Philippe Gamache  0:07  
What's up, guys, welcome to the humans of martech podcast. His name is Jon Taylor. My name is Phil Gamache. 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? Arun today we have the pleasure of sitting down with fish Gupta, marketing operations manager at Databricks. Fish started her career as a business analyst in sales ops at riverbed, a network management company. She later joined Redis Labs, a real time data platform as a marketing coordinator, and got her first taste of analytics and reporting covering social, paid and events. She then had a short contract at brocade, where she was a marketing ops specialist and worked closely with her data science team to develop marketing reporting using bi she then joined VMware, the popular virtualization software giant just before they were acquired by Broadcom, and she was both a marketing analyst and later shifted to growth analysts, where she was focused a bit more on go to market strategy. And today, fish is marketing operations manager at Databricks, a leader in data and AI tech valued at more than $40 billion fish. Thank you so much for your time. Today, really excited to chat. 

Vish Gupta  1:18  
Likewise! 

Philippe Gamache  1:20
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Jon Taylor  3:00  
So let's start off with growing up in a tech household. I've seen a couple of your posts on LinkedIn talking about your mother, in particular, as a leader in the artificial intelligence space, like they grew up in the tech boom in India and have now transitioned to AI and cloud computing, like tech is literally in your DNA. Now you work at Databricks and AI data company. Talk to us about the impact of growing up in an environment, in your career choices.

Vish Gupta  3:23  
So I grew up in America that my parents moved from India, and the reason that they went into tech wasn't necessarily because it was their dream. My dad wanted to play cricket. My mom wanted to be an architect. And they kind of both as a result of their circumstance, they weren't, you know, dirt poor or anything like that, but they weren't particularly well off. They really wanted to move up many levels in their lifestyle, and that's what led them to tech. And when they moved here, that story was really well known to me, like tech was really this opportunity to build a better life, and growing up around that, I feel very fortunate. Not everyone gets to grow up in Silicon Valley. So, like most of my network was in tech, the role models I had around me were in tech. And initially, I really rebelled against that. I wanted nothing to do with it. I wanted to be a psychologist. And after I, you know, tried the psychology thing, I kind of realized, you know, for for the lifestyle and the kind of life I want to live. Actually, tech is an opportunity for me, too, and so not the most romantic of choices, but it was certainly a very practical choice for me. And growing up, I also saw my parents just like constantly upskilling and really being fascinated by tech. It's really hard not to be influenced by that, and I've always been very eager to learn the tools and technology that's been, you know, available to me. Very

Philippe Gamache  4:45  
cool. Yeah, such a cool story. I didn't grow up in Silicon Valley myself, but I coded with, like, some of your sentiments. My dad's a video editor, videographer and photographer. My mom's a web designer. So we. Were having an Easter dinner the other day, and they found an old picture of me, three years old on a Macintosh computer. And I was like, Damn, I've been using tech for for quite a bit of time. So yeah, like, you like, it's definitely influenced a lot of my career path and where I wanted to go and stuff. So yeah, landed in marketing operations at some point, like yourself. And one thing that I was really curious to ask you about, we chatted with a couple of folks about this idea of building this like Frankenstein martech stack. And I wanted to ask you, like, how do you navigate this delicate balance between harnessing marketing automation martech tools for efficiency, but avoiding creating this Frankenstein system that has a bunch of parts that are somewhat connected, but not really connected, and still tackling like complex processes. Curious your take there?

Vish Gupta  5:49  
Yeah, it can be hard, especially if you've inherited a bit of a Frankenstein but when you have the opportunity to build or, you know, get rid of things, I think the question that you have to ask yourself is like, what is this tool doing? And tools don't solve problems. People solve problems. Processes solve problems. So like the things, the tools that I've been able to bring on, they solve a problem for the business, and then the tools that we offered really are either no longer serving a purpose or they didn't get good adoption, right? And automation, I think really falls in very easily, into Frankenstein. People view like, Oh, if we automate everything, that's the solution. It's often not the solution. If you have a clunky process, if you have something that's constantly changing, that's not a good candidate to get a tool. Or, you know, automate. It's really much more like, how can we simplify this as much as possible? And then once you've simplified it, that's when you want to go automate or go get the tool that's going to further simplify it. But I think a lot of times people just view tools as a savior, and they're really not a Savior. I

Jon Taylor  6:55  
was listening to your interview with on the Mad kudu podcast. It was a really great interview, by the way, so I encourage people to check it out. I think it's confessions of marketing ops or something like that, and you're talking about the idea of setting up self service models for campaigns. I think this is a really interesting discussion point. I want to kind of dive into it. Phil and I both come from an analytics company where, like, self service Analytics was really the mission in marketing operations, I think, like self service, seems like a little bit of a moving target. We want to enable the end users to be able to be effective. But it's also training and getting the right tooling in place and avoiding this frankenstack They were just talking about, um, I know you also mentioned that you're working with NAC to build and deliver emails. Maybe you can talk a little bit about your experience with, like, that specific tool, about how implementing self serve work there and then, like, more generally, about the jobs to be done and getting to that ideal self serve state. Yeah.

