Balancing Strategic Projects and Tactical Needs in Ops with Carissa McCall

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman. I'm Naomi Liu. And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out there. I'm your host, Michael Hartman. Flying solo. But joining me today is Carissa McCall to talk about one of the biggest operational challenges that marketing ops folks have, which is how to keep strategic work moving, what I like to call change the business stuff, while juggling the daily fires and unplanned requests that come with running revenue operations or marketing operations. So Carissa is the director of revenue operations at Liquibase, where she leads efforts to align marketing and sales through process improvement. Capacity modeling and prioritization frameworks. She brings a thoughtful, real-world lens to ops leadership, especially when it comes to balancing vision and execution. Carissa, welcome to the show again.

Thanks, Michael. Happy to be back.

Yeah, we were just talking before we got on that, like, you were, you were an early guest. I had to, like, go remind myself. I was like, I think she was. And it was, like, right at about a year into our show. So, yeah, it's now 3+ years later.

That is crazy.

Yeah. So maybe start with the big picture. So when we talked before, as we were getting ready for this, you talked about building a sustainable capacity model so you knew what your team could handle, um, quick ad hoc needs so that you could avoid pushing strategic projects out, um, so you can keep them moving forward. What prompted that as sort of a thing that you realized you need to do and What does the practical, like, day-to-day look like for that?

Yeah, so I was hiring a new person for my team, and it was going to be like they were going to be joining about a month before the new quarter began. And I was already starting to think about, okay, like, what do I want to accomplish, um, in the next quarter? And I had always done planning and trying to build out a project plan of what I wanted to accomplish, but I've been a team of one for for so long in so many different roles. And I think a lot of us probably experience that, like we're small lean teams. And I was just like, okay, what if I really tried to think this through and not just think of like, okay, from an hours perspective, how much could I get done? It's like planning what's realistic to actually set out to do that's real, that's reasonable. And so I started thinking about like, okay, How much time do I actually have in a given week? And I started looking at my calendar and I realized, you know, I spend a fair bit of time in meetings. Like I'm at the director level. You are always gonna be split in between like having to be on those strategic calls versus having the time to actually do the thing.

It's a hard truth that people don't understand if they've not been in that role, right?

No. So I started thinking about that and I'm like, okay, well with this new person, like they're not gonna be on as many calls as I am. So let me try to think about, okay, what does like a, you know, 20-hour, 20-hour split look like for myself? You know, of having like time to work versus time time I need to be in meetings. What does like a 30-10 hour split look like for that person? Like 10 hours needing to be in meetings, like 30 hours being able to work. And then I really tried to look at it from like a, I'll like back up a sec. The first tech startup I ever worked at, like I was like a, you know, I was a BDR first, like, and then I was like a general like marketing coordinator for quite a while. And one of the things I learned how to do was project management. And I learned like you always leave like 20% of your time. Unplanned in case something goes wrong, you have a fire, something breaks, or you have an urgent project from leadership that needs to be addressed. So, I'm thinking about all these things and I'm like, hey, how do I plan this out in a really smart way? So, I started just doing the math. Okay, here are some of my KPIs, like as a RevOps function, as a RevOps team, what are the projects that need to happen to support those things? How much time will those things take? Like those big critical things that will move the business. And then just start doing the math of like, what can we realistically accomplish? And so that's kind of how I started going about it is just like, I tried to break it down into real numbers and like math of like hours and be realistic about it. What prompted me is like, I need to be organized, like, and not just, you know, think for myself. If like, this needs to be a real function and like a real team. I need to like really critically like think about this and put us in a position where we can actually accomplish the goals that we're trying to set out to do for the business. So it came from a place of like, it's not just about myself at this point. I gotta think about what can we accomplish as a team unit.

Yeah. So was that a relatively recent scenario that you went through this? Yeah.

In the last like months. Yeah.

Okay. So this is like really top of mind. Yeah. And you, you gotta be able to hand stuff off that is like understandable for the new person, right?

