Philippe Gamache 0:00 What's up guys, welcome to the humans of martec podcast. His name is John Taylor. My name is Phil ganache. Our mission is to future proof the humans behind the tech so you can have a successful and happy career in marketing What's up everyone today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Angela Cerrone, Senior Director of Marketing operations at Optimizely. Angela started her career as a dental assistant before moving to academic advisory and then trying out dental sales. She moved over to marketing playing social media and community roles for various companies and eventually she found her way into marketing ops. At skill software. She learned Marketo and got her certification. She later freelanced at CSU and then joined a proposal automation software company that would later get acquired by upland software, a portfolio of 25 plus cloud apps where she would eventually get promoted to director of marketing operations. She learned took on the role of Senior Director of Marketing ops and demand gen at Sauce Labs, a continuous test and error solution, where she transformed the ops function for enhanced efficiency and aligned with sales and GTM. And today, she senior director of marketing operations at Optimizely, an enterprise digital experience platform. Angela, thank you so much for your time today. Really excited to chat. Yes, thank Angela Cirrone 1:30 you so much for having me. Philippe Gamache 1:31 This episode is brought to you by our friends at knack. launching an email or landing page and your marketing automation platform shouldn't feel like assembling an airplane midflight with no instructions. But too often, that's exactly how it feels. NAC is like an instruction set for campaign creation for establishing brand guardrails and streamlining your approval process to knacks no code, drag and drop editor to help you build emails and landing pages. 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But you should instead focus on carrying the ball to the next stage. So you got a problem. Take it to the next stage. And mops you can give be given like a new problem every single day, multiple times a day even. What's your advice on being confident in your skill sets and overcoming insecurity? Angela Cirrone 3:59 This is a big topic with my team all the time. And we always talk about you know, empowerment and recognizing that we don't always have the answers. And that's okay. But be curious and be adamant about trying to find answers, I think is is another thing that helps build that confidence. Because if you know you have either a network or you can use AI or just Google searching and you establish those skills and really enhance those skills, then when you're hurt when a problem comes to you that you have no idea how to solve at least you can start to break it down into little things and start tackling it. So I think really that curiosity and being resourceful will help with those doubts of your confidence along the way. I mean, I've certainly had plenty of times and continue to have plenty of times where I'm I feel like I'm losing my confidence. It's like, oh, no, I don't know what I'm doing. But if you look around a lot of us don't always have the answers. We just know how to find them. Philippe Gamache 5:08 Yeah, it's a great point, knowing where to find them is most of the battle in marketing ops. And thankfully, we have so many awesome communities and resources to, to learn. I know myself, like when I was picking up Marketo. Early in my career, like John talked about Marketo, there are no use Marketo was one of the flirt the first platforms used also, it was my first taste of discovering like, hey, a lot of people have very similar problems, and they found solutions for it. So like reach out to someone or like post something on the Marketo nation community at the at the time. I don't know what it's called these days. But we joked that there was a ton of different companies that you worked at. And I know that like part of that growth for you is not just like learning through doing but at upland software, there was a ton of acquisitions that happened. And there is the theme of growth through acquisition for that part of your career. And I think you said that, like during your time there, you witnessed like a whopping 14 Plus acquisitions, including the company that you were part of before, like you guys kind of merged in there. So from a tech stack perspective, going through the hoops of managing that many audits and that short period of time, and all the integrations must have been a huge learning accelerator. So walk us through that experience. Angela Cirrone 6:30 It, it certainly was such a learning accelerator, it also really tapped into that lack of confidence and insecurity of not knowing what to do, right. So I that the story behind that is kubity and was acquired, thrown into the pot, like, okay, here, you're going to be with this company in the field, there was a lot of emotions tied to that experience. It hadn't been something I had experienced before. So being part of an acquisition was new to me. And then I was also given six months notice. So essentially, there, they said here come in, you have six months to move the acuity and work or systems together into uplands and, but side note, hey, we don't have a formal marketing ops team, there's an opportunity for you to basically sell us on why we need to have that. So they had pretty much outsourced to an agency that was really just doing campaign operations, they really weren't doing much more than that. So it was a very cool experience. Just so multi-dimensional, quite frankly, within the concept of acquisitions, but also trying to establish a marketing ops function within the organization. So when we kind of break it apart and talk