From Twinkle, Twinkle to MOps and Mimosas: 4 Years of OpsCast Moments

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

Hello everyone, welcome to another special episode of OpsCast, brought to you by marketingops.com. I'm your host, Michael Hartman, joined today by my 2 compatriots, Naomi Liu and Mike Rizzo. Happy New Year.

Happy New Year.

Yeah, so this is, uh, so we are, we are getting together, getting the band back together, which we don't get to do as often as I'd like. I mean, I miss, I miss talking to you guys regularly.

So, I miss you too, Michael.

Thank you. Um, but this is, we, we've kind of realized that we are about to hit 4 years of doing this podcast. So we started in, if I remember, Mike, is this, is it your birthday? January 15th?

It's like the day before my birthday.

Okay. So, you know, happy birthday, Mike.

Yeah. Thanks.

A little bit early. Um, we started January 15th.

Can we get a cameo? That year, sent him a Cameo.

Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, did somebody do that?

Yeah, Michael Tucker actually, uh, like organized, um, that— oh gosh, the co-founder of, uh, Apple, um, did a Cameo.

That's right. That's right.

It was actually kind of fun and special.

Oh, that is too funny.

Yeah.

Wow. I forgot about Cameo. Maybe that'll be part of what we talk about is like all the things that have changed since January of 2021.

What was that thing with all the audio experiment, the audio chat room thing that was happening at the time when—

Oh, what was that called? Now I'm so curious.

Oh, good gosh. I know you're talking about, I never quite understood what it was. Yeah, you figured it out. But I remember like I, when we started this—

Clubhouse.

Clubhouse. Yeah, that was it. Did you ever do it? Did you ever join a Clubhouse session?

I joined one or two.

I never did.

I was trying to see what happened.

I never quite understood how that was—

They should have sold the second that they got that offer.

Oh yeah. It was a lot of money.

What did they get offered?

No, I don't know. They got an offer to get acquired like right away by like pretty quickly, but I think it was like by X at the time, Twitter.

Right.

Or maybe somebody else. I don't remember, but they turned it down.

Should have taken it. That's crazy. Yeah. So think back 4, 4 years ago. 2021, we were still kind of reeling from the COVID and the lockdowns and all that. And we, when we started, do you remember this? We started as a, as a like talk radio, right? It was a live show. We had an audience.

Yeah.

As much as we tried to get people to come on in, in real time, you know, to join us, that didn't, I mean, it was the online chat part was good. We still had that interaction, Yeah, it was fun.

I liked that. I liked that aspect of the show, and it sort of became the DNA of why the show is what it is today, like this raw sort of unfiltered discussion. I mean, for our listeners, if you're listening to this episode, you know, there's quite a bit that goes into doing a show, as you might imagine.

Sure.

But like, you know, some prep work, right? Like Hartman does an incredible job of getting on and saying, hey, what should we talk about with you? What's your passion? What's your background? And there's a bit of an outline that we follow, but generally it's just sort of a loose discussion and it's meant to go exactly wherever it needs to go, like a live radio show. And that's where like the DNA of our show came from.

Yeah.

I don't know, but I think that I enjoyed that aspect of it. I, those were fun days.

I think it, and was it, was it the, was it the Darryl Alfonso episode we had where like in a fire alarm or something went off in the background?

Yeah. His literal smoke alarm went off.

Yeah.

And we didn't mute it.

Yeah.

And Michael, I think you and I were on one where, um, I can't remember who it was. Was it AJ?

It might have been—

I can't remember who it was, but someone had a baby alarm that went off that sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars for the entire episode, and we couldn't figure out where it was coming from.

That was not AJ. Right.

AJ's like, I don't have a kid. What are you talking about?

No. What's his name?

Raja?

Yes. Yes.

It was like a very low level Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars that played the entire episode. And I was like, is that coming from my neighbor's house? Like, where's that coming from?

I remember that.

We were just trying to lull everybody to sleep.

I know. It's so funny. Yeah. All those things, you know, but I think it's, I don't know. Yeah. I'm sure. I'm sure that sometimes that's distracting or annoying, but it's part, to me, it's part of the. Like it's just part of the ethos. So I'm glad, I'm glad we keep it that way. I, you know, I think there's trade-offs either way, right? You can, you can really do a lot of work to, to clean things up and, uh, totally. Yeah. Do all that kind of stuff. And it's—

We say it's a, we say it's a show that's, you know, for the MOPROs, by the MOPROs. So, you know, we are marketing operations professionals by trade. We are not podcast producers by trade.

Right.

Thankfully, the tools are helping us make it a little bit easier, a little bit better.

Although I don't, I don't know about you. I have had a couple of people ask me for, like, they, I want to start a podcast. What can you tell me about it? Right. What, you know, totally.