And help guide them, right?

Which adds to your Probably adds to your meeting overload and all that. The thing that all this implies, right? So let's say you size those out and everything else, like you still have to, you probably have some sort of sense of like which ones are most important to do, a prioritization of some sort. How, how did you go about prioritizing all those different kinds of things to decide what you would say do in this upcoming quarter or delay to the next quarter, or maybe If you were lucky, right? And you held out a little bit of your bandwidth through the quarter and like all of a sudden you're like, hey, we're going to have to be able to do a little more. What's the next thing you would do?

Never find myself in that position, but it's a great sentiment. Yeah. I, what was your original question again?

Oh yeah. But there's also like, how do you understand like the level of effort scope of each of those things? And then how do you then prioritize? Like, how do you think about prioritizing so you can slot them into A given timeline. Yeah.

So I have 2 elements. So in, you know, we use Asana and like within that I make custom labels for a lot of different things so that I can slice and dice and look at things in a few different ways. But I have an impact label. Like what kind of impact would this like have to the company? I have 3 labels, impact, low, medium, high. And so whenever, you know, we think about like effort, low, medium, high, I put it into We, there's so many things that we do that are really quick hits. Like it takes under an hour to do a lot of small ops things. Low is like less than an hour. Medium is 1 to 5 hours. And then high effort is above, cuz anything you're spending above 5 hours, like that's a lot of time to put into something.

Do you have a bucket that is for things that are sort of self-contained within your team or with a relatively small set of people? Do you do the same kind of thing for things that are much larger? Choosing an entirely new tech Platform?

Not really. And it's a good thought to do that. There are so many things that aren't our direct project. There's campaign operation, things that are just part of other teams that we're working with. But yeah, I don't think we've gotten to that level of maturity, but it's a good place to go to next to start scoping those things out. But like for an implementation, for example, I make all the subtasks of evaluation and doing a proof of concept if it's needed. It's like scoping out all the pieces of onboarding that need to happen. And yeah, I put that in the 5 hours or above. Like in my mind, I know that, okay, this is probably gonna take like 15, 20 hours.

Right.

How many of our tasks fall under that 5 hours or less? But then the third element that I look at is what financial impact does this have? I heard a couple of years ago, um, I had someone tell me, especially in ops, if it's not related to revenue, it doesn't matter. And it's true, like 95, like sure, there are things that may not seem like they're directly impacting revenue, but even things like data hygiene and inventory management, well, that could affect pipeline growth. Oh, if that's not cleaned up and functioning properly. So, you know, I put the labels of new business expansion, pipeline growth, like ARR growth. And so as I'm like planning things out, I'm labeling them. If I'm struggling to put a label how it impacts the business in some capacity, then that means it probably needs to stay on the backlog for a little while longer.

Yeah. Yeah.

So that's kind of how I go about prioritizing things and plan.

Do you consider things that are, I don't want to say cost reduction because it has all kinds of other implications, but like, yeah, maybe minimizing cost increases or increasing efficiency and throughput, those kinds of things that are not quite directly tied to revenue or profitability, if you want to think of it that way.

Those are usually the things that I'll still do anyway. Like that's that 5% that made it. So it's like, say if we have an attribution field that like the automation's a little funky and it like maybe needs some attention, that's not like directly really impacting too much right now. But if I don't get that figured out, like that could make reporting complicated later. We would just carve out like 5 hours of time to work on building out an automation further that could save us an additional 10 hours a month. Like those are the things that like I think what you're talking about, like the, it's the time savings, the efficiency. And yeah, like that falls in like that 5 to 10%. Like it's not directly seen in like revenue impact, but it's gotta happen at some point.

Indirect impact on, I think of it as I'm gonna think about profitability just because I tend to think about both revenue and the cost structure that affects that. So in terms of prioritization though, to me, there's like prioritization is one thing, but then deciding You've got this list of things and they're prioritized. Say you're, you happen to be at the time when you're trying to plan things out that you're heavy on the things that are the medium to high side of effort.