about the acquisitions, and the mahr tech stacks. You know, the fun fact I did, you know, establish a marketing ops team there and stayed there for about three and a half years. So, you know, did something right along the way in the beginning. But through that experience, and going through those 14 acquisitions, each one of them was so different than the other, right? So you figure, the company that we acquired the tech stack, they acquired, really just pausing when we had that acquisition, and looking at, why are they doing the things that they're doing? So not just the tech stack? But like, the why behind it helped us uncover? Are there things that we can learn? So this is one thing I really appreciated about upland, is we looked at each acquisition as an opportunity for upland to be better. And think about, is there something that this organization is doing a tech stack, a process of structure of their teams that we can implement? So I'll pause there, I'm happy to go into kind of how we dug into the mahr tech stack and our process with acquisitions if you'd like to go deeper there. Philippe Gamache 9:10 Yeah, it's exactly where I wanted to go. Actually, like I was going to ask you what the differences were from maybe the first couple of acquisitions, or like the tech stack audit slash migration that you did for the first few mergers versus what that process looked like what your framework was towards the end like acquisition 13 or 14? Angela Cirrone 9:32 I mean, super great question there. Because there was such an evolution in that process, as you can imagine, right? Like we started to build muscle on how did we do that right video, and I think was the 13th or 14th acquisition, the company had done that they have done smaller ones that they had just kind of dump data in. So we'll start with that. Literally. Let's take all the leads from this company and put it into this. So you can see Like the Salesforce instance that we walked into, and the Marketo instance that we walked into. So, when they were asking me what we should bring in, immediately, I'm like, cut the dead weight, like, why are we bringing in people that haven't had activity in a certain period of time. So what we did do over time was established criteria of like, we kind of talked about it as pack the suitcase, not the whole house. Right. So the same with the data, but also with the tech stack as well. So definitely, we improved the process in terms of what's the criteria of the leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, campaigns that we decided to bring into the system. We got really specific. And there were a couple of organizations that had maybe like an event, a customer event that we said, you know, what, we want to keep that history for a little bit longer. So maybe we'd make an exception there. And I think that's the key component. Each one of these was unique. So sometimes we did make exceptions to the rule, but 80% of it was pretty consistent across the way we think about tech stacks. In the beginning, I think we're probably a little bit more lenient and allowing a company to continue to use a particular tech. As you can imagine, like the contracts that we had, we had contracts, let's say they signed a contract a month before they get acquired, and it's a three year contract. So we weren't, we were faced with certain decisions that we had to make based on those decisions that company made prior to acquisition. So as we move forward, we really honed in on that. Not optimizing Apollon one model really thinking about how do we do things with a singular approach. So really taking the tech stack, if let's say they had, I don't know like a Lusha. And that's one of those the sales prospecting tools The team used, but we use cognitivism, it was a pretty simple thing where we would say, Okay, we recognize you use latia, we, as an organization have chosen cognitivism, for our tech stack choice, we're going to migrate you over. But if that contract was, you know, had two years, there were times that we? Well, we either cut it and let it let that contract just die, which is, which broke my heart because you think the contracts already paid, or we would bring them in, you know, at the end of the contract. So there were a couple of different ways that we dealt with that. It was very interesting to see the amount of tech some of these very small organizations were having when they came to us. Philippe Gamache 12:54 Yeah, the contracting must have been like a big factor in the decision, obviously. But so you kind of talk about this idea that like, through a few acquisitions, upland had this like standard of okay, if we're acquiring this company, and they're using x for lead gen. Sorry, like, we're already using a like, this is our center of excellence. Was there ever a time though, like when you were debating, like x versus a and discovering all these new like alternatives, where you were just like, Huh, wait a second, like maybe this company that we just acquired, this tool that they're using here is actually quite a bit better than what we decided to kind of keep using in the future? And then you ended up like inheriting that one or you like left, the one that you had there? Like, just curious. Angela Cirrone 13:44 Yes, that was something we were always looking at. Right? Like, it's a great opportunity for us to expand our knowledge as marketing ops professionals of what's out there, right. So if it's not in our normal daily practice, I don't have any, the only one example that comes to mind in terms of what you're what you're referencing, that I can pull right now is actually the transition into leveraging Kaposi, which was actually one of the acquisitions. So Apollon acquired, proposed, I think it was 2019. And we brought it in and actually implemented it as