Vish Gupta  7:53  
So I'll ask you a question. Have you guys ever been to like, a buffet, like a fresh choice, or a Sweet Tomatoes, or something like

Philippe Gamache  8:00  
that. I don't know any of those names, but big fan of buffets, yeah,

Vish Gupta  8:04  
it's kind of like self serve, right? Like the food is already prepared. You're just picking what you want and putting it on plate. I think when it comes to campaign ops, that's the world that I've spent a lot of time in enabling self serve. It's kind of like that there are certain tools, and knack is one of them, where they're not going inside of your Marketo and like cooking up a full campaign, but maybe they can just self serve those emails, right? Maybe they can just stack the salad on their plate. And Knack really allows you to do just that work in their system, not have to go into Marketo, similar to other tools like splash, for example, right? It keeps them out of your specific system, but allows them to create those emails and also remove some of the burden on your stack. And that's not back next. Integration with Marketo is so seamless that really the work that remains with the marketing ops specialist on our team that run these campaigns. You press that sync button, you QA, your flow, and then you execute, right? But it really is a win win situation. I find that when you think about self serve, a full self serve model, I kind of agree with you, could be quite dangerous to have multiple users in Marketo finding the tools that allow you to self serve some component of it can kind of be a win win for both the ops team and for the affrontation team.

Philippe Gamache  9:25  
Very cool. Yeah, I feel like if there were too many people in the marketing automation system, retention might be a tricky thing on on the marketing thing to do. We joke about some of the bigger legacy platforms here a little bit. But yeah, it was interesting to hear that Databricks uses Knack we actually just stumbled upon that information during your confession episode with with Mad Kudu. I don't know if you inherited it, or if you were part of the team to bring it on. Just curious about, like, maybe chatting more, how it kind of embeds itself with the current process right now is how to. Just what you just shared. Yeah,

Vish Gupta  10:01  
so actually, nap was brought on to replace a tool that hadn't really met what we wanted it to do. I was involved in the decision, but I wasn't alone. There were quite a few champions of the tool already on our team, and we also had a leader that was really confident in our team's ability to select and implement the right vendor, which always helps. So certainly involved in the decision, but not the sole decision maker there, but it's been a really great decision for us overall. Nice,

Philippe Gamache  10:25  
curious in that process, that decision making committee, what was the mix between how many marketers were part of that decision, versus how many people have, like, more of an engineering background?

Vish Gupta  10:37  
Yeah, so I would say zero people had an engineering background. We did have some technical staff on the upside, more of an IT background, I would say a couple of them, marketers in this scenario, were not as heavily involved. They had been involved in the tool that we offboarded, and we kind of learned from that experience that perhaps your stakeholders should give you their requirement, and you should select from their requirements, what are the right tools? Give a few options and then give a case why you selected that, but they don't necessarily need to tell you what tools to implement. Very

Philippe Gamache  11:08  
cool, yeah, I was asking that to lean into my next question here, which I think you you kind of guessed already, but having worked at some pretty big enterprise outside of just Databricks, VMware, also, I'm sure you've been part of your share of build versus buy debates internally, or maybe you think this whole like build internally is crazy, but I'm curious your take here. And regular listeners of the show are going to be tired of me referring to him, but we're eventually going to create like a pillar episode and mash up different guests answers and different takes there, but his name is Casey winters. He's a former CPO at Eventbrite and instructor at reforge. We shared this article with you ahead of our chat today, so hopefully you got a chance to look at it. But he titled it the problems with martech and why martech is actually for engineers and for folks that are hearing this for the first time, his arguments are essentially that martech is simply a response to engineering constraints and that martech will decline due to competition from in house engineers and platform limitations. The whole thesis is essentially successful. Martech companies are going to be catering to engineers, not marketers, because of the rise of in house engineers who can build tailored solutions for their companies. What's your take on this fish like is martech Ashley for engineers,

Vish Gupta  12:28  
I think it's, it's a nuanced answer I'll give you. So I think it's really an off putting statement for me when a company tells me, Oh, we built our CRM in house, right? But that's, I'm not an engineer, right? So to me, I'm, like, my value is that I know these popular systems like Marketo and HubSpot. So I think when it comes to, like, finding the right talent, I would have a lot of questions, like, I'm My parents are both engineers, like we talked about, I don't think Martex is the sexiest thing for an engineer to do. Maybe that will change. But I also, you know, I had our head of operations here, not marketing operations, but head of operations asked me, it is what we're building here, world class. And I think when you talk about world class, that's where it gets interesting with engineering, right? Because an engineer can look across the stems, not just your Mario tech stack, but where is your customer data living? Where is your product data living? And I think that's where I'm personally running into challenges with the systems that are, you know, the big vendors, like, how do you bring all of that in app data in? How do you have that customer data in and in a compliance way? And should that even sit with just the marketing department, or is this like now becoming an operational project, right? So I think you can do some really interesting things when you go there. I don't think martech will ever be just for engineering. I also think it depends how you approach your martech team. I think the value of a martech person is less so about the tools and systems. Some people might really disagree with me here, so I'll prepare for that. But I think the value is being able to see like this is what the marketer wants to do here is how we can enable them to get there and measure and make sure that they're doing the right things right to be able to have that holistic system view is really the value there. And I don't know that until this function is much further built out, that an engineer is going to be that for you.

