I think that we will see an uptick in internal systems probably being built out more by engineers? Probably? Is it going to kill more tech? No, I don't think so. I have the it's, I happened recently here where we had a need in our team. But and I casually mentioned it actually during one of my one on ones with it. And I was saying that how I was going to onboard a new vendor to meet this need. Because after extensive kind of research and diving in, we decided it was worth it. And he mentioned to me as well, we could build that for you, right? And I said, Well, yeah, I know what you can. But why would you you have this is something that's already built, it's actually inexpensive. And therefore it leaves you time to continue to do the more business impactful things that you have on your plate. Alright, so I think that's where just because you can doesn't mean you should is my point of view. So, again, it all comes down to cost benefit analysis. Is it worthwhile for you to vote? Is it worth it for an engineering internal groups to build a marketing automation platform or? Absolutely not? Why would you want to do that? It's who has the time to maintain that. And not only that, you run the risk of because of customization bloat? What happens when those people if they leave, and then nobody knows how to update this? Nobody knows how to fix it. Nobody knows how to integrate it with anything else. It's to me it's out. This goes back to I see why he has these general opinions. I personally don't share them. I think there's a middle ground. Yes, some things should and can be built internally. Some things shouldn't and don't need to.
Philippe Gamache 19:37
Yeah, such a great point. I think that just because you can do it doesn't mean you should it. And yeah, the great point on what if those engineers leave? Like how much documentation do they have on that, but what aren't they doing? Instead of building this marketing automation tool in house now that could potentially improve the customer experience as opposed to like building something thinking that there's 5000 tools out in the market for already with one argument that I really like is like this idea. If we build a tool in house that lives already versions of this and the third party world, how are we going to support and service this tool for our teams, if we don't buy a Marketo, or an iterable, or a HubSpot, the engineers are building it in house. But we need to create a support ticket is the engineer also going to have time to help us like troubleshoot some stuff, HubSpot has a team of 5000 people that are just on customer support, who's supporting this internal tool. But anyways, the whole like aI debate is really interesting. You mentioned that, like how AI might help like with some of the custom bloat around the internal tooling, and could lead to an increase of custom tooling, especially this idea of composability. And connecting third party models with like internal data sets. We've talked a lot about that on the show. But one book that I found really interesting on your LinkedIn is you've written about the impact of Vijay telas, new automation mindset book, and that the impact that it had on your mindset of a building a culture that encourages leveraging AI and automation, and I haven't had the pleasure of reading that one yet. But I'm familiar with the concept that you talked about anti fragility from the seem to labs book on anti fragile things that gain from disorder. So for folks that aren't super familiar with it, it refers to the ability of a system to not only withstand chaos, and uncertainty, but also thrive and grow stronger as a result of it kind of like very much the startup ecosystem. What are some of your practical, favorite practical takeaways from the book? And how does this suggest integrating automation and AI into existing workflows without disrupting custom bloat and all the current operations? Well,
Debbie Mayen 21:52
first of all, I can't recommend the book enough, I think the biggest takeaway in it, and there's a lot to unpack there. It's a very dense, very informative book. But I would say, in general, the, the biggest takeaway, that I got promotions, that automation and AI, they're not just about saving time, they help us genuinely boost productivity and keep our focus on the big picture. Right. So it's, the real value of automation is in connecting kind of all of our apps, all of our existing systems, right, making the most of our existing investments, and to help solve issues with bottlenecks and fragmented process, right? That's where I see the biggest value in automation. And then on the other hand, AI is a game changer in helping to speed up the value chain by taking a comprehensive view of how power the different processes that support orders, how efficient are they How are we doing? I can process huge amounts of data in minimal time, right? And so if you can build out models that can sort of what's the word I'm looking for? can just see how are all How efficient are we across the ecosystem and the processes, right? Where are we seeing potential bottlenecks? And where are we seeing? Where's areas that we could be more efficient? Right, then that's where it brings value to to to the organization. And then there's also generative AI, which is the AI everybody hears AI and they think generative aI don't realize it? Yeah, that's one part of AI. Well, I still think that generative AI has work to play as well, it can, it can help design workflows use help with content creation help with you basically become almost our digital assistant to to all of these different business units, right. And so I think that these two tools they are, they're the ones that will help move businesses away from the task centered mentality, and towards the mentality of focusing on business objectives, right? The automation and ai, ai helped to remove sort of those, those time consuming tasks that people have to get done in their jobs, but then it keeps them It keeps them from having that big picture strategic thinking. I think that's the real value that they bring to the table. The book talks about that, right? It talks about how that's how you build an anti fragile company is by employee process, mindset, scale, mindset and growth mindset, right? And these are all done through orchestration, democratization, and plasticity and automation and AI are the tools that allow for you to have orchestration, democratization, complicitous, and plasticity. That's a tricky word