part of our tech stack for for content creation. And so that was one time that I can think of, but for the most part, we had a pretty consistent best in class tech stack that really wasn't challenged by some of these new things that companies would come up with. I think one of the challenges that the companies faced was maybe they had like a point solution tool that was just like solving one, one problem and are Our methodology was, yeah, we had a very tight budget like budget wasn't there to go by technologies to do one thing that was more of a nice to have than a must have. So that was hard for folks. You know, we tried to solve in other ways. But yeah, it was a very interesting, dynamic. I learned so much. And I'm super, super grateful for that experience. Jon Taylor 15:25 One of the visuals that goes through my head as you're talking, and it kind of pertains to the next question is this idea of building a wall using Lego piece by piece by piece. And I think when you apply that to the marketing operations professional, like we build our skill sets, largely in the field, like we're learning the stuff as you go, like, there's no playbook for how do you make a decision around what martyr martech, to keeper to get rid of? How do you transition a database from one place to the next place? And I know, like a lot of us in marketing operations are self taught. Like, there's, I'm sure there's a few courses, we've interviewed somebody recently, who teaches a course. But like, there aren't really any great courses to learn this material. Talk to us a little bit about like being self taught on the job for the folks who are listening or maybe earlier in their careers, like what are the signpost that they should be looking for? What are the Lego blocks that they should be looking to build upon? To have a successful career moms? Angela Cirrone 16:20 Well, very interesting. Because if you think about mops today that were what from where it is today, to where it was 10 years ago, it's such a massive transformation. So I think that the biggest piece is, the biggest skills that you need to have is you need to have curiosity. You need to be logical, and be able to think about one of the questions actually asked sometimes when I'm interviewing folks is like, what type of games do you like to play? Because I find it quite interesting to see the correlation between mops folks or like logical folks. And the correlation between like, I'm, I was a big Tetris fan growing up, like taking the blocks and figuring out how do I have to turn it to get it to fit? And that similar to what you're saying about Legos, and like building your skill set? It's it's very interesting, because you're constantly trying to think about things differently. And like, how does that fit into this not? So you have tech stack, you have process, you have people, all these things have to flow together. So when I think about my experience, you mentioned I was a dental assistant, right? Like, people go what, you are a dental assistant, I was dental assistant for eight years out of high school. So it was when I, for a long time, I thought, Wow, that's so different. But then I when I broke it down, and I thought about it, my day to day in dental assisting was thinking about how do I make sure that the the operatory was set up for success for the dentist to work efficiently and effectively with the patient. Right. So I was presenting those operational skills back when I was setting up operatories with cotton rolls and gauze, right? So it's kind of funny when you think about that. It's interesting, though, that you call out in terms of like learning on the job and, and having courses and I, I would love I've seen an uptick in courses available for marketing ops professionals, I think it's fantastic. I would love to teach one someday, for sure. But I also see huge value in that that practical application, because you really can't experience or put in a program, every different scenario someone's going to come across. So how do you give them the foundational skills that will make them feel that they have the ability to find the answer, even if they don't know it? Is is what I would, how I would approach that. Jon Taylor 19:01 Yeah, it's fascinating because I think with developers, for instance, there's this like being a self taught developer is quite possible because you can work with all the tools in real time you can solve problems, but even then you have to be thrown into the, into the fire, so to speak, to really test your skills and become, you know, top tier marketing operations is, at least in some part is handling all kinds of challenges that happen and arise day to day that you may have never seen. This Philippe Gamache 19:28 episode was brought to you by our friends at customer IO, oversold the note legacy marketing automation platform that is still struggling to update its user interface. I've done a tour of duty with all the major marketing automation platforms and many are definitely similar customer I O is the most intuitive and beautiful platform. I'm talking about the industry's top visual workflow builder to design and implement your unique messaging strategy. 