Philippe Gamache  14:16  
Yeah, why do you what do you think it is that like martech might not be quote, unquote, for, for some gene of some, some engineers like, Why? Why is the idea of like building a product that's being used by users more appealing than building an internal product that's used by users who grow revenue for the company? Yeah,

Vish Gupta  14:37  
I think when it comes to martech engineering, I think it's a bit of a thankless job. And I'm sure, like as ops people or analytics people, you might have experienced that, right? You build something if it works well, they're happy. If it doesn't work well, they're really unhappy. But even if they're happy, they're not going to scream from the rooftops. You're not going to get people work for a marite company and you're helping them. Build out tools right now that you generate so many more customers, that's something you're going to get credit for, right? And you're going to be proud of. But I think that thanklessness of it and the amount of engineering work that's available to engineers that is rewarding, right, is going to be always a bigger draw to me than something of thankless of being in house and creating these tools that people will use. But like, not really think. I

Jon Taylor  15:24  
want to loop back a little bit to the two points that we made earlier, one around the self service, and then one around, like the processes. So we made a really good point earlier, around how people make processes. And then we were discussing a little bit about, like, the self serve component of it, like putting in this tech. Like to me, I think a lot of what you're discussing here, like marketing operations, has this engineering component to it, like really thinking deeply about the solutions you put in place, and then managing those solutions, iterating on them, making sure users are satisfied. Like typical product engineers will do all of this type of work. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you envision, like, modern marketing operations within this model, like, what is the engineering perspective, you know, for marketing operations, person who's looking to deploy tech around that, like self service angle? Yeah,

Vish Gupta  16:15  
I would say. So. I'll give an example that I'm currently working on, and that's we have this automation tool, right? And it has the ability to go and use APIs to go talk to Marketo, to go create a program in Marketo. Now, should we go and use that tool to go automate every single type of program we have? I think not like we're not there yet, right? Then I'm going to be okay. So somebody gets that program done, and then they want to change an audience. How are they going to do that? Okay? Now they want to swap out an email. How are they going to do that, right? You're you have to build a standardized set before you can automate. I think that's the job of a product marketer, right? What are the requirements to use this tool? What is a good use case for this tool? And really, it's about training and enablement to some degree too, which I'm not sure if that falls into the purview of a product manager, but it's certainly what leads to success when owning a product and rolling out the features and functionality of it. So I think what I am trying to get better at, I think what my team is trying to get better at is really scoping out, like, what are the right use cases for the right tools, and what's the level of effort, right? So if we have something that's small, event type, that's easy to automate, we have very standard templates for it doesn't change often. That's a good candidate for our, you know, automation tool to go and then automate. Then we have programs that we're testing out, and they're going to change every quarter. Probably not such a great use case to automate. But how do you create the talk track around that? How do you explain to non technical food the level of effort involved in automating that, and why you should and should not automate that, right? So how do you say that in a nice way, in a way that makes sense, similar to how maybe product marketing does it?

Jon Taylor  17:58  
Yeah, I think there's something subtle there around developing these instincts as a marketing operations later to be like, when is it appropriate to go down this like automation rabbit hole, and when is it appropriate to be like, No, we're gonna just do manual effort for a quarter until this gets so painful and so obvious that it needs to automate. How have you honed your skill set around this? How have you kind of developed this sense of when to automate things and when to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, so to speak. Yeah,

Vish Gupta  18:23  
so I would say I've learned by doing doing the wrong thing often teaches you how to do the right thing in the future. One example of an automation that I did that was good is we moved off of an internal tool that we had built to a tool that was going to be, you know, more scalable for us. There was going to be documentation and things around that. I think if I were to approach it like a framework now, like, what I tell myself now is, if I was to design a framework, what I would do first is create a set of requirements. Like, what are the things that are necessary for something to be automated? Is it standard? Do we have template? Do we have someone who can code it? Do we have someone who can document and maintain it? What's the level of effort, right, having that scoping document and then when you're done automating it, really making sure that you've documented it, so that when that talent lead, you have someone that can easily take it over. So that's kind of like the framework approach that I've learned over time. So when I fix something that, you know, there wasn't documentation and things like that, that's been really successful for me. What has been less successful for me is when I was given, you know, requirements by the business to get something done, and I kind of knew internally that maybe that wasn't the right thing to do, but I didn't speak up, or I didn't, you know, push against leaders for whatever reason. And I think over time, having done it, I now have the top track to be like, Hey, we really shouldn't do this, and here's why. But it can be hard when you're starting out, you don't know what you don't know, right? So I think in a future, I forget the opportunity. I. Think I'd love to, like, really flesh out, like, what is the framework to automate or not automate something in martech? Very