Mm-hmm.

How do you think about choosing the right mix of low, medium, high effort kinds of things into the available capacity that the team has?

I was doing this a little bit with the math, like that I was talking about of like kind of the available hours that we have saved. Like we have 5 things on the backlog that are really low lift, but like high impact, like really small changes that could make a huge difference. Like I'm going to try to attack those first because those are quick wins that can like help us improve a lot of things later. But in terms of like, Medium, I think like keeping that under maybe 4, like I try to think about things in terms of like weeks and the amount of time we have in a given week, like keeping that under like maybe 3 to 4 a month of like medium lift things. And then the high lift things need to be like 2 or less. And so as I'm like trying to pace those out, it all just depends too about the individual.

Sure.

Especially when you think about implementations or massive data cleanup projects or anything like that. But it's also just understanding that things need to happen in an order, especially when the end goal is cleaning up your CRM.

Sure.

There are probably 5 different projects that are encompassed in that, and they all need to go in a really specific order to make things run smoothly and to make your life easier as you're going along the way. So it's trying to like have that force to like look ahead and see like, okay, if I, this is the final place I wanna get to, what is everything involved in that? to get there and pacing those projects out, but being reasonable about it too. And sometimes you don't know until you start actually scoping out a project of like, oh, this is way more than I originally thought it was. And then you just need to adjust the dates of the future projects too.

So one last question on this, and then you said something I want to pick up on. When it comes to scoping these, do you have, do you do this like in some sort of formal, semi-formal way where you're scoring things, which I've done in the past, or are you doing it a little more just based on experience and intuition about So I had, I spent some time at a HubSpot agency earlier in my career.

Weirdly, having agency experience makes you think of things in terms of time. So it's like everything that goes into building a landing page start to finish, everything that goes into building a dashboard, depending on like the client's need. I know that it takes me roughly under half an hour to build an email start to finish, QA it, QA the list, and get a test Sent out to the stakeholder. I kept track of those things over time. So I have a rough estimate running in my head and that's how I'll scope things out. And that's how I definitely remember we would scope things out at the agency too, is just like, this is the rough time estimate. You put in a little bit of buffer in case something goes weird or wrong, right? Of course. Um, but yeah, that's how I do that.

Okay. So for the things that are fairly common, you probably have a rule like, this is what we generally expect it to take. You spend a little more time on things that are Outside the norm.

Yeah. Anything to do with implementing something new, if I haven't implemented it before, you just try to go piece by piece. I need to do the integration. I need to map the value. Like, this is how many values I need to map. This is the enablement that needs to be scheduled for the team. It's like trying to think it like piece by piece, and sometimes you're gonna miss stuff for sure.

Yeah, always.

But yeah, like it, and it really does like come from, you know, I think I'm still relatively very early in my ops career, but I've seen a few different scenarios a few different times now. And I'm like, okay, I have a sense for like how much time this should take.

Yeah. Kind of a rule of thumb, right? No matter where you're— okay. So you said something about being realistic about what things are going to take. And then you also mentioned like intentionally building in a buffer for even common things, which gets at one of the things I think a lot of people in this space, me included, right? I tend to Maybe be overly optimistic about what can be done. Basically, maybe because I think of like, everyone should be as efficient or as good as me, right? It sounds so arrogant, but which is no longer the case. Like if you asked me to go build an email, I would struggle today. So like, how do you think about that? What do you do to keep yourself from getting too optimistic and making sure that you're doing that not only for yourself, but for their team?

Fully, and to be fully transparent, I was just overly optimistic like last week. I think I go through these like ebbs and flows constantly.

Do you like major swing? Is you, is the variance from the line?

I can sometimes only if I'm being super stubborn. Like, no, I said I was gonna do these things this week.

Gotta be.