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As you might know, I'm pretty opinionated that the future of martec is composable. And that the single source of truth for your marketing data should be your data warehouse. Since this helps marketers solve an age old marketing problem getting real time complete access to your customer data without needing to write a line of code. Also, if you want your own face as a humans of martec style image, we're doing a fun monthly raffle with census for a personalized t shirt, enter to win at get census.com/humans. Jon Taylor 21:16 Something else that you called out just as like a follow up, I want to chase the thread a little bit is this idea of curiosity, like so many guests that we talked to talk about curiosity, and like, I'm developing this thesis that is like the the foundational skill for marketing operations, like you're curious, and you're excited to dig into problems, this is the career path for you. But when you're interviewing, you're trying to build a team. How do you, you know, identify people who are actually deeply curious? And then for people who are listening who may be in an interview? How do you express that? Like, how do you express curiosity? And how do you identify it? Angela Cirrone 21:51 It's a tough one to F to identify. I mean, I think I've been I've come across people that I thought were way more curious than they actually presented when they started, right. So it is a hard one to judge I, what where I am now versus years ago, when I was kind of digging for that is I love when people tell stories of examples of how they've approached problems. And when you hear how they how they actually addressed, they were handed this tool to solve it, walk me through the steps of how you how you solved it. And depending on how they some people don't want to get into too much detail. They don't know really how much you want to know. But I would encourage people to share, like, the thoughts that went through their head, like, I think that's something a manager would want to hear is okay, it was presented as problem, I thought about four different ways that we could potentially solve it. I started researching on this particular particular path, and realize that was a dead end and then went to this one and dove into some of the like, we want to hear examples of this like, or I do I would love this is hey, I went on to that companies that vendors website and looked at their university materials to see what that was telling me and see if that was something that could solve the problem and and things like that. I think that helps present your curiosity and your eagerness in terms of trying to propose potential solutions and be resourceful. Jon Taylor 23:30 So that gets me thinking about just deploying tools within the team. One of the things that I think a lot about is this idea of like the carpenter, as the marketing operations professional, the the tools don't necessarily make the professional, but they can help the professional move faster, better deliver higher quality. I'm curious about your approach around delivery martech, and how you use martec to augment the skills of your team? Angela Cirrone 23:54 Yeah, great question. So when I when I think about this question and a couple of things that you hit on about moving faster, and and more efficiently. While I think that can be the result that we're all hoping to achieve. And I hear it all the time. Oh, well, can't we just get a tool to do that? It's like, yeah, short, but let's take into consideration everything that goes into researching the technologies that are available to us, documenting our requirements, having all these demos, implementing technology. And then once it's implemented, it's not just complete, right? Like, we need to think about, what's the strategy, we're using this technology? Is everyone aligned with the strategy? Is everyone trained on how we're using this? So instead, in many ways, we look at how much additional work is it going to take from the marketing ops team or other teams in the business to make it actually proved to be more efficient, right. So there is a level of work that's involved to get that level of efficiency I think for skills and the tech stack, you know, I work with my teams on thinking about things, exactly the kind of what I just described as, okay, what are the requirements? What are we looking? What are we looking to accomplish with this technology? Let's think about the technologies that are out there. And then bringing in I'm in the process of implementing a new technology now. And it's really leaning into the resources these new technologies have available, also tapping into our networks, any other users using Zen technology, because hey, can I grab 1530 minutes on your calendar? Let's walk through how you're using it. Are there any gotchas? So well, that's not necessarily skills? To answer your question. But these are things that I think are really helpful for teams that are taking on technology that they may not have used in the past. So I think the skills if we were, if I was to call it a few skills, it does tie back to curiosity, being, you know, eager to dive in and press some buttons and know that you're not going to break things, right. Like, having too much fear associated with being a perfectionist and not wanting to break anything, can actually be a hindrance in marketing operations. Right. So definitely, that I think, you know, just thinking pragmatically about things, not trying to overcomplicate. So like a very simplistic skill set or mindset, I think is really beneficial with some of these technologies, you don't need to do it all at once. Right? Phase one, here's what we're going to accomplish phase two, once we have that stable, let's mature our use of whatever it is that we're implementing. Philippe Gamache 26:53 Yeah, that's such great advice. I feel like it's, it's easy to forget that when you get lost in the potential and like seeing that end journey, and you just want to get there as fast as possible. But remembering to walk before you can start running marathons is very important in integrating martech tools. Angela Cirrone 27:11 To add to that, yeah, go for it. It's also setting expectations externally to your to your customer, your internal customers, right. So they see this shiny new object and like, oh, my gosh, we can do all these crazy things with it. Yeah, sure. But