Philippe Gamache  20:06  
cool. Yeah, great answer. I'm curious to, like, have you expand on this idea of, like, diplomatically pushing back on requests that come in from the top. Like, I think it is, it is a key skill and something I'm still learning how to do myself and my day job. What's what's worked well for you in in instances where you know you're you're competing internally with this idea that, like, I was hired to be an expert in this, and this is what I think we should be doing about this. But then the top down folks are saying, This is how it's going to be done. Just make it happen. Like, how do you deal with that internal battle of being diplomatic about, you know, like staying your case and and explaining why you shouldn't do something, but then still, at the end of the day, like storming and norming and doing what, like the the leaders are expecting you to do, yeah,

Vish Gupta  20:54  
I would say that don't do it alone. Have a stakeholder champion or somebody who's partnering with you to roll out and solution has been key for me. I find that when the stakeholder comes and lives in our world and understands our challenges, then they themselves are a lot more supportive and help you communicate the why, right? So I recently was on a project where we're rolling out audience management across our marketing org, and there's system limitations to doing that. And I think because I've been working so closely with them and communicating so consistently, they have started to understand, and when a marketer see that stakeholder that's in the same position has the same problems as them, also advocate it. Advocate for it. With you, they understand, I also think I've particularly been in a position where I came from that marketing world, I understand the challenges that they've faced, and really being able to be empathetic with them. The other thing I would say is, like, try it if you really have to roll out a process, like, set those boundaries, like, Hey, we're going to try it for a month, maybe two months, and then if we find that actually this really didn't work, and here are all the challenges, let's revisit this in two months. So give yourself that kind of like out, and give them that out too. If you're rolling out a process they're uncomfortable with, encourage them to try it for a short amount of time, and then let them know that if it doesn't work, you'll be open to solutioning with them something else.

Jon Taylor  22:23  
As a former marketing operations professional, I love the idea of process and digging into especially the project management process like I love asana and Trello and all these other tools. I know you spoke at mobs of Palooza last year about how your team leverages asana and marketing ops, especially across like multiple teams. I just want to nerd out. Can you unpack a little bit about how your team uses Asana?

Vish Gupta  22:43  
Yeah, sure. So I love Asana. I had never used it before joining Databricks, and I just, like, very quickly got up to speed, because they have just designed such a seamless product. When it started here, we were using Asana to kind of like a board to manage tickets, right? And I would say we were very limited in the automations that were we were using, and there's a lot you can do, right? So how I initially started using it was similar to what I inherited, which is really the like project board for ticketing. And then we we found that at that time, Asana had some limitations, and our team had some limitations, where we were doing one type of intake for every single marketing request, the same way you intake an ebook is how you would submit a webinar, and that just clearly wasn't going to work. So we built that out further, initially with a multitude of forms that integrated into Asana, but now it's much simpler. You can have like 10 forms in one Asana project board. So we've built out different types of intakes, and then, because we already have licenses for everyone in our company, in the operation side, so our web team, our brand team, et cetera, we joined it together. So instead of having a demand gen person or field marketer, then one ticket to brand, one to get to web, one to get to ops, we really brought it all together and created a form that will allow people to fill out all of their requirements across all of these different teams, and then as brand finishes the graphics, they'll pass to Web. As web finishes the landing page, they'll pass to ops. Once we're done with the whole build, we'll pass to digital or social media. And so that's been one really great use case. We're also starting to use Asana to do strategic annual planning. We're starting to use Asana to do road mapping, to do t shirt sizing for different types of projects, and then map them across. So I think, I think there's many more things we could use it for, but that's kind of the use cases today. Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  24:36  
love Asana. A big fan of using it myself. Tried using it at a couple different companies. I feel like sometimes it can be overwhelming with like, all the features and the powers of it. We tried using notion for project management at my current company, outside of just being this internal wiki too. So this episode was brought to you by our friends at customer IO, oversold on a 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, but customer IO 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, powerful AB testing features inside your workflows, not just on subject line sends hold out testing functionality to see the incremental impact to your messages. Queue draft mode, so you can queue a messages and conditions in production with real users before anything is sent. Copy workflow items so you don't have to repeat the building process again and monitor campaigns tests and keyless membership growth from your personalized dashboard. The icing on the cake, marketers using customer IO have seen a 20% increase in conversion rates from strategic messaging, so stop using clicky old tools and adopt a multi channel approach that creates joyful interactions with your customers. Start a free trial without a credit card@customer.ao and tell them we sent you. This episode is also brought to you by our friends at census, the number one data activation and reverse ETL platform loved by Activision, Canva, Sonos notion and more. As you might know, I'm pretty opinionated that the future of martech is composable and that the single source of truth for your marketing data should be your data warehouse. Census 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 martech style image, we're doing a fun monthly raffle with census for a personalized t shirt. Enter to win at getcensus.com/humans you Yeah, there's, there's so many ways you can use some of these tools. I think, like, one thing I often struggle with is, how do you balance this idea of doing the work and cataloging in Asana and putting updates in Asana and changing statuses in Asana? And eventually, when you get to a bigger team size, you need to, like, get a bunch of people in tune and being like, all on the same page about certain projects. But like, I don't know for myself, like, at startups, like, we're moving so fast that, like, I find it distracting sometimes to just like, okay, instead of giving an update to someone on Slack, I'm gonna, like, pause my current flow, go in Asana, find that task, change the status for it, put an update or something like, maybe touch on this, this idea of like, how do you balance this? Like, doing the work versus living in a sauna? Because, like, you could spend your whole day in Asana, just like, updating things and tagging people in there, are you also using slack at work? Like, are there other things in there, just curious about that, like the dilemma of project management tools.