Jon Taylor 24:46
that's fascinating is definitely on my on my left, so I'm going to take that recommendation to heart. Switching gears a little bit, I want to talk a little bit about the soft skills and marketing operations and what I find fascinating is what we were just talking to recently. So of ours, and she described herself as a problem solver, someone who would sit at the airport solving complex math problems. And I get a little bit of that from your origin stories as well, you're talking about how you are deploying martec at the beginning and tracing the line from the activities to the revenue and having that analytical approach. What I find fascinating as, as we interview like senior mops leaders like yourself, is that there's almost a switch from the hard skills that lead us into mops that we love, intricate puzzles, and problems and analytics. And then there's the soft skills, there's the things that help us to bridge build bridges within the organization. I think, and I think maybe you'd agree with this is that the modern ops leader needs to do more than just a technical aspect of their job. Talk a little bit about what you've learned, as you've kind of gone into these leadership roles and led mops teams about the soft skills, and how folks listening to you speak could apply this to their own day job.
Debbie Mayen 25:59
Absolutely, I mean, don't get me wrong, the hard skills are still extremely important. You have to be you have to live it, you have to have experienced everything that a mops person has to know, right, the technical side, the the systems architectures side of it, the highly technical skill set is needed so that you can you know, what your that is the foundation for when you have to step into a strategic role, right, you have to understand very well, what are those systems? What are their purposes? And what are their limitations? With that set, though? I think that one of one of the soft skills that people in modules that want to kind of love into leadership they really need to work on is really the interpersonal skills, it's that ability to communicate, and to communicate with clarity, right. So it's part of what I do with my team is I try to push them towards communicating what's necessary to get your point across. Because what can often happen is coming from a technical background, if it's so much, it's such a part of your day to day that to you, it's very easy to just go down the rabbit hole of why, why something happened, oh, well sync errors between two systems cause the queue failure, that's not right. And then your audiences kind of sitting there with a blank stare, because why that's not hard in their day to day, wild. So it's a key skill is to put yourself in the shoes of the audience that you're trying to convey a message to? What information do they need, so that you can accurately and clearly convey your message right, so that they understand so that they do what it is that you need them to do? So know your audience, right. It's people think that's an easy skill, it's not, you have to work on it, right. And when it comes, it's that's where that relationship building come so that you can understand my my C suite audience needs a very different type of communication than my audience. That is, let's say, the campaign managers there, what their needs are completely separate. And we need to be able to fairly quickly identify that as well. It's, I think it's about there's it's clarity, in communication. But then there's also I think, an aspect of being able to stand back. It's difficult for a lot person to put so much time and effort into a process into a system integration into whatever it is. And then for us to have the ability to step back and take constructive criticism, right? It hurts. You're like, Oh, God, I put so much time into this. And you're telling me you don't like it, you want me to change everything about it? That's I think another critical skill is the humility to say, okay, maybe I do need to learn how can we make this better? Right? It's that this is where it kind of that plasticity comes into place. You need to be able to, you need to be able to be open to rewiring things, and knowing that it's for the greater good. Yeah,
Philippe Gamache 29:16
such great advice, Debbie, I feel like I need to take some of that to heart myself, especially the the first part of being more concise. Like, it's so easy to like, Oh, why is this happening? Why are we having email deliverability issues? Well, let me tell you about subdomain and our SPF issues and our DKM issues, and it's my current boss at my startup will will often just give me like a timeout sign. It's just you're rambling a bit too much. I think I get that from my dad. But I think that comes with the synchronous nature of like always going on video calls and having synchronous meetings. It's natural for humans to just talk about stuff and ramble sometimes, but it happens less like at some of my previous companies. When I was at WordPress, we were an ace sync company legs through and through. And we're distributed completely. And I'm curious to hear like how you guys are set up with like synchronous versus asynchronous, because in the async world where a lot of what we're doing is written form of communications. And so, by default, you need to change the tune of here's this long winded answer that I can talk about. But if I'm posting a quick update on our internal project management tool, it needs to be concise. It needs to be clear. And I have time to think about the clear point that I want to say first, as opposed to risking going down this like rambling hole. So I'm curious like how async is, is Logitech considering you guys are global and in kind of spread out? And if it's kind of somewhere in the middle, how do you manage all the synchronous meetings that are across time zones?