So, I mean, I will say that we have learned a lot about what it takes to spin one up. And I think we, I think if we were to take a stab at revamping the show or launching another show, we would probably do it differently this time, probably partially because it's just interesting to try a different approach, right?

Absolutely. Yeah.

But yeah, I think there's a lot of learning. I get that question a lot though, Michael. Like, what tool do you use to publish? How do you distribute? You know, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

To answer that question for all of you, uh, we record on Riverside. Shout out to them. Thanks for the product. It's been great. We pay for it. They don't give it to us. And we publish and distribute to all of the media streams that you are tuning in from via Buzzsprout. So that's, that's how we do it. But— Oh, and we do a bit of editing in Descript.

Yep.

To like truncate any dead space if we have dead space or whatever.

Our podcasting tech stack.

Yeah, that's our podcasting tech stack. There's a HubSpot RSS email that goes out once a month to those that are subscribed with the last episodes that went live in the prior month. There you go.

And it comes from, does it say it's coming from me?

I think it still says it comes from you. Yeah.

Yeah. Because I remember the first time one came out and I was like, oh, look at that. I'm sending somebody, sending myself an email.

Gotta love automation.

That's right. Yeah, but it's, I'm with you. I think we've covered a lot of ground in terms of different topics and it was clearly what's interesting because I think there's a lot of topics we've covered. There's a lot of things that we all have passion about that I think we'd like to cover more maybe even. So Yeah. I mean, we're always open to new ideas. And I mean, the biggest, to me, the biggest, one of the biggest changes right now is just, yeah, I'm still, I'm starting to see more of our guests or potential guests, people who've raised their hands or said, had interest bringing up things like AI. We've had some great conversations with people talking about mental health and Naomi, you had— well, we also didn't have MOPSApalooza or summer camp before we started all this stuff.

Oh my gosh, yeah.

That's all new.

Yeah, I mean, in terms of topics to cover, right? I think we've had a really amazing and varied range of guests and topics that have come across the show. I think something that was eye-opening for me was during this past MOPSA where Audrey and I hosted the women's breakfast. Mops and Mimosas, that, you know, we had an intake form where women who were interested in coming to this breakfast would fill in an intake form with just some information about what they wanted to talk about. And a lot of recurring themes around diversity in the workplace, leaning in, getting a seat at the table, work-life balance, mental health, those were all recurring themes that a lot of the attendees wanted to discuss and talk to. other women at their table for networking on those topics. So, I think it would be good to explore some of those topics as well for future episodes for this year, whether it be, you know, having a— maybe we have like a roundtable with some of the women who came to the women's breakfast, or we bring in a guest speaker. I don't know what that looks like, but yeah, I just think that would be something that would be really interesting for some of our listeners.

Y'all need to do the women takeover thing again. Like we had the women's—

Yeah, that would be really fun. Time.

We need to do that again.

Yeah, that would be super fun.

Maybe we should extend it to like the whole month though.

Like, yeah, we could do that.

You just run it for like the whole, like 4 weeks, 4, at least 4 episodes or something.

I'm down with that.

Yeah. Yeah.

Could do that.

Makes my job a little easier. Yeah.

I was looking at our, uh, Our stats, all-time stats for top downloads. I'm sure we shared some of these things in a social post, but for those of you that have been diehard listeners and fans, first of all, thank you.

Yes.

Second of all, top stats. What the fuck is Marketing Operations with Amy Goldfein? Still, it's 2 years, it's over 2 years old. It went live June 14th, 2022. And it is 784 downloads. So shout out to Amy for creating an awesome episode that obviously resonates to this day. What else is on here? The Evolution of Marketing Ops in the Age of Generative Digital Experience with Paul Wilson. That's about a year old now. It's actually over a year old from July 24th, 2023. I'll give you the top 5. We'll stop there. A Marketing Ops Maturity Model and More with Simon Daniels. So Analyst extraordinaire Simon Daniels came on. Yeah, that was great. That was May 22nd, 2023. That has 616 downloads. The Great Attribution Debate with Andrea LB and Drew Smith. Can't get enough of Andrea and Drew.

Yeah, throwdown.

That was a fun one. That is almost 2 years old as of March 27th, 2023, and it's 558 downloads. And to round us out, Bring us home. Top 5 is Attribution Ruining Marketing with Kerry Picklesimer. And that one is over 2 years old, September 19th, 2022. So apparently we didn't know what we were doing in 2021 at all. 'Cause no, I'm just kidding. The next one on the list is from 2021.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, our very first episode is just a scooch under— scooch, is that the right word? Just under 500 downloads. So, I mean, for that, that's another thing for that I tell people all the time starting out doing this. I would've assumed that how, with how, how many podcasts and stuff there are, that we, the metrics would be incredible and they're pretty terrible.