marketing ops needs to be really adamant about a successful implementation is going to look like this. And this is how we want to approach it. Because if if you implement it too fast, then that's where all the problems arise. And everybody's upset and doesn't trust it. Right. So I think we as as team members need to be really, we don't need to control everything. Like that's not what it is. It's just about setting a good foundation and helping people understand the why we choose to do things the way we do. Yeah, Philippe Gamache 28:01 great advice. It feels like so far, we've we've talked a lot about martech, and some some people stuff and process and training. There's another pillar of mops, though that, you know, kind of reporting and analytics. And I was curious to get your take on this. I was chatting with a listener recently on the show who is currently hunting for new director of marketing operations role. And one company he was interviewing with their 200 person plus company, this, this person would get two or three direct reports. They're looking for a director to own both martec and analytics, including multi touch attribution, and analysis strategy. What's your advice for people who you know, because in some companies, those are kind of two separate roles like and I'm curious to hear at Optimizely. Like if the data team owns like dashboard building, and a lot of that analytics stuff. And Mark at marketing ops, like is more focused on on martec. But I'm curious what advice you have for folks who are looking to specialize in a sub area of marketing ops, like analytics, or martec. And maybe chat about, like, what you're seeing what you're seeing about, like these reports, opposing forces of employers looking to consolidate functions into a single person, when really, you know, those could be sub teams, or at least two people. curious your thoughts, sir. Angela Cirrone 29:21 Yeah, I mean, I think you all have probably seen the amount of posts with these like unicorn job descriptions, right. I think it's unreasonable to expect to have someone that's really really killer at analytics and dives into the operational process flow. Right. Like I think that those while they can be complimentary, and you can find people that do really good at both, I think it's a lot to ask in a to 200 person organization for one person to own all of that. Now that said, there's there's ways around that right. And I've been in organizations where I was responsible for the A weekly, me this was long time ago, but like weekly MQL reporting and talking about the progress in the conversion, as well as I was building all of the marketing campaigns in Marketo, and owning the Marketo instance. And, and those sorts of things. I think it's possible but there needs to be reasonable expectations on delivery, prioritization, even D prioritization. I think as an as a culture, we always talk about prioritization, but we actually need to start talking about D prioritization. What do we need to D prioritize to make room for the other things? In it Optimizely, we do have a go to market analytics team, I actually report into go to market strategy and operations. So I've kind of ventured from always reporting into marketing to having the ability to report into a central ops function here, and I am enjoying this type of structure, I think there's a lot of benefits, I know there's conversation around terminology, revenue ops, go to market ops, whatever that is, I go to market ops seems like a very logical term. And it makes a lot of sense when we're thinking about the the work that we do. But so we have a go to market analytics, team, marketing operations, but I also have a team member that is focused on forecasting, insights, budgeting and planning. And he does an incredible job leading those conversations with our CMO and our marketing leadership team on what what we're seeing from the data. So our analytics teams are responsible for building the dashboards, they're also partnering within the business. They're part of the conversations with the CMO and the marketing leadership team, but the team member on my team is, is having those deeper dive conversations, looking at patterns and things like that. Jon Taylor 31:56 You mentioned, I want to dive into this a little bit. You mentioned reporting into the GTM ops function. I think that's actually really fascinating. I don't have any experience here. So just maybe for my own edification, do you mind like talking about what the difference is you feel like are on the ground as an ops leader reporting into marketing and now reporting into a GTM ops function? Like, how does it look for you? Why do you like it better. Angela Cirrone 32:19 So I think we've done a really great job here at Optimizely, in terms of the way we've structured it. So while it is reporting into GD GTM ops, and the central function, I do dot line to the CMO, and I am part of the marketing leadership team. So they're, that having that close alignment with the marketing team and making sure that, you know, I view my role and my team's role as as stewards for the marketing team, right, like, so when when I'm in conversations with our revenue ops, sales ops, team members, Customer Success ops, team members, we're having conversations, and I'm representing marketing, I want to be that seat at the table, having those ops conversations from that perspective. So what I think the major difference that I see is, I have a stronger alignment with the ops teams, I have more visibility into all the projects that are going on from an ops perspective. Then previously, when I reported just into marketing, I think I had kind of this kind of just a very high level of the projects they were working on. But now I'm getting pulled in, hey, Angela, this is going on, and we're looking