Jon Taylor  27:44  
Yeah,

Vish Gupta  27:45  
I would say, first of all, you shouldn't feel bad about that. Like there's, you know, the right people for the right stage of the company. I think there's the right tools and processes for the right stage of the company. And when you're a startup, you have to move that. So when we started, and when the company was smaller and ranked, you know, closer to 28 marketers only really our builders. That's like our in house folks that were building the campaigns were responsible for keeping their tasks up to date. And even then I was assigning out the task, I was tracking and doing the reporting. And they had one person really focused on that, and you as the builder, really were building the campaign to be like, tick. I did this, I did QA, etc. But there were many on the team that were doing their own projects, and they maybe weren't using Asana at that time, because we had to move fast. Direction changed all the time, and if we spent our time at that stage being in Asana, documenting everything, I don't know that we could have grown as fast as we did, right. But now, as we scale, as we become a bigger team, as we have people that can be dedicated to these things, we have people that are like dedicated program or product managers, and they're really keeping the team accountable. And I'll often go in there, I have a team of two, a developer and a program manager, and sometimes they're not so diligent, but they're getting the work done right. So I'll have that weekly status check, and I'll mark the task done, and I'm constantly reminding them, but I think unless you have something that's like a deliverable for a stakeholder with a very tight timeline. I don't know that everyone needs been all day in Asana. Maybe once a week you do a status update, either yourself or with your team. I personally don't have like, a morning routine where I'll go into asana and I'll keep it up to date. But I do have like, an end of week routine where I'm like, Okay, what did I get accomplished and what do I need to move to the next day? So I think that's how you find the balance. And also, if you are a smaller team, I don't know that it's necessary at that stage, sometimes you really need to spend all of your time to get the work done.

Philippe Gamache  29:32  
Yeah, super cool perspective. I I like the advice there. I think that sometimes there's decisions to bring on project management tools like Asana to like, have a way to give visibility to C level folks on like, what is my team doing? And I feel like sometimes it's the leader's job to be aware of the fact that, like, hey, my team is moving too fast. I can't have them spend 10% of their time updating projects in Asana. But. That aren't necessarily cross collaborative and are just doing that so you can get visibility on stuff like instead, I'll meet you weekly, I'll give you a list of what my team is working on, where we're blocked on stuff. So, yeah, I really like your advice there.

Vish Gupta  30:14  
Yeah, I certainly agree, and I'm seeing that too as I, you know, talk to different people in the industry, I'm like, Oh, really, you have a team of five, and you're, you're bringing on Trello already. So, yeah,

Philippe Gamache  30:25  
yeah, Trello, I feel like at least is a bit less overwhelming. But yeah, we could probably go down like a UI discussions about project management tools. I want to ask you about a use case for, for first on our, like, other tools you've used in the in the past, um, specifically around this idea of, like, the spaghetti of email sends as an ops team that you sometimes have to deal with, I know, in a big company like Databricks, with what, like 1000 plus person marketing or, I don't know if LinkedIn is way off on that, or if it's kind of close on the mark. But what strategies do you recommend for mastering this idea of, like, email scheduling to ensure that you're like enhancing productivity rather than causing chaos. Maybe you can share, like, some of your favorite tips or processes to listeners to have this idea of like orchestrating a symphony of email rather than a catastrophe.

Vish Gupta  31:15  
So I'll start off by saying we have about 7500 employees, but I think we only have around 200 marketers, so not quite dollar mark. LinkedIn

Philippe Gamache  31:23  
is way off there.