Yeah. Oh yeah. The way that you get reporting from these tools. Yeah. It's horrible. You can't tell hardly anything unless you go to a specific streaming provider to get stats or whatever.

Right. And it's partial at that point. Yeah. Which to me, like what, so one of the things that we occasionally get is feedback from people and we've been fortunate enough that most of it's been positive. Almost all of it's been positive. And I always thank those people because we really don't get anything else. Like it's really, you're sort of throwing this out into the ether and you don't know if it's landing, you know? So it's always nice to get that feedback.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, good or bad, right? Like we always want to hear from everybody, but it's so rare to get either.

Yeah.

And so we appreciate whatever we get from anybody. So it's been, Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. I do know I spoke to one of our community members recently who I shall remain nameless, and she said she's a longtime listener. I'm hopeful to have her on the show soon, but a lot of like the content, the guests that have come on, so all of you who've ever been guests, like, thank you. She, and she joined the community. She has now built her career around all of the advice coming from everybody in this community across. And it really, like a lot of it stemmed from her discovery of this podcast and she ended up joining the live workshop with one of our instructors and She, it was a leadership workshop that she took and she discovered that because of this podcast and she now feels even more equipped to take on a new leadership role in her organization. I mean, she's literally like bolstered so much of her career around everybody supporting her from the content you all contribute on the show, right?

Absolutely. If it's who I think you're talking about, I do believe we have that person scheduled for an episode.

So Oh yeah, that's awesome.

Stay tuned.

That's great. So anyway, the point of me sharing that is that it's, it's awesome that although we rarely get the feedback, occasionally we get inspirational moments like that. And yeah, and I hope, we all hope that this is helpful. This stuff is helpful to you.

Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely a labor of love. So when we get that kind of feedback, it helps reenergize.

Speaking of reenergizing. Yes. We're in a new year. Like, what are we, what are we thinking about this year? Personal goals, professional goals. What are you, what's, what's on the docket for Naomi this year?

Well, so I, I wanted to raise something with you guys. So over the holidays. Yeah.

I feel like we're in trouble, Mike.

No, not like that. Am I using my mom voice, my stern voice?

Can of worms.

I am a mom now, you know, so.

Oh yeah, that's right.

That's one of the big changes since we started, right?

That's the biggest.

Yeah, that's a huge change. Yeah. I, my husband and I, we adopted our daughter, brought her back in May 2023, and that was an experience. I've now learned that I can just say no. No is a complete sentence.

Just no.

Why? Because I said so. Anyways, um, over, over the holidays, I had some friends visiting from LA and, um, One of my girlfriends, she works in admissions for a polytechnic university in Southern California. And she was, you know, we were just talking about education and work and my job, marketing operations and whatnot. And she was saying that for the computer science department, They saw this year compared to last year and all previous years, a double-digit, almost 50% decline in applications. And they just thought, okay, like, what is this?

A, you know, like a blip?

Is it just us? Yes.

Is this a blip?

Is this just us or what's going on? So they went and, and I guess a lot of these schools are affiliated with one another. So they went and, you know, talked to peers and colleagues at other schools. And to see if it was just them and what was going on. Was it an anomaly, something wrong? And no, all of these other schools are seeing the same thing, double-digit massive declines in applications for computer science.

Undergraduate or graduate or both?

Undergrad. And they did a little bit more digging, right? Like, what's going on? So apparently, This is all just like hearsay, right? But this is what they're trying to figure this out because this is obviously concerning, right? So apparently what's been happening is a lot of these students that are coming in, they're seeing the rise of AI and they think that there's no future in computer science because you can just type into an app and tell it to build you something. Or basically they feel like AI is going to take computer science jobs. So instead what they're seeing, because these students have to go somewhere, right? What they're seeing is that there has been an increase In applications for engineering. And I asked my girlfriend actually this morning to— and I'm just gonna pull this up— what is that split? So there's been— this is at her school only— a 20% increase in applications for electrical engineering, a 10% increase in applications for mechanical engineering, and a 15% increase in applications for civil engineering, but a double-digit, almost 50% decline in computer science. And that's concerning to me, right? So, for myself, you know, my original declared major was computer science. I switched about halfway through to communications and marketing, but the overlap between computer science and programmers and developers, I feel, is very tangential, integrated into people who work in operations. And I don't know, that's kind of terrifying for me. I don't know what you guys think. Like, do you— I don't want an entire generation of, You know, unchecked AI happening, right? Like, you know, a lot of folks that they've been talking to, or potential, you know, applicants, they're very interested in robotics. They're very interested in mechanical engineering, mechatronics, all of that. You still need a computer science background to be able to power these. I don't know. What do you guys think? Curious.