Debbie Mayen 30:50
Of course, somewhere in the middle, right, at least when it comes to my team, we know that we can't possibly have a meeting about absolutely every issue, everything that we're coming across, right, that's just there's not enough hours in the day. So slack is are we use Slack for quick one hour questions or updates for each other. We have a project management system, we use Asana, where we closely monitor our projects and make sure that nothing's falling through the couple have updates to those projects, anything, anything directly related to those projects in that portal in Asana so that we have a record of it as well. Right. So when it comes to, I think the approach we take is when it comes to project related and sort of updates or quick questions, it's definitely go through slack, go through whatever. But when it comes to something that is critical that cannot be potentially misread, misunderstood. How to call, because it does make a difference right now, it's we all know this, an email can easily be misinterpreted. A slack chat can be easily somebody takes it the wrong way. So I think it's important for you to have that ability to distinguish, alright, is this a piece of information that we cannot afford to have misinterpreted? If that's the case, then we need to meet about it? Or is this a decision that I need my fellow decision makers that may or may not be in this team? I need them to fully understand I need to make sure that they fully understand the implications of what their decision will have and what it is that I'm asking of them. Right. Have that meeting. It's understanding what is your need, from, from whatever interaction you're having. And I think Logitech does a great job at that. It's like many companies, we can sometimes suffer from meeting overload. That's why we have no meeting price. You can see anytime to get actual work done. But I think overall, it's a matter of you'll start to see within your teams, if you're over communicating, you'll start to see blank stares, right there, there has to be that ability to read your audience and see, okay, are they actually absorbing what it is I need them to absorb? And if they're not, like you said, Change the channel, what you're communicating with them that it might work.
Jon Taylor 33:10
One of the things I want to tee off of that you said was just this idea of reading your audience. So I think in mops, we kind of touched on this a little bit in terms of going down that technical path where Phil gets the timeout button. We love to go to take people to what I call acronyms city, but outside of our little insular bubble, we don't actually know what those acronyms mean. One of the things that I think is really important for mops folks, I'm curious, if you agree, is the idea of celebrating wins. And being able to understand what is a win to an organization? How do I celebrate this publicly at whatever form that you may have? Whether it be a all hands meeting or a Slack message? How do as a mops team determine what is a win? What is a win worth communicating outside of our group? What's a win that's worth celebrating within our group? And how do you coach your team on this.
Debbie Mayen 34:00
So I'm very fortunate that Logitech as a company is very much now the culture here supports celebrating wins we actually even have a whole systems that are called logic things where there's different options for you to recognize people different levels, right and then it can like you said it can be something that's just interval within a room up to monetary gifts to ended recognition and all hands on meetings. That so that really helps that from a company culture it's very much so embrace and within our team we always were very tight unit we always anytime I like to celebrate both personal wins and professional wins within there. So like when we have meetings we have very casual conversations and anything that somebody wants to bring up from a personalized they we all celebrate as a group. I think that helps people helps keep people motivated and sort of connected to each other, especially when it's all virtual. I think that's important. I I think it's important also to be genuinely happy for the small wins to the large wins, right? Any team leader who doesn't celebrate our team member, achieving even something that in their mind is small, in their team members mind could be huge, right? We're all different levels. So we need to respect that we need to respect the fact that it's he, I might have been that might have been my mountain a while ago. But it's no longer because I managed to check to konkret. Therefore, it is my duty to celebrate my team member climbing that mountain because one day, they'll be in my position, right? Molly said, my goal is to honestly to have my team members eventually become with people that I, you know, reporting to, or, or something like that. And I would love to be treated that way, as well. So I think it's very important to make it clear that all wins are celebrated, but also make it clear why and make to just say, this is why we're celebrating this because this has this impact on our group on our departments on our company. Right? It's, again, it all comes down to communicating clearly.