at this, how does that impact marketing, I think it helps increase that collaboration and the communication of the ops team. So I am appreciating that level of collaboration. Jon Taylor 33:43 So that's super cool. Thanks for giving us insight into that. And I mean, just in terms of where you're at with Optimizely. Like, I'm assuming you guys have a pretty decent budget in terms of a tech stack and being able to support multiple initiatives from a marketing technology. But something you said earlier around the acquisitions, I kind of want to rephrase my question, because you're talking about how you guys in the previous rollout plan, were acquiring smaller companies and kind of surprised by how much tech they have. Like, I don't think it's fair to say that smaller teams don't have as much tech, sometimes they have more tech. So I'm curious from from kind of a more mature organization perspective at Optimizely. What advice would you give for martec Humans and marketing operations folks at smaller, scrappier startups who are trying to build a modern tech stack but may not have all the human resources and budget to do it, you know, at such a pro level as Optimizely. Yeah, and Angela Cirrone 34:38 I think I tend to be very minimalistic. So I think that the organizations that I've stepped into I've walked into these kind of Hornet's nests of over complex process built out in Salesforce and Marketo and had to untangle that Maybe, maybe my approach is wrong? I don't know. But I think it is a very logical approach to think simple. What are what are the key things that we need to solve for? Let's start there. And then we can add on and get that increase that level of maturity. I think people at smaller organizations, it depends on where the company is, right? Like, if the company is in a growth trajectory, they're willing to spend more budgets. So it's like, oh, well, let's just buy something to help with that. And that's kind of where I think it starts to bubble and expand into these, like I said hornet's nest. Um, but, so my guidance would be to think, like, there's no need to over an engineer at every single tech stack that you can get your hands on to think about the foundational one. And then the ones that you need to, you know, take it a step further. And, and build that roadmap. You know, one thing we didn't talk about as some of the lessons I've learned from working with certain people in my past, and I did work with CES, too, for a while. And, you know, they talk about the marketing, marketing ops roadmap, and it's so important. And I think you should have a tech stack roadmap as well. And think about your now next later of like, okay, this is where we are, especially smaller organizations that only have a couple of resources, just filled it out in a way that's digestible, and that it also sets the expectation within the business of where you want to go. Philippe Gamache 36:33 Yeah, such a great point. We had some cool conversations with Darryl Alfonso and Chrissy Saunders to talking about like, productizing, your martec roadmap and how to think of it like a product team and like prioritizing, like pieces of it and stuff like that. But something that is on your current roadmap that you talked to us about before we recorded was data operations. And I wanted to get your thoughts on this idea of like data quality and data enrichment that you're going down the path right now, like you mentioned that in the fall, your team expanded to include data operations, and you own the data enrichment strategy. Maybe walk us through the journey, so far of implementing some of these tools and partners and what that looks like so far. Yeah. Angela Cirrone 37:21 So I was fortunate enough to come into optimizing we already had what was called the data stewardship team. So these were a group of folks that were monitoring data quality implementing, they were in the process of implementing some data enrichment work. And that reported into sales operations. And then we did some analysis took a look at all the requests that were coming in and made a recommendation to actually split it out into two teams. So one more focused on kind of the marketing, I would, I would we do call it data enrichment. But I think it's more about top of funnel, data quality and data enrichment. And then you have kind of the sales operation side, which is more later stage, data quality and data enrichment. And so those teams work really closely together, we were able to establish both teams, one in marketing operations, one and sales operations, and they are part of our Bangladesh, Dhaka office. And they were like I said, they work really closely together. The culture there is phenomenal for team collaboration. So we really appreciate that. But the data operations function is so critical to the work we do. This team has a vast amount of responsibilities from monitoring, overall data quality, establishing our data enrichment strategy, what are the key data points that we need to enrich? Demographic technographic excetera? But also thinking about like, what are the vendors that we want to be partnering with for that data? So there's a lot of questions to be answered that can't just be done by one person. So I'm grateful to have that team. But it's an ongoing effort, right? So you're not going to just again, plug it in and let it run this, this team's constantly looking at net new data coming through, why are things happening the way they are, and they have a great view of not just changing data to make sure it can sync to Salesforce or whatever, you're looking at it going. Is this a common thread? I'm seeing okay, what can I work with the marketing ops team to make changes in the process that will make this flow better? So you know, I'm really I really drive that home with the team is