So, a lot of that show, I don't remember if we've talked about this. I can't remember if I've talked about it on the podcast either, but I'm— so I graduated from an engineering school in a program called, which the graduate degree would be operations research, which is sort of tied to industrial engineering. So I'm now curious, like what's the change in industrial engineering if that school has it? But I can't talk about specifics, but in general I would say Well, one of the things I know is happening, I've heard this multiple places, not just with the, 'cause I'm on a board, the board now with that program and the engineering school that I graduated from. But there's a definite decline just overall in college, like people going to college in particular, boys, men.

Hmm.

They're not going as much. So I think in general, College campuses are safer.

There's definitely more women.

More women than men.

More women now in universities than men.

Yeah. And then there's, in general, it's been interesting to see some of the numbers, but it's a mixed bag when I've seen the engineering numbers. Computer science is in the engineering school where I went. One of the things they're seeing is There's been more of a rise in applicants and growth in undergraduate business programs that are somewhat affiliated with it too. So you got MIS, which would be more of a business school program as opposed to management science, which is the engineering equivalent, which is a little more heavy on programming, things like that. But I've been trying to pitch the idea that the degree program that I graduated from actually aligned really well with operations and marketing operations in particular, because it's very much about optimization and analytics and process and all the things that we go through. It's just, I don't think people have thought about marketing as a place for that, where that lands. So I'm interested in that. I'm surprised about that, that it's such a significant year-over-year change because I've seen it more as a trend. I don't remember off the top of my head the numbers I've seen, if they translate to that same degree, but they're definitely, they stand out. And it really came out of, part of it came out of the pandemic, right? And then I haven't seen impacts. I haven't been hearing anybody talking about impacts from AI. Yet, and the concerns that that's just gonna take all the jobs.

Yeah, well, I think that that's why they were so concerned. They're like, whoa, is it just like a glitch? But then once they started talking to other schools, they realized that they were seeing the same thing. And that the rumors that they have, I don't think they have hard facts right now, is that the students that are coming outta university, or sorry, coming out of high school, are thinking that, you know, there will be no future in computer science. That's what they're, that's what they're assuming right now. So, I don't know.

That's so fascinating.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I was like, and it just evolved into this like conversation where I'm like, wow. And so I immediately thought of you guys. I was like, I'm curious what the 2 Mikes think.

Hmm.

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I, I wonder, I kind of wonder who, you know, to your comment, Naomi, like, who's gonna, who's gonna make sure this stuff's doing the right way?

I know.

It's like, it's like, it's kind of like, you know, martech stacks.

Terminator judgment day.

Without any marketing ops people, like, except for a little more scary.

Right. Skynet.

Exactly.

Oh God.

I don't know. I feel like they're, yeah, it seems like, uh, we're in for it. If that trend continues, there's probably going to be, you know, that old— I graduated with a business degree, and so I think of economics and unit economics and supply and demand curves all the time. So not all the time, but that's where my head goes in this conversation. And it seems like if that trend continues, there's going to be a supply and demand issue, and all of a sudden we're going to start seeing the The computer science majors earning salaries that are probably 2, 2.5x what they would normally have been if, you know, because the supply will be low, right? Like there just won't be that many people and they're going to want to pay them top dollar to do that. And that'll be kind of like circa 2017 era of what developers were to startups in that ecosystem. And what was our— it was actually probably 2015, 2016. I mean, that trend continued for a while, but do you remember that? People were getting paid crazy money when you were like, you were skipping school and going to a bootcamp because you could go make $200K after the bootcamp a year. Anyway.

Yeah. I mean, I think, I think it's interesting because there's these like meta trends that are happening in education and Jobs. I think part of the draw, best I can tell, part of the draw that is taking young men out of college or drawing them away from college, there's way more facets to it than I think I'm going to say, but I think part of it is a view that college education is not worth what it costs. and saddling yourself with debt is not like you— whereas if you go into say a trade, right? And in particular some trades that are, I wouldn't say totally recession-proof, right? But they're much more stable over time, right? The fluctuations are lower if you were say a plumber, right?

Mm-hmm.

And you can, start making money right away, even if you're an apprentice, and then become your own, and then you can start a business. Like, so I think there's, there's this perception out there that there's that as well. Now, uh, yeah, it's not for everyone, but yeah. So I don't, I don't know. I struggle with that.