It's my own fault that I underestimated how much time this is gonna take. So I definitely get caught in that, just being stubborn and then saying I didn't estimate properly. Like, this is what happens when you don't estimate properly. But at the same time, I think Sometimes you get into projects and they just take way longer than you could have ever. If you uncover something and you're like, whew, I wasn't expecting that, it's an additional 10 hours to go through the data in a different way or slice things in it, look at the automation, cuz you found other automation that was related to something you thought was standalone.

It's like those home repair shows where they open up the walls and there's water damage or termites.

Yes, yes, exactly. Trying to be realistic is Week over week, like look at your calendar the next week. Is there work that's gonna potentially come out of some of those meetings that you may need to address right away? I think that's where building in more buffers, sometimes 20% is not enough, especially when you're a builder and also like a strategic person at the same time. Sometimes that 20% of unplanned time is not enough. It's a good rule of thumb.

Sure.

And like, that's usually what I operate on. Sometimes you're just gonna get overly optimistic no matter what, and it's gonna happen to us. But being realistic, I think, is being super intentional with your calendar and being realistic with your time. Like the time that you have, your time changes every single week. Like the priorities of the business could change, you know, in a week, in 2 weeks.

Right. Or there's an intense period in a campaign or a project of some sort, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Curious, a couple follow-up things. So one, when you had that example where you under— maybe underestimated something or whatever, Um, and you did the heroic thing and completed what you said you were going to complete on or close to the time you said, do you then go back and clarify with whoever it was for? Let's assume it was some sort of request from somebody to make sure that they know that, oh, actually the next time you ask for something like this is probably going to be longer because— Yeah. Okay.

100%. Because like I learned in that process too. If the teams that you're working with don't understand what they're asking of you, I think that's where, you know, sometimes if you, if you do the heroic thing and just get it done, it's like, oh, it wasn't too bad.

Right.

And you can convince yourself, yeah, it was quick and easy. It wasn't a big deal. It's totally fine. I got it. And then you remember it later and you're like, oh, I need to account for more time to do this next time. Sometimes you just don't know till you know. Communicating, overcommunicating is really important there.

Yeah, I think being very honest and direct about it, right? I think that's— and to some degree, like, I think I would be like, take ownership, right? Like, I did this, like, because I told you I would do it, and that's what I truly thought it was going to be. At the same time, like, I've learned now that, um, this actually is going to— like, for this in the future, if we want to do them So I think it's worth having, going through the, maybe what might feel like humbling or tail between the leg kind of conversation.

Yeah. And I've been going through that, I think a lot just in the last few months, just making a transition from marketing ops to RevOps. There are things that I understand the basis of like what I need to do. I have the technical skill and ability to do these things, but some of these projects, my first time doing them before.

Right.

I can do my best to estimate, but it's like, that's where it's constantly like learning and it's being as real as you can, but sometimes you're still gonna be like, whoop, underestimated that one.

Yeah. So I think that's part of learning, right? And it's—

Yeah. That's just growing in your career, I think, and doing new things and doing hard things.

Yeah. So you, you've got a team now. Like a lot of what we talked about so far is especially if you're a team of one or even just a really small team, right? Where you're mostly like, heavy player and coach, it's a matter of like you're managing your own time, right? Hopefully having some control over your own calendar. But then when you start having a team, like how are you trying to help the team overall manage the priorities and the commitments and maybe even helping them manage their own time and calendar personally?

I ask a lot because I make educated guesses on What's realistic? You know, especially for somebody else. But in reality, like something could take me 45 minutes and take another person 20 minutes. Everybody works at different speeds sometimes. So I always ask, is this realistic? Is this due date realistic? Is this timeline realistic? This is what I think is involved. Am I missing anything? Am I not thinking of something? Like never being so far removed that you lose the thought of how much work is this for somebody else? And like, did I give them knowing like Rough idea of their calendar, what other priorities, what other things are due around the same time, what could go wrong with those things that are happening at the same time. But am I being realistic? Am I being fair? I ask that a lot.

Yeah. I'm a big fan of a certain personal time management approach, right, based on Frank Lecovey model. Do you use anything like that for your personal time management?