Philippe Gamache 36:17
Yeah, such a great answer. I feel the why are we celebrating this is sometimes easy for moms folks to understand, Oh, we're sending out our first monthly product email. And if you're not involved, you're just like, okay, cool. This is one email. What's the big deal here that I don't understand the mountain that then the boulder that you had to push up hill and the people that had to be involved in all the steps that were taken there, and the person that accomplished it, live that day in and day out? So I love that point there, Debbie? I know we're getting short on time. One question we asked all of our guests, at the end of the show is the topic of happiness. And I feel like we did a good job talking about the humans behind all that martech and not just the martech today, but Debbie, you're a mother, a Mar tech enthusiast, clearly a mops leader. You're a comic book and a Disney nerd. You've got a lot going on in your life. One question we ask all of our guests is how do you remain happy and successful in your career? How do you find balance between all the things you're working on while staying happy? I know you said work life balance was a big deal for you.
Debbie Mayen 37:21
Yes, yeah. Well, I'm gonna give my Disney nerd and so Hakuna Matata. Oh, that's nice. I Gosh, I wish I didn't worry about anything. No, it's I always like to say that. Like we have a view on work life. And this balance it seats. No, come down to the three G's essay, grit, Currys and gratitude, you have to always give it your best. Give it everything that you can at that time. And it may look different at different times. Right? It's having experienced that myself when I went back to work after my second daughter was born, three months, three, and she was three and a half months when I went to work at Molex my previous company. So you can only imagine what state I was. I'm not only a newborn with two children of love, which is a new boy, but also starting a new job at a huge company. And so I gave it my all my all, then might not look the same as my old now because I'm not sleep deprived. I'm not. So what I know for a fact that I gave it everything I could. And that's that was my grit at that time, right. But then there also that's what leads into grace. I have I've learned to give myself and others grace, based on what you can do, right, based on how this is my 100% today. And if for whatever reason it wasn't enough, then I give myself grace. And I will work on ways to get there the next time, right. So I think that's very important. The mom guilt is real. I think I can speak for most mothers, when I see we're never 100% sure that we're doing mom, right? We're either it's we feel guilty because we can't dedicate 100% of our time to our children, and then we feel guilty because the time that we're spending our children, we can't dedicate it to our work. So mom guilt is a very big thing. And I think it's very easy for us to fall down that rabbit hole. I think that's where grace comes in, and just giving yourself permission to not be everything to everybody. And then the last one is just gratitude. Just being grateful for everything that I I've had the opportunity to work at a great company that allows me to work remote, which in turn helps support my, my my mom life and I'm able to make my children breakfast every day and drop them off at school. It's I'm eternally grateful for all the opportunities that have come my way. I'm always grateful for I try to be as grateful as I can for everything that I have given my problems. I always come across these students really on whatever social media they like. And I always see posts, I sort of change the mentality from iPads to to I can I have to pay a mortgage? Well, I can pay my mortgage, I have to do this. Well, I can do that. And that's I really tried to incorporate that into my day to day life. I think those three are what's helped really keep me from losing my mind. Worrying and grace and gratitude.
Philippe Gamache 40:31
Such a great answer, Debbie, thank you so much for for sharing that. I hear a lot of you're the mom guilt in my wife, like we have a nine month old at home now. And the sleep deprivation is still very real. I can't imagine going back to work at three months. We're in Canada. So my wife is off for a bit longer than three months. So yeah, all the respect to you for going back to the grind with the newborn and how early you did that. But yeah, such thank you so much work on it and somehow powering through it. Thank you so much for your time, Debbie. This was an awesome chat. You shared some really amazing advice. We'll we'll be packaging this up with key takeaways to share with our audience. But yeah, really appreciate your time. Thanks for being here.
Debbie Mayen 41:12
Thank you so much for having me. It was such an honor. I really appreciate it. Awesome.