I mean, I struggle with the, I, I have no background or understanding of why, um, individuals that are males are deciding to, you know, forego the college experience or college education system or whatever. But I mean, that one makes sense to me to some degree. Like, I think colleges have been struggling for a really long time on the prices have been going up and the value to society. I mean, like the baseline value to society isn't changing. Right. So like the unit economics of like what it costs to go get the same education that somebody got before isn't like, it's just, it's interesting, right? Like we have to pay 5x what someone else did 10 years ago or more. And it's the same. The degree's the same piece of paper. The information is largely the same. Like not much has changed. Yeah, you go to business marketing school and you learn about international marketing, and yeah, they're going to tell you some stuff that changed because international law changed or whatever, but like the foundations of what you, what you learn. Anyway, so I think I'm— I don't want to like prop up that college is a waste of money because I thoroughly enjoyed my college education. Yeah, I think it was wonderful for my ability to get to where I am.

But no, I think there's more like, I think the value of it, and I'm right in the middle of it, right? With kids in that age range. But yeah, the value of it is beyond the education purely, right? Or the financial part of it. There's socialization, there's learning to be on your own, like all those kinds of things that are hard to quantify.

So it depends on the degree too. I mean, I hope my doctor went to university. There's just some jobs that you, yeah. Right.

Yeah.

Right.

There are certain things.

So what was— so, Nami, you brought this up. I'm curious, what was your reaction when you started hearing all this?

Honestly, I was fascinated, right? And I don't know how much of it is the difference between US schools and Canadian schools, because obviously I'm coming from a Canadian perspective. And my husband, he's a high school teacher, when he started his career, he was hybrid math and technology. And for the past few years, he's been purely tech. He purely teaches computer science because there's been such a— the demand is so high, right? And so, and this is kind of a bit counter to what she is saying because there's such a high demand for tech.

Mm-hmm.

Granted, we are in Canada. This is— he teaches at an all-girls school. So is there a difference there? I'm not really sure. It's just— we just had that conversation, right? Because it's not what he's seeing.

Sure.

And it was just interesting. Well, where are they going? They're going to engineering. Why is that? Is it just because of where you are geographically located?

I don't—

there's so many things, right? And it's such a small sample size that it's difficult to extrapolate. takeaways from that, but I just thought that that was just a very interesting thing, especially because it wasn't just their school. They had seen it with like other schools and other admission departments that they had talked to. Is this part of a bigger trend? I don't know.

Right.

But it just gets you thinking like, what would happen?

No, I do, I do think it's interesting if that is part of the mindset that they're hearing is that people are shying away from computer science because they believe that they, you know, AI is going to essentially replace that kind of job. I'm with you, right? I, I, uh, I'm not sure I want AI to kind of go off and truly run on its own without some sort of intervention.

But yeah, right. And I think why one of the things that I would share out into the ethos, into the world, into the void, Is I, you know, I, I'm pretty steadfast. I mean, maybe I'll be proven wrong and then that's, that's what happens. But I'm steadfast in this idea that marketing operations professionals aren't going to get replaced by AI like overnight by any stretch. And I don't, I don't think they're going to get replaced, frankly. I think you have to understand the art of the possible and then you got to Use AI to extend your capabilities, right? And do stuff faster and better and with, you know, more accuracy or whatever. And I think that that should be true of computer science degrees and those that are looking to head into that field. Like, this is a way to, if you understand the art of the possible and you know how these things can work, then you can— get to your end destination more efficiently.

Yeah, I think one thing that I'd be interested in, so for our listeners out there, if you've got a point of view or experience, right? I think there are becoming more and more tools out there that can enable not only marketing ops professionals, but kind of everyone to eliminate some of the things that you do that don't really require creative thinking as much, right? And you can expect, you know, make your, you know, your capacity will increase, right? To be able to do those things. And I think there's opportunities there and I'm bullish about that. I also think that there are going to be opportunities for AI to go beyond that and to start to enable us to, again, I can't keep going back to this, like the idea of getting better insights in our data, as messy as it is, especially in the B2B world. I think there's stuff there. So I would love for us to get more discussion on that, should we, you know, but—

Did either of you, Speaking of messy data and AI, did either of you happen to catch the small little back and forth that Stephen Stouffer and I had on LinkedIn the other day? It was like, it was in public Slack or whatever comments.

No.

Anyway, he posted about this idea that the idea of data quality and being so necessary to leverage AI. is like a farce.

I agree.

And I was like, see, I love this. I love that you agree. And I was like, well, hang on a second. Because he gave this example, right? Like, oh, I've fed it all this information and it was able to more quickly help me identify the duplicates, right? Like out of all these records that looked identical or very similar to each other, like which one was the right one to sort of like maintain, right? It was able to take all this information and it used some of the information like last contacted, create date, whatever, some of this stuff. And I was like, but you gave it good quality data for it to be able to make that decision. And, and my point was, If you didn't give it the create dates and those things, and you just said, which of these looks like the right thing? It doesn't have something to leverage, right? You have to, you have to give it something that is good in order for it to have an opinion of how to give you the right output that is, that yields the result that you would look for. And the good in this case was I'm leveraging the recency and the active to, to help identify accuracy.