What is that? I'm sure I have a rough idea. You might know.

Well, so if you're familiar with the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Yes. Okay, so Stephen Covey wrote that.

Yep.

So Franklin Covey planners, I had one for years, probably somewhere sitting in the stack of stuff around my feet 'cause I'm so organized. It was all paper-based, right? But part of it was, it was very much about integrating scheduled things and like to-dos, right? A lot, I think a lot of people struggle with if it's the to-dos don't get handled, especially if you don't manage your calendar, right? Because you need to allocate time to do them, even small things. So it's a framework for managing that and a lot of it's based on principles from The 7 Habits. It's not the only one, right? I mean, there are other ways of doing it. There are certainly ways for doing prioritization of like action items or to-dos that are personal, like Eisenhower Matrix and things like that.

I, I don't use a specific framework, but I found something that works for me and that's stacking a lot of my meetings like towards the beginning of the week because I realize some people can multitask. Um, really well. Some people—

No, they can't.

I can't focus on more than one thing at a time. But with that being said, that's kind of the point is I need focus time. I can't, like, if I have 15 minutes in between my next meeting, I had a boss one time and she was, I mean, she's incredible. Like one of the best ops people I've ever had the pleasure to work for. She could just do all these like with 15, like in between meetings or 30 minutes in between, like she was so efficient. But I really overthink things sometimes, and I know that I do that. So I've gotta have at least an hour block if I wanna do something productive. And so what I've started doing is having like larger blocks in the morning. My brain works best in the morning.

Great insight.

I'm an early morning person.

This is why we get along.

Yeah. Like I know some people that they can think really well on deep projects, like late at night. And I'm just like, I am in bed by 8. I'm asleep by 8:30. Like, that's how I function.

I wish I could say that.

So, so the early morning stuff, like sometimes I will do a few things before work hours if I need like absolute quiet and I need to focus on something. But starting to block my calendar from 9 to 11-ish to try to have real deep focus time, I've been able to get some really cool stuff done.

It's trying to like understand yourself and it's your calendar that helps you control your calendar, which I have regularly tried to like block time on a daily basis and then shit comes up and I, I get, I give in, I give in. So yeah, have you like started to train the rest of the people that you work with? Like, this is my focus time. So unless it's really, really urgent, you know, honor this for me please. So I can get big Like big deep thinking stuff done.

Yeah. It's like I, when I started requesting of teammates like, hey, can I move this call? Can I move this call? I'm trying to have blocks of time where I can just focus on projects. Like basically I'll get all the to-dos from the meeting like early in the week. And then I've got time to do the things. Yeah. And if I anticipated correctly of like what's going to come outta those meetings, I actually have time to do the things. And it's like, it's not perfect and I am not perfect at this, but this is what I try to do. And I think I can roughly do it like 75% of the time. And so it allows me to be productive in a way that like is helpful for me. I'm like, I'm using my best brain time on meetings in the morning. Like something's gotta give. And so I started moving things around a little. We joked one time, it was back when I worked at the agency actually. I told someone one time, I'm like, I do my best automation at like 5:30 in the morning. It's just better.

Yeah.

My brain's just sharper. I've had my first cup of coffee. I'm happy about the day.

It's so, what's really interesting to me is like, I don't think a lot of people pay attention to those signals from their bodies, right? Because like everybody is a little different. This is one of the things, you know, Instagram, TikTok, like, oh, do this, right? Get up at 5 in the morning. It doesn't work for everybody. I'm like you, I'm an early morning person. I also struggle in the middle of the afternoon. If we weren't talking, I would be really struggling. Today's mid-afternoon for me, it's warm, but then I'll get another boost of energy in the late evening. So the problem for me is like sleep is a problem for me, right? That's like, but I, that's just how my body works. But I think a lot of people don't pay, like they, if they paid more attention to that and then tried to take back a little more control and actually had the, again, it kind of comes back to being transparent with the people you work with. If you want the best for me, like this is what I think will work best. And I think your point about like, The goal is not 100%, right? Goal is whatever, 75%, 50%, like don't overdo it.