like we they need to have that view and they've done an incredible job. Now happy to talk about the tech stack and stuff we've chosen. I just don't know how much detail you want there. Philippe Gamache 39:57 Yeah, I know we're we're getting close on time. I'd Love to tease that out. But maybe JT, you go to your next question there. Jon Taylor 40:07 So something I've seen it with some of my colleagues in my career is almost like there's what I call the engineering dilemma where the best engineer gets promoted to a people management position. This can work out really, really well, especially in marketing operations where like having chops is part of the job. Like I don't think you can be a mops leader without a certain degree of chops. And other cases, it doesn't work so well, because people management has its own stream of skill sets. I know in your career, you've managed to balances both quite well, I know you've do are trained in life coaching, growth and development. So I'm just curious from your perspective, about the the ability to kind of go from people management, to mops management, to strategy to tactics, and all back again, when running a mops team. Yeah, Angela Cirrone 40:52 it's, it's an interesting conundrum that we find ourselves in because we do I think, good marketing ops leaders have a level of technical understanding that helps them lead their teams, right. Like, I don't have to be the expert in like an from an engineering perspective or integration perspective of some of these technologies. But I do need to have a level of understanding so that way, I can have compassion and empathy for challenges that my team might face. So it is an interesting one, when you call out the moving engineer into a leadership function, I think it all depends on the person and their aspirations, right? So if someone's just thrown into it, and they like being an IC, and they don't have any desire to manage people, then that's going to be a failure right off the bat. But if you have someone that has that technical aptitude that has an interest in people leadership, I think it can work out really well, because they can take that technical understanding, and help educate and uplift some of their team members if the team members need additional skill sets to grow, to continue to grow their career. Philippe Gamache 42:06 Yeah, great answer. I think that there is a lot of training and Momsen, like just having that understanding of maybe not being an expert in every single tool, but knowing the art of the possible, because oftentimes, you are working on strategy, and like developing that roadmap, and even though you have a lot of your team members doing some of the implementation, oftentimes you're put in a position to make strategic decisions. And if you don't know, some of the latest capabilities of your stack, like you're the blind leading the blind, almost right. So Angela Cirrone 42:37 I'm thinking like, the person may have that technical aptitude but not be strong and project management prioritization. And that's where it can go south, right? Like they could have this really amazing team that does all this great integration work with technology and process, but they don't do a great job of communicating it. And having priorities set and committed to having those conversations with leadership. So it's an interesting one, I think that the right person will dig in and want to get better at that project management prioritization piece. Philippe Gamache 43:15 Yeah, great answer. Angela. I know we're, we're short on time we gone a little bit over there. Appreciate your, your time today. This is a question we ask all of our guests at the end of the show. We know that you're a senior director, human and dog mom at trained life coach, life coach, a yoga teacher, as well as a crossfitter. We ask everyone on the show, this is like how do you remain happy and successful in your career? How do you find that balance between all the things you're working on while staying happy? Sure. Angela Cirrone 43:45 Happiness is a big component in my life, I'm not sure that you saw but about 14 years ago, I created a Facebook page called Be happy, stay happy. And at one point in time, it had over 900,000 fans so and the mission for that was, was promoting happiness. And realizing like happiness is something that you choose and it's within you. It's not in external based on external resources. So for me, it's it's a mission in life to always remain happy and positive. And while the negative is like the our normal, that's kind of like a default, the easy way out a lot of the time. So making that conscious effort to remain happy. I do it through those things that you mentioned that I am right, being a mom, being a dog, Mom, I'm a French Bulldog, dog advocate, breed advocate. So I really believe in that breed and adamant about breed preservation. So I find ways to take my passions and expand through fitness, yoga, all those things. I think that's what helps me remain focused in my work as well, by having those external hobbies and things that I'm passionate about. Philippe Gamache 45:08 Awesome, great answer, I think 900,000 fans is is pretty wild. Angela Cirrone 45:13 It's down to about 600. Now, but that's, you know, I'm not as active on it, admittedly, as I used to be, but I do hope someday I'll kick it back up a notch. Philippe Gamache 45:24 Yeah, that's awesome. Your answer was really, really good there. Really appreciate your time today, Angela. This is a super fun conversation. Thank you so much. Angela Cirrone 45:33 Yeah, thank you. Really appreciate time. Philippe Gamache 45:44 Folks, thank you so much for listening this far, we really appreciate you being here. Just wanted to call out two things before we go. 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