Yeah.

And that's so at the end of it, like the, the argument sort of like diluted down to what is the definition of quality and good is really what it sort of boiled down to. I was like, at the end of the day, it's still good quality data that you fed it to make a decision.

I don't know.

It felt like a bit of a Socratic argument, but anyway, you agree, Michael?

I agree. I agree. Like, Here's why I say I agree, right? I think there's a lot of people, I have not, I have yet to find anybody who says my Salesforce data or my marketing data is pristine, right?

Right.

And I hear a lot of people talk about holding back on, like, we can't do, we can't trust our data, we can't do reporting. And so they're going through all of this effort. And my view is, It's never, first off, expecting it to be clean and perfect or whatever that means is a fallacy. It's just not. It's just not the— outside of financial data where there's lots of rules and regulations and controls in place, you know, about what can happen, pretty much all the rest of the data is going to have anomalies and errors and problems. And you just have to like assume that. So that shouldn't stop you from doing reporting because what I think is if you start doing reporting, it's going to highlight where those errors are and where, if there are root causes for common things, you can go address those. And you like, over time you'll get, it'll get quote better, but it will probably never ever be clean like financial data as an example.

Yeah, I agree.

So I think that's why I was like, well, AI, if AI can help accelerate that part of it, right? That improving it. Now the danger here, what I see the mistake people make though, is instead of saying, I'm going to start reporting, like we're going to build this great dashboard, which is like the, like the first way to like shoot yourself in the foot when you're trying to get insights. I think it's a waste of time.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think to, you know, and, you know, I love talking, like Steven, like loves pushing the boundaries on all this capabilities and stuff. I just, the stuff he puts out is like awesome. So if you don't follow Steven, go follow him on LinkedIn.

Yeah.

But, and I think what is important about all this stuff is to say, and, you know, if I was to rephrase or, you know, Playback some of what you're saying, Michael, is like, you know, don't let—

what is the—

there's a turn of phrase for it. Like, it's like, don't let perfection impede your progress kind of a thing, right? Like, you just don't. You can start tinkering with these things and get a lot of value out of them without it being what you think is perfect right now, right? What do you think, Naomi? Is data quality—

Yeah, I mean, I think Data quality has been the bane of my existence, I think, and any marketing ops person's existence for as long as they, you know, have been in the industry. It's one of those things that you are constantly just fighting, right? It's, you bring it, it comes in and it replicates across all your systems if you can't catch it properly and it's in your backups and You know, it's just something that it's like, sometimes it feels honestly like one step forward, 10 steps back, right?

Yeah.

Like, you've got a pretty good handle on it, and then, oh, we just went to a trade show, and now there's like a massive data load. Or, you know, it's just something that is just constant. And I don't have an answer for what, like, how does something— you're right, Michael. Like, nobody can say, like, yeah, my data's pristine and perfect. Right. It just doesn't.

No, I don't know anybody.

It doesn't exist.

No. Yeah.

It's just some, it's one of those things you just have to, you just have to deal with. Yeah.

And AI can definitely help you get there faster, right? Like if you are looking at trying to solve data problems, I think you, it's a great, as long as you do it within the limitations and the boundaries of what is safe for your business. Full disclaimer, use AI safely.

Well, but this goes back to why AI, I don't think AI, and I'm probably somewhat wrong in this, will not replace people and what they do is because I think we've all heard of examples of where AI spits out either nonsense or made up stuff, right? Think about ChatGPT in particular. But I do think, and I do strongly believe that you still will need especially on the data side, people who understand data, where it comes from, how it works together, how people are interacting with it, to be able to go, what you generated is nonsense, or it's interesting, but we can't really do anything with it, right? Those kinds of things I think are still going to need people who understand that data. And it's part of why I keep harping on, you know, The few things I do, right? Understanding finance, understanding statistics, because I believe more and more, like, that's going to really be— make you stand out. Even in a world where AI is doing some of the heavy lifting, people need to understand what the output means.

Yeah. I mean, it, to me, that, that, that just goes back to this idea of like, you know, quality can take on, just like the word, the damn word campaign can mean a million things to a million people. I think this idea of data quality is the same in that, you know, you can feed a system a bunch of information, but what it might draw as a conclusion or as like an output is not relevant to the way that you think about your business. And you didn't, if you aren't really like hyper-specific about sort of like your aspiration for whatever it is that you're pursuing, right? The answer to a question, you should probably know your data pretty well, which means you have to feed it quality inputs to get a quality output, right? There's a— but for those of you that like don't follow Brinker, I suggest you do.

Scott Brinker.

Scott Brinker.

Not Brinker International, which is a fine company, but Right. Very different. Yeah.