It's something to work towards. And that's the thing about the planning and all the project management stuff too. I'm like, sometimes they were just made quickly from a meeting and I'm like, I gotta do that by Friday. And I know I do, but it's gonna take me maybe 45 minutes to do those larger projects. Like those big rocks that are like related to your KPIs, like they require very thoughtful consideration and like time on the calendar that's needed. and necessary for them.

Okay. So all that said, right, then how do you, I think there's 2 variants of this and we could cover one at a time if you want, but there's like, you, like we all have experienced where you get unexpected high priority requests or ones that someone thinks are urgent and high priority, but maybe Right. How do you handle those both in terms of like, how do you handle reacting to those and assessing which of those they fall into? And then second, like, how do you then both, like, I think there's 2 parts to this, right? You're going to have to adjust what you've committed to, probably, maybe, if you're able to. Sometimes you can't. This is where you put in extra effort and you need to communicate what that impact is to others who things might be affected.

Yeah. With those The urgent requests that, that come in, I, the first thing I think about is if I don't get this done in the next handful of days or 2 to 3 days, like whatever it is that the person asks for, like from the urgency point of view.

Yeah.

Is that going to affect pipeline? Is it going to affect business that we can win? Is it like, what is it going to affect if I delay it? More. So like sometimes I can make that choice and I, I ask for a, I'm like, you know, ask for a different date, you know, live date on the task versus what was asked for. If you're not sure, there is nothing wrong with asking your boss, your manager. Like there's, there's nothing wrong with that at all. And I actually do that pretty often.

I think.

When I'm not 100% sure, I will, I'll build out a list. I'm like, okay, if, if we wanna get this done by Friday, say if it's a Monday, I wanna get this done by Friday. Here's what I'm thinking I need to deprioritize in order to do that and to have time to do it. And I'll literally just send that as a message. Is there anything I'm misreading or misjudging here? And that's a completely okay approach to do that. We have a rough idea of what should be. Push aside like what can be lower priority, but sometimes depending on the week and what's going on, sometimes I'm not sure. I just need a gut check. This is what I think, but I need somebody's feedback.

Sometimes I think if your experience is like mine, sometimes you go through that list and you go like, actually nothing can push.

And that's just how it is sometimes.

Yeah.

Yeah. And that's okay too. And you know what? When stuff like that happens, make sure you have a couple of things planned that week, like outside of work that you are looking forward to that make you happy, that are important to you. Like. Say, you know what, I'm gonna make this really big push on this project and like Friday morning I'm gonna go get my favorite coffee from my favorite coffee shop. Like, that's what I've done. That it's like, you know, the, like, so I, I had a teammate, like she, um, said one time, she's like, always have something to look forward to. Because like, you know, sometimes we work really hard. Like all of us work really hard in our jobs and like we want to do good things. We want to do good quality things. And sometimes like that extra time, sometimes it all does have to get done. If you're saying like, I'm gonna reward myself like for all, you know, extra hard work. It's just the little things in life. Yeah.

That's not what I thought you were gonna say because I don't think that's a bad thing. This is something I struggled with until later in my career, but I think it's important to be vocal about the heroics that you just did, right? Make sure people know that this was above and beyond the norm so that it's not perceived as the way it's just gonna be. For 2 reasons. One, Like you should be proud of that when it goes well. Just like feel badly if you have any care about the work at all. If you didn't do something, you might as well get the credit for doing heroic stuff too. I don't think enough of us do enough. Like, I think we just, there's a lot of people who are probably listening and I was this way too. Like, this is just part, this is quote, just part of the job. Right. And yes, that may be true. At the same time, it doesn't mean that it's not out of the ordinary for what you should be expected.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think you bring up a really good point. Sometimes I'm just like, nope, I needed to get this done this week. I sat on my couch with my little laptop desk early in the morning and I turned on New Girl and I had a good cup of coffee and I got the work done, you know, a few mornings in a row to make sure it got done. And sometimes you don't think about, whoa, that was a lot. Like I did a lot there. That was good to accomplish that. So that's a good reminder. Thanks. Yeah.