Vish Gupta  31:27  
So in terms of, like, orchestrating a symphony, we have always had some form of an email calendar in Asana since I started. What we didn't have was, like actual people governing what was in there. So people would, like self serve and put in emails, and the email they would change, and then they wouldn't move it. So it was really a very useless thing for a long time when I was here and again, I had this vision that took several years to execute online. Very early on, I had this vision that we were going to have calendar view of all of the emails tied to the program ticket, and if things move, they would move, we color code it by a team or some other way, and we finally achieved that, I would say, in the past year. And Nithya, if you're listening, thank you for making my imaging have true. That's somebody who reports to me who has really a detail oriented mindset and has set this up for us. And what we do is we use Asana to link. When a ticket comes in, we ask people like, Okay, what is the date of your emails? And we have a standard two emails per program that we run. We use those dates to add it to a calendar project in Asana, and then Nithya, works for me, goes in and looks at the tickets like, okay, these are the audiences that's going to let me color code it. We've tried to automate some of that, but it changes so fast. We ultimately decided to keep so bless her, but she does it for three months out right now. And then we create views by audience. So once you've tagged things appropriately by audience, by region, etc, you can start to see the patterns like, Okay, we really want to email this audience eight times a month, but we're seeing 16 emails this month. Where can we start to consolidate those emails so we're not overwhelming our audience, right? So that's kind of how you start creating that symphony. Before we had this what was happening is we hadn't designed a process, so we were hitting our communication limits all the time. People were really mad at us because their programs weren't going fully recognized, and we hadn't been proactive in our approach. Proactive in our approach. So moving to this model has really helped us, and Asana has really helped us with our calendar of youth. I think you can do this in a spreadsheet. I honestly do think you can. And for a long time, we tried that, and it worked fine. Like to have a spreadsheet you and then you have somebody manually create pivots and so on and so forth. But I think just having a plan in place before you get to that stage where you're sending out so many emails is super important. And then being proactive, like, when you're designing things, and I did this a lot when I started, I designed for, like, the immediate problem. But I didn't think, okay, my team, like, keeps doubling, and the, you know, company keeps doubling in size. Is this gonna scale? Right? And some things just naturally do Gale, like our intake, our email management process, not so much. So now, when I find I really think about, okay, this is what we're doing with email today, but what happens next year when we're going to move more to like a nurture or an omni channel model? How can I start to think about that? Now,

Jon Taylor  34:20  
I love the deep dive into this process. It's, it's very cool to see how you've arrived at this point. One question that immediately jumps into mind as you're discussing this was, like, the soft skills, right? Like mobs is so challenged, I think sometimes with the communication side of things and, like, managing expectations, right? How do you what's your advice for folks you know, trying to manage expectations internally. Hey, I have this email. Why isn't it going out tomorrow? I just thought of it. I needed it now, and having some of those tougher conversations internally while still keeping friends. Yeah,

Vish Gupta  34:51  
I think that I have lost friends sometimes, right? It's a hard line to walk, and I think you really need to have a strong lead. Better backing you up, especially if you're lower in the totem pole. Now, if you are at that leadership level, I think it's on you to kind of position yourself. I was reading something on LinkedIn the other day that like rev ops, and I think this is true of ops two, we're not here to pick sides right? We're here to do things in an efficient manner and guide different team. But when you're a marketer, your email is the most important in moths, it's like, okay, what is really the most important thing is it getting out this global program that, for years and years, has performed and generated X amount of revenue? Or is it the smaller send that is important to this one marketer? But like, if we can't get it done, the impact to the bottom line is going to be smaller, right? So starting to think in that lens and explain it to them in that lens is important. And then I think at you know, when you're not in that senior leadership position where you're in a peer to peer communication, work with them, empathize with them, problem solve with them, not against them. And you don't always have time to do all of these things perfectly, but I think as long as you're starting to think about it, and coming from a place where you're solutioning, as opposed to just saying, No, I think for the most part, people are understanding,

Philippe Gamache  36:08  
yeah, sometimes there's, there's casualties and friendships along the way. When you're you're building process there, but we're all here to grow the company and be efficient. So sometimes it's a necessary evil. But yeah, I really like your your answer there. I feel like we, we jammed a lot on on email and some of the martech components. I'm curious to ask you about all the different like specialties of marketing operations, especially at a bigger company like Databricks. I'm sure the marketing ops team is spread up and different sub teams. So I was actually chatting with a listener of the show who has given us some constructive feedback on some of our content, and he's currently hunting for a new director of marketing operations role. One of the companies he was interviewing with was looking for this director of marketing ops to own both martech and analytics, and analytics in this purview included multi Dutch attribution and analysis strategy. So I'm curious to ask you, like, what's your advice for people who are looking to specialize in one of those sub areas of mops like analytics or martech or process and the opposing forces right now, at least, of employers who are looking to perhaps consolidate those functions into a single person or a smaller team?