Follow Scott Brinker. Some of his stuff is like really, really interesting. There's a really good thread by, or a comment that was added to one of his more recent posts on LinkedIn by Justin Norris, who shared this article that went really nerdy and really deep on this idea of AI and how you string together different agents. It was published by Anthropic. I can put it in the show notes for all of you, but it is fundamentally what it gets down to is kind of what we're talking about here is that like breaking down, when you think about an AI agent operating on your behalf, it ultimately comes down to like being able to like get it to do very specific things really, really well. And In order to do that, you have to have like some pretty clear steps and like guidelines, and you string together in some of these different models, they actually string together different parameters so that it can operate within those parameters independently. And then they bring 'em back together in an aggregator model. It's just fascinating stuff, right?

Yeah.

Like you're basically like isolating these really specific outcomes and then bringing it all back together once each of them have completed their job.

No, the whole concept of agents and agents that follow you around, like career coach or whatever, like students, right? That's, I'm fascinated by that and how that might play out. It's hard for me to even wrap my head around with that from a practical standpoint. What does that look like in my, in, in our lives? Yeah.

I don't even know what to expect with all this stuff. 2025, this is going to be our whole world.

I mean, if we could all help everyone get outside and move more, I think that would be a good thing.

That would be great.

That would be great.

You know, I've been on a LinkedIn kick lately. There was somebody that put— I have no idea who it was— somebody posted that their goal was to get— spend 1,000 hours outside with their family.

Oh, I saw that. It was, um, oh gosh, what was her name? I know exactly who you're talking about.

Yeah, I was like, good on you, that is amazing. She hit her goal this year.

And of course, ops person tracking it. So yeah.

Well, that was what I was— where my head went immediately. It was like, but how did you track that? Like, what tool did you use to— did everybody just go log in that they played for an hour outside?

I don't know. That's funny.

Was it an aggregate or was it individual?

Yes.

Yes. The answer is yes.

Um, all right. So where are you? Where do we see all this going? You know, 4 years into it, what's, what's next? What do y'all, where would you like to see us going with this?

The show?

Yeah. Does the show continue? Does it morph into something else? I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know.

I feel like I've been—

It's organic, you know?

Yeah. I love, I love our show. I, I, I certainly, I don't know if it's reached its shelf life and it needs to be sunset just yet, but I think, you know, as long as people are interested in sharing their career paths and their learnings, we want to share their stories. I love that idea.

Yeah.

But I do see opportunity for us to potentially string together other Other show ideas. I mean, we have so many show ideas.

You do.

So, I mean, I do.

You're an idea generator, Mike. We know this.

I know, I know. It's a problem I have, but, uh, it's a gift. It's the glass half full version. People on my team are like, stop, stop. Yeah, I don't know. I would like to see even more like people come on and share, like I'd like to see more of the B2C side come in and share a lot of their challenges because, you know, they're different.

They're the same and they're different.

They're the same and they're different. And, but they've been doing marketing technology and automation stuff, operations for longer.

I mean, my, my first move into marketing was to build a 50 million household database for a company.

See?

Right? It was, yeah.

So it's been around for longer. It's been bigger challenges. So I'd like to see more of that. I'd like to see a continued push for the advancement of like, what does it mean to be certified? That's obviously on my agenda. So I want to have more conversations around that for our audience. You'll see more of it from us, but—

Yeah. But you know, I mean, I, yeah, I mean, I agree with everything you guys are saying. I think I would love to, the B2C part is interesting for me specifically. Most of the people that I know in real life locally, they are in the B2C space, direct-to-consumer goods. And, you know, they're— I know never to call them or text them during Black Friday or Boxing Day sales or anything like that. And that's just a completely foreign world to me. And, but they use a lot of the technology in this very similar way, just on a different scale.

Yeah.

So, I think that that's really interesting. I definitely think it would be interesting to have more discussions around some of the topics that we had covered during the women's breakfast during MAPSA certification as well. I often get questions on LinkedIn about how did I get into this role? What are some suggestions or tips that I can give to people who are looking to get into this role? Because unlike a lot of other career paths, there isn't a, okay, I'm going to study this and then I'll get a job in marketing ops, right?

Right.

It's not always so clear-cut or so defined. So, I think topics that kind of lean towards those areas are things that I would definitely be interested in. Also, I just love origin stories, right? So, guests that we had had, you know, for example, Johnny from Slack and Vivian, who had started Flax Sleep, now known as Will It, you know, like it's just conversations like that around their entrepreneurial spirit, I think is always going to be interesting. And to hear how business— to hear how they started their businesses, the challenges that they have as small business owners, I think there can be a lot of takeaways and parallels, right? When it comes to marketing ops people and how we digest information and I don't know, just lots of topics that I think that we haven't covered that I think we can cover too.