Yeah. And I know like one thing I started doing, I don't know how many years ago, especially as a leader, I would both do it for people on my team, but also for people who were on other teams that worked for me or did work I worked with. If I thought they had gone above and beyond, I would literally write an email to their boss telling them, if it was somebody working for me, I would send it to my boss, right?

Sure.

Like talking about the thing they had done. Because I think it's like, I don't think people get enough of that, right? Especially in this world, it feels like you get attention when things don't go well, not when they do.

Yeah, for sure.

So, 99 good things and 1 bad, and then that's the, that's when the guns are pointed at you, figuratively.

Well, whenever I think when you ask others that don't work in ops, how do you see operations as successful? And a lot of people will tell you, when I don't know if anything wrong happened, if I don't hear anything, that's how I know it's working well. And it's like, that, that is the truth of it. Like, that's usually the way people think about it. So we are the behind the scenes, you know, automation process wizards.

The only flaw in that is if people are talking about it negatively behind the scenes and you don't know about it.

I can't do anything for all that.

Okay. So true. Yes and no. I don't totally agree, but we can, I'll set that aside for now because I think this, the next question I had may get into this a little bit, which is you and I've known each other for now for a while. And I think one of the things that you probably went through as a lot of people do, especially as they get in leadership kinds of roles is having to You advocate for your team, and sometimes that means saying no to people and requests, or not now. How have you gotten used to doing that? Do you have a general approach, or is it a case-by-case basis? Do you feel more comfortable with that now?

No, I don't think I'll ever be comfortable with it. I still have to work on it like every day, and I think that's a me thing, and I'm sure other people like feel that too.

But I—

when you're— when your personality can be geared toward just people pleasing in general, personally, professionally, It is just guilty, right? Oh, I feel terrible about it. I'm just like, oh yeah, we could go to that restaurant.

Totally.

And I just, I will go with the flow and I don't like harbor any resentment from going with the flow. Like, I want people, others to be happy. But in my work, my work is so important to me. Like, I put so much of myself into that. And so I want people to be happy with my work. I want to make their jobs easier. I want to make their lives easier. And so I'm like, if I don't do this, what if it makes their life harder? What if it makes their job harder? And so I go through that thought process, but I think usually the advice that I've gotten from other ops folks and other leaders that I've talked to, and so, you know, this is the, I think, best practice and what I'm still working on always is ask more questions when someone asks you for something and it's like, You're not necessarily sure if it should be prioritized or not, if it's something we should ever do or not. Ask the questions of like, by not having this, what is this not allowing you to do today? Is this affecting your team's ability to track their progress or reach their goals? Is it affecting like our ability to build pipeline? Is it affecting our— like, there are so many questions that you could start asking.

Sure.

So I'll do like a 15-minute conversation with someone when they submit, like we have, I made like a Slack request channel where they like submit a little form and then I can easily make the task in Asana. And I like having that little queue system. But usually when someone submits something and it's like something I need a little bit more information about, I'll book like 15 minutes with them just to talk about it. I'm like, help me understand like what's going on. Like what is this hurting right now? Like, how is this affecting your team? How is it affecting, like, you know, your day-to-day? Because I think the better I can understand that, I can sympathize and understand, like, how prior— you know, high priority is this. And usually by getting someone to talk about it, they can also realize if it's not the highest priority thing in the world or not. It's difficult. It's trying to make each party understand it a little bit more.

Yeah, I think the idea of having— this is the value of having some sort of queue And a form kind of like, there's still people who tend to not go through that process, right? CEO, VP, like whatever, they're going to come to you maybe like directly. And so the one, I think, suggestion I would have in those cases, like your thoughts on this is because you may not be ready for that. You may not have the questions ready at hand is just to maybe ask for clarification. Understand the scope of it, but then ask for some time to consider it and come back with more questions before committing to anything.