Vish Gupta  37:24  
Yeah, so we're all trying to do more with less. Right in this I would say that it really depends for that director level role, I would imagine that you're not being asked to go in the data and create all these like different snippets of the data and then put it into Tableau. But at a high level, maybe you're being asked like, Do you know how to get from A to Z? Do you know how to hire the right people that are going to give you this right? And I think at that higher level, the higher you go, you do need to have a bit more of a broad lens. Now, I think it can be much more challenging if they're looking for someone who is hands on in Marketo and in Tableau. And you know, unless you're a very senior person to have enough depth in all these multiple system can be quite challenging, especially if it's more than, you know, a team of one where you kind of like you're going to do everything, but maybe you're not going to do everything so amazingly sophisticatedly Well, it just needs to get done. I could imagine in that scenario, you know, be open to it. I've been open to it, and it's really helped my career to take on different facets and do what the business needs you to do at that particular moment in five but I think the director piece is interesting because I've had leaders here at Databricks that have owned both those pieces, or multiple pieces, and maybe they don't know how to do it all perfectly when they start, but Then they either learn or they hire someone that they manage to then own that piece. But I would say, the further you get in your career, I would think actually specialization, if you want to be a leader, is maybe not the way to go, but really having that broad understanding of like, how does martech work together? And I would imagine some companies even want you to own web in that director of martech role. So I think if you're going at that leadership level, stay broad, if you really want to specialize in a specific tool, I think then it's a lot harder to pivot from being like a very great Marketo admin to then also being a really great analytics person. I think that is a little bit of an unrealistic demand from a company need to expect to have that caliber of talent. Can't you sleep econ? I'm sure there's some unicorns out there, though.

Jon Taylor  39:30  
I think with marketing ops, we often see like marketing ops tend to be more technical, and they take on more of these roles by default, certainly in the beginning, as new roles come in. You've worked at some pretty technical companies and Analysts and Technical Marketing roles. I was digging through your Databricks website and reading about the dawn of and I'm going to butcher these acronyms, ml ops and LLM off. So machine learning operations and large language model operations, like we've talked so much on the show about marketing ops being like this. Stewards of these new technologies. How do you see this playing out with these types of new roles coming in within companies like, what is your advice for folks who are maybe just getting started in their career? How do they future proof their careers with all this new great tech coming out?

Vish Gupta  40:13  
Yeah, I would say, take a deep breath and take the opportunities that come so many people cold call. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I answer everyone I can, I really do, because a lot of people answered me when I was starting off. I think when people start off, they should really take the opportunities that come figure out what works what doesn't work, in terms of like LLM ops and ml ops, I think that is actually a very different skill set than what mops does. Like in grad school, I was training models. I was sometimes using a tool to train a model. I think that's where mops can maybe help. It's like, if you're going to onboard a tool to do it for you, onboarding the tool and making sure it meets the requirements, that's something I see mops doing. But when it comes to like, data cleansing and training a model, assessing the accuracy, you need a specialized skill of like, statisticians. You need people that are really good at cleansing the data beyond even you know, your standard analytics within marketing function, but really a true data engineering function. So I don't know that. I agree that that's something that should fall in mops purview, maybe a business operation purview, and then you bring in that specialized talent. But I think to ask ourselves to go and get trained in these things. That's a different career path, at least for right now. It's a very interesting one. I went to grad school for it. I think it's fascinating work that can be done there. But I don't necessarily know that that sits in mops, or will ever sit in mops.

Jon Taylor  41:35  
What degree of like fluency Do you think you need like? Do you think that you need any fluency in this type of area, like, when we're talking about the dawn of AI with, like, all these martech tools like this is, this is such a huge topic for us. Like, what degree of fluency should you know, like, basic level, none you get by No problem, just kind of knowing your marketing automation platforms. Or should generally, marketers have some impetus to go out and and really educate themselves. What's your take? Yeah, I

Vish Gupta  42:01  
think a basic level of understanding, like, how do you actually get an algorithm created, understanding that I don't know, that you need to know exactly, like, what are the different types of models that are out there, right? But having that rudimentary understanding, and then I think we can rely on tools out there, or like products that will be created for us in the market tech space, right by really great data engineers and data scientists, and then we should learn to use those tools and learn that part quickly. There's a lot of tools that are already being created out there. People.ai is one I can think of. Clarify, AI is something I use when I was in grad school. It's for images training models based on images and like, understanding things and knowing what questions to ask. Like, okay, what match algorithm did you use for this? Because if you understand that, you know, like, did they filter out for things that were zero matches, or did they include them in their model? Right? So starting to have that rudimentary understanding, but I don't think we need to exhaust ourselves and like, Go understand the nitty gritty of it, unless you want to go be a data scientist, in which case, yeah, go right ahead. But I think we have a lot to learn in the current tools and technology, and I think we can start to push some of these vendors to sooner rather than later, bring on that data engineering talent so that they can leverage some of these things and the tools and products that we already existingly have, and then expand our knowledge in that way. But I think it goes back again to the build versus buy conversation, right? Do we want to go and be a martych engineer, or do we want to be stewards of the tools and really focus on, how can we help the business achieve their goals with these tools? Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  43:33  
I think that's great advice, like basic level understanding. We had the Brittany Muller on their show, former SEO scientist at Moz, who's really deep down the LLM trained right now, and when she talked about this topic, she really emphasized marketers roles in this, being like QA, in a sense, like understanding what goes into The data and being mindful of all the biases, and when the model, whether you're using like Gen AI or like image generations, like really being mindful and having a critical eye of the output and understanding like the racial biases and in all the other biases that that are part of those. So yeah, I really like that. That answer there?