Yeah. I had 2 additional thoughts, or maybe it's a little slight difference to what you just talked about, Naomi, but one, it just occurred to me through our conversation, I wonder if it would be useful to get some people from colleges and universities to talk about what they're seeing in terms of trends. and how that could tie into it and maybe even help elevate the profession within the universities as a viable career path.

Oh, that would be killer.

That's a great—

Yeah, that would be great.

So that, and I think through our connections, it sounds like we all 3 have some connections to university folks. So that, I think that would be an interesting one. The other one, and this is one that, so one of our past guests, Kyle Lacy, who I'm a big fan of. He, he for a while had a podcast that he did that was, I don't know, each episode was maybe 15 minutes. And what was really fascinating was he was talking to revenue leaders and he would get really deep into kind of personal stories and not about work stuff, but like, you know, a guy was a recovering alcoholic and they talked about that. I mean, I think the, like his, deeper things. I'm not sure if it's, this may be one where it makes more sense. Like if we want to get into stuff like that about people's stories from that standpoint, right? The personal side of what it's like to be a professional and dealing with things might be an interesting one. We've had a few people that have opened up about challenges that they've faced, whether it was losing loved ones or going through, you know, stress-induced kinds of things or whatever. But I think that might be kind of an interesting one. Um, and my guess is, Naomi, you've probably heard stuff like that in the intake forms you talked about for the, the, the women's, what'd you call it? Mops and mimosas?

Yeah, I think it was called Mops and Mimosas. That was Audrey's.

I hadn't heard that yet. I just heard the women's breakfast, so there.

We deliberated on what that name was going to be and she landed on Mops and Mimosas.

I loved it.

I was like, that was great.

Yeah. So I think it'd be interesting there. So I guess, so maybe, maybe we, we end here with a shameless, shameless request to our, our listeners for, uh, again, we always love getting the honest feedback. Um, it's, it's always good to know that we're We're connecting with you one way or another, if we're not, and helping us get that. But we'd love your ideas too. If you, you know, if you want to see us go deeper into certain of these subjects or other ones that we didn't talk about, let us know, reach out to us. We are, I think, we're all nodding our heads here. Like we are very open to input and ideas. In fact, I was interacting with someone who wanted to be a guest just today who brought up something. I was like, oh, actually we've never talked about that. And I think it would be an interesting one for our audience. And it could be, that one happened to be, I think, where it could go into a practical, like, this is how I can use something today or tomorrow that I learned. And other ones are big picture things, you know, more esoteric. And I think we're open to all of those.

Yeah. Yep. I totally agree. If you've got an idea or you feel like you want to share your story, we would love Love for you to come on and do that. I like, I personally, I was just like thinking about it this morning again. Like I was like, maybe I'll spin up a channel for those that are like, I know, I know it's a new year, so everybody does the like, I'm going to get fit or I'm going to do this or whatever. Like I really am on a totally different journey of my health right now. And I was like, maybe that, you know, I like that part of like, we're already in a community full of people with like similar interests in the category of MarTech. But I like getting one layer down to like, yeah, let's all support each other for the other thing, right? Like, maybe you're a marathon runner, maybe you're a, I don't know, CrossFit enthusiast or a mountain biker. I was like, maybe I'll spin up a channel for— so anyway, all that is to say, if you've got other interests and you are game to share them, or you want to share your background story, I think that's what Makes it possible to relate to each other in this field.

Yeah.

Because we all got here somehow. So, yep.

Yeah.

Anyway, 4 years.

I appreciate the 2 of you in this journey together. Um, it's crazy. I said, it's like when I realized it was 4 years, I was like, what?

4 years?

Is that right?

Yeah. It's blowing my mind too.

Yeah.

I looked like a very different human being 4 years ago.

I don't know.

Constantly exhausted. That's mostly because I had a newborn, but you know, that's okay.

And I'm on the other end where I've now got ones that are in college or about to head off to college.

Yeah, we're running the gamut.

So Naomi's got— thank you, Naomi's a new parent.

Newish.

Newish.

Yeah. It's good.

Well, good. Well, uh, this is fun. Uh, hopefully our audience appreciates this sort of open book view, like of where we, where we think things are. So anything, anything else before we wrap it up? No, no, no, no.

See y'all at Spring Fling in May. Let's go.

Spring Fling. All right. Well, that sounds great. Well, again, always, always fun talking to you two and to all of our listeners. Thank you again for your support. Uh, as we said, right, we're always open to ideas and feedback and suggestions. And if you have an idea or want to be a guest, uh, talk about something, we are all ears. So bring them on to any of us. And we will be glad to talk to you about it some more. So until next time, bye everyone. Bye everybody.

Bye everyone.