Yeah, I think that's a great idea because then that's how you also avoid situations of biting off more than you can chew at one time. Say, yep, I'll get that to you Thursday. I'll get that to you Friday. And then like you get to it and you're like, I should have thought through this a little bit more.

And even if you're not given Because they still believe it's a super high urgent thing, right? Even if you get a few hours, that can be enough, right? That obviously might affect what your day was planned out to be and the things that you were going to do during that time.

Yeah.

But if you got put in that position and you had to commit right there, and then that totally shoots the entire week, right?

Derails things.

It gives you a chance to put some thought around it, to clarify. Your understanding, any outstanding questions, and then also the impact, right? Which is the part that gets missed. There are people out there, I'm sure, who have this great memory for like everything that's in the queue, right? And it's active, but that is not me. I'd want to be able to go back and look at that. Most people that I've encountered, not all, but most are reasonable about it, right? They give you a little bit of time to do that.

Yeah, just to think through it. Because I'm a lot of time, only if there are things that we've done on repeat. Like those repeatable processes that we have like ingrained in our brain, like how long it'll take you. But if someone's asking you to do something new, like I think that's a great idea to just take the time, take a couple hours, go write it out on a piece of paper, draw it out. Yeah. See how long it will realistically take to do this. And that way you're properly setting expectations too.

Yeah. One, I think this does, it signals some maturity, right?

And not immediate reaction.

I think we all have heard, right, a lot of people in Marketing ops in particular say like they feel like they're just task takers or task doers. And some of that perception can be changed if you do that. Now, just saying no flat out, right? That's not going to do it. That will not end well either. You can't go all the way to the other extreme, but there is a place in the middle that if you're not used to doing it right, it's going to take some time to figure out how to do it well.

Yeah. Like my version of that right now, when someone tells me like, something is medium or low priority and ask like, when do we think we can get to this? I say, I need to look at the rest of our backlog and I need to look at the rest of our planned projects and I will get back to you as soon as I have an estimated date and we'll talk more then. I just can't bring myself to say no. I just say, not yet, not right now, but we will totally talk about it very soon. I usually try to talk about it sometime in the next, you know, 2 to 3 weeks because I don't want anyone to feel like their problem's not important or anything.

But what you are saying is yes to considering it. Yeah.

Consider everything, like every request, because no one's asking for something like, like unreasonable that it's not like feasible as to like why they would want something like that.

Most of the time.

I haven't heard anything like that in my experience.

No, but I mean, so it's funny. I, for a short period of my time, my career, I was in sales. And one of the things I learned, or like a mental model, is that when a prospect says no, the best salespeople don't hear no, they hear not now. And I think the flip of that is if you're telling somebody not now, right, they're not hearing no either. They're hearing there's a chance. And then if you're, especially if you're saying not now, but I'll get back to you in X period of time to give you something more definitive, then a lot of people are just looking for that. Now, eventually you have to commit, right?

Oh yeah. But I do need the time to think about it because maybe there's, maybe there's a solution. like already sort of in place that could help? Like maybe there's something already available and I just like don't know. And I need to go figure it out. Right. But just giving yourself the time to think about it is a great approach to that.

I love it. I think this has been a great conversation that a lot of our folks in our audience are going to get a lot of benefit from. So thank you, Carissa. Yeah. So if folks do want to reach out to you or learn more about what you're doing or If you're— I don't know how active you are in the community or on social media, but what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, you can send me a LinkedIn connection request. My name is Carissa McCall. I am the Director of RevOps at Liquibase. You can go to the Liquibase company page and probably find me that way too.

There you go. All right, awesome. Again, thank you, Carissa. Thanks to all of our longtime and new-term listeners and soon-to-be watchers. So we appreciate your support. As always, if you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest, you can reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we'd be happy to get the ball rolling on that. Until next time, bye everybody.