Vish Gupta  44:22  
Yeah, I definitely think the QA part is super interesting. I don't know if you guys are doing it, but I've started using a lot of different models. I think Dataverse has their own. I tested that out the other day, and then been using opening eyes chatgpt for a while, and like, sometimes when I look at what comes out, you have to get really, like, specific with what you're asking it to do, and refine it multiple times. And that's like, outside of ops, from a marketing point of view, right? Like, if you want to get value, can't just, like, ask it to write, you copy and not do any steps further, right? I

Jon Taylor  44:53  
feel like there's a process, particularly, like, with a tool like chatgpt, that's so accessible, where, like, the first couple moments you're in there, you're like. Whoa. Like, I can't believe this is happening. This is the future. But then you're six months in, and you're a power user. You're like, Okay, this stupid machine, like, so I'm gonna tip it 2000 bucks and then make it do what it's supposed to, but it still doesn't seem to do that. So I think, like, we're, we're definitely still on the hype cycle of AI, but you know, given your background and your education and your experience, like, I just want to give you an opportunity to kind of talk a little bit about, like, your thoughts on AI and martech and how that's going to be applied over the next few years. I think you probably have a really interesting take on this. So I want to give you, give you the mic for this one. Yeah,

Vish Gupta  45:33  
I'm cautiously optimistic. I think that there's a lot that AI does and a lot that it doesn't do, right? And then there's regenerative and generative AI, right? And those are different as well. I used AI to create my profile picture on LinkedIn, for example, right? That's a great use case for me. I think we can start to imagine that some of these things will get more refined over time, and maybe you won't be having to pay to, like, get corporate headshots done of your entire team as much, right? So I think that some jobs will be automated. I think some things will start to become of a higher value in nature, right? Like unmade products will be of a higher value in nature. And then in terms of, like, the work, I think there are that, unfortunately, with automation does come, you know, like, similar to the Industrial Revolution, does come some level of job loss. I think it's now up to us as a society to really come together and think about, like, okay, how can we enable this for the greater good, as opposed to just, you know, continue to drive up gentrification and make society a harder place for humans to live in. Do? I think this change is going to happen rapidly and the next five to 10 years, I don't I think we're going to start to see ourselves use these tools to make ourselves more efficient. But I think after that 10 year mark, really, no one can say what's going to happen, but I personally, you know, do want to make sure that I start to involve myself in the types of companies that are leveraging this for good and not for bad?

Philippe Gamache  47:05  
Yeah, I think that's a great take there. Vish, thanks. Thanks for sharing that. This interview is flown by. We're, we're close on time. And there's, there's one question we ask all of our guests at the end of the episode. You're a marketing ops pro conference speaker pops of Palooza last year. Cat mom, a mind body connection junkie. So curious. Your take on this here? You're also an inspiring ski expert and the gardener. 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?

Jon Taylor  47:36  
Yeah,

Vish Gupta  47:37  
I think gratitude is something I discovered early in life, my parents had this book in their bookshelf called attitudes of gratitude, and I remember reading it and just being overcome by like, this profound sense of like, we are so lucky to be here in this first world country, have a roof over our heads, have enough food to eat. Like, I'm so incredibly lucky to be here to be talking to you guys like, I think for me, I've always had this overwhelming sense of, like, gratefulness, especially with those immigrant parents we touched on earlier. You know, they moved mountains to get me and my sister here and give us these opportunities so that big on, you know, the things that keeps me happy is I constantly remind myself the incredible opportunity and like gifts I've been given just by being born in the right pace at the right time. The other thing is that mind body connection. When growing up, I did ballet and jazz, and that's always been a way for me to like, decompress and move away from what I'm thinking in my head. And when you move your body, you're so focused that you're able to turn your brain off. So I think combining that gratefulness practice with movement has really been key to keeping myself be

Philippe Gamache  48:44  
very cool, such a powerful answer, yeah. Definitely relate to both of those and super grateful for your time today and coming on and sharing your wisdom. Really appreciate it likewise.

Vish Gupta  48:53  
Thanks so much, you guys.

Philippe Gamache  49:02  
You 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. Number one, the best way to support the show is by signing up for our newsletter on humans of martech.com we send you a quick email every Tuesday morning, letting you know what episode just dropped. We include our favorite takeaways. So if you don't have time to listen to that one, no pressure. We have you covered with some learnings anyway. And number two, proceeds from sponsors this year to have allowed us to venture into video. We recently launched a YouTube channel where we publish full length episodes. So if you want to see our radio faces, check that out. That's it for now. Really appreciate you listening again. Thank you so much. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai