Keeping the Lights On While Changing the Engine: Managing Transformation in Marketing Ops with Adele Kurki

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 and powered by all the MoPros out there. I am your host, Michael Hartman. Today, I'll be talking with our guest about one of the most persistent challenges in marketing operations, how you can, how you change the business while still running the business. So to join, to do that, joining me is our guest, Adele Kerke, Senior Marketing Operations Lead at Avan. Over the past several years, Adele has built and led global marketing ops functions through major change, including top-of-funnel redesigns, evolving go-to-market strategies, and large-scale transformations. All while keeping day-to-day execution running across distributed teams. So this episode is going to be all about the reality of transformation inside marketing ops, hopefully marketing a little bit too, balancing BAU work with long-term initiatives, creating transparency across global teams, securing leadership buy-in for technical change, and figuring out when frameworks like Agile help and when they don't. We'll have an interesting conversation about that, I expect. So Adele, welcome.

Thank you.

Thanks for joining so late since you're in Finland.

Thank you. Thank you. It's 8 PM here in Helsinki and it's definitely dark as we are recording this in February. Thank you for a warm introduction and invitation. I've been following your podcast for a while and I must say I'm deeply grateful to share my perspective today. So I serve as Senior Marketing Operations Lead, as you mentioned. A significant recent change is already now, we, for instance, moved marketing operation team to a revenue operations organization, which adds a little bit of a spice for today's conversation.

Okay. Is that a new thing since we last talked?

That is a new thing since we last talked, but anyways, we're focusing definitely on marketing operations, more tech operations and analysts in how we are working with our stakeholders in moments of transition, as well as day to day. Yeah.

So why don't we start there? Like talk through a little bit, like in, in, so this is like a pull back the curtain moment a little bit. So when I say Adele and I spoke before, it's, um, yeah, it varies from guest to guest how long ago that was. Um, but I think we, we are recording in early February of 2026, and I think we spoke in early October, if I remember right, something like that. So it's been a few months. So Um, that's not that long, but it sounds like some change. So like maybe walk us through your role. Um, and I'm, I'm really curious, um, about the, like the global nature of what you do. So we, we, like, I've had global teams managing them from the US, but people in other countries, and we've had a few people on who've managed global teams from Europe and other places. So I'd love to get your perspective on that as well.

Absolutely. Actually, let's start first kind of like getting the scope and globe in place. Indeed, we are a mighty team of marketing operations specialists serving our stakeholders across US, APAC, and Europe. So practically, we are serving our sales colleagues and supporting colleagues around the globe. We are specifically in Europe and US so that we are able to ensure this 360 view support every single day. Maybe kind of like opening a little bit of a, like, what does it mean? What is the scope and what is kind of like the team supporting with? We are practically ensuring that we have optimized customer journey. So practically we improve sales and marketing alignment. We lead initiatives that boost operational efficiency. Uh, practically the team kind of owns the funnel, like everything top of the funnel, is it tracking, operations, tooling, marketing analysis, uh, and analytics is our team. We set the targets in the beginning of the fiscal years. We own AI workflows.

So you need targets for marketing, marketing leads and things like that. Funnel metrics.

Exactly. Funnel metrics, setting the targets in the beginning of the fiscal year. Like, hey, if our sales target is here. How as marketing function are we able to support to kind of like get us there?

Yeah.

Right. Indeed. And of course there is this admin part, which is not always so cool, which is like the admin. Of course we have always privacy, security. When we were thinking about the global business, there are— Europe is very like strict with their data privacy. Same, like all the states might have slightly different elements. So all of that work is also monitored and controlled. in our team. If you think about like, okay, we have this global element, we have that org element, what else there are? There is a ton of stakeholders. We work day to day, obviously with marketing, it's part of the name as well, right? But day to day with sales, is it kind of like a sales rep or sales leadership? There needs to be day-to-day alignment so that we actually connect the businesses together. We have sales motion, but we have also product motion. So we own part of the product motion. We work day to day with product teams to ensure that we are on the same map, we are roadmap support each other. And also, of course, if there are end of the life cycles, who owns the customer communications, we're raising our hand and supporting there as well. Then as we have analytics, analytic engineering, all that planning. So it's really, really interesting. core business that we are doing here in the marketing operations.

Yeah, I mean, it's all, 'cause this is, it just struck me as you were talking about, and now we're gonna talk more about the, I'll call it the tension between run the business, change the business kinds of things, but also I just was, it sort of hit me as you were describing one of your roles is to help the business, whether it's efficiency, velocity, effectiveness of things that are going through the funnel, but also Um, and I think about this as being an advocate for customers, right? Whether it's privacy compliance, doing kind of doing right by them. And it does feel often like those are also in tension. Do you, and you've got the global differences that make it more complicated. Do you see, do you feel that too?

Yeah, absolutely. And also something that's really, sometimes you forget is like, okay, when you are in like an operations, it's not actually that backroom role is actually sometimes the most customer-facing, especially if we think About like, for instance, AI workflows, which I mentioned here, it's like sometimes actually today you're pre— like creating in operations an AI that is actually, for instance, serving the whole customer flow until the closure.

Yeah.

Which is quite interesting, uh, perspective as well. So then for that perspective, it's really, really good to be connected on, on those stakeholders that are there to actually monitor and like setting the standards.

That's interesting. Sorry, I was kind of smiling because I just had a personal experience. It was not a sales funnel thing, it was more of a support thing.

Yeah.

And it was a, you know, AI chatbot, whatever. And I asked about 2 questions, didn't understand it. Asked the second one, another one. It told me kind of like, oh, if you want this, ask this. I put it in, like, I don't understand what you're saying. I was like, I just put in what you just told me to.

Yeah.

And it would not, I just got the same don't understand over and over.

And I was like, and honestly, those things you want to avoid, right? Because it's actually not helping the customer. It's just creating the frustration. And you're like, I remember this brand, but not in the most positive way.

Yeah. And if I remember, I can't remember what it was, but I think it was like a, um, insurance thing or something like that. And I'd like no choice. Right. I'm like, so it's not like I could do anything about it anyway, totally off topic. But, um, so when we talked before, you said that we, you know, over the last few years you've led several major initiatives. Um, maybe walk us through what some of those are that you wanna highlight. Um, yeah. And maybe go even a step back and like, what kind of, what was the, the trigger or catalyst that led to like why we wanted to pursue those changes to the business?

Yeah, absolutely. I could maybe share kind of like 3 key elements and then we look a little bit on like how to bring it to the the, to the board and what kind of like triggers those. Maybe if we think about what drives change from marketing operations side, like, okay, if it's not like given change, which sometimes happens, it's, um, after all, we are the architects. We are building the invisible bridges between the data points. We're bringing the actions, we're bringing the insights. Okay. From that perspective, often the change is that, hey, we cannot bring, like, we are missing some bricks from this invisible bridge. And that is what, at least, uh, in our case, have been triggering a couple of, um, cool work projects where one, for instance, is that, hey, we need to find a good way to automate and build marketing attribution. As simple as that.

Okay.

Do you have the, the bricks in place so that you can tell the story to your leadership that, hey, okay, this is what sourced, this is what tipped, this is what influenced. And you know, this is the storyline of the deal and these are the ways where we should invest. And if you want to make a change, this might be the way where you're leading towards to. Then other big project is from pretty much the same elements. It, we started quite early within AI marketing flows.

Okay.

Of course, they've been kind of like quite along in the business, but it wasn't kind of like that mainstream to bring them, uh, let's say 4 years ago or so. And there the conversation started like, okay, we have again this invisible bridge and we see their gaps. How can we fill it when we don't have resourcing in place. Okay. How do you replace basically additional human partners? Are there caps that we can do? And we started building actually proactively, like, hey, actually let's, let's do a POC. Let's try so that we can sell later for leadership that, okay, actually if we are investing in this, we can provide X times return on investment.

Okay.

And then a third big one, which was actually quite recent one is that, um, sometimes in marketing and especially in marketing operations, we tend to think and simplify that, hey, our customers are living only one lifecycle. So we are looking like, okay, they entered the system, they did this, and they either closed or did not. And, um, we wanted to solve it like, hey, okay, how do we create more transparency on if our, uh, like, um, prospects are going through different life cycles. Okay. They might not enter to the opportunity process this time. Okay. Let's like enrich, engage, blah, blah, blah. And then they come again and again.

Yeah.

And we created a process on how to bring that transparency to the table. Now you can already hear like, okay, so how did you explain it to your, you know, VP level? Because it sounds already quite technical and complex.

Well, that one is, that's another one that's like, it's hard to explain because everyone's so used to this very linear funnel model, right? Which it's an easy framework to get, but that's not the reality. I think of how people, yeah, research actually behaves. Yeah.

Yeah. And especially if you have product that you can try for free, or you can kind of like bring your colleagues into, or you change businesses. Uh, and it's a missed opportunity if you somehow lose the ends. After the first lifecycle, as we wish. So, and honestly, with this project, I had a lot of difficulties to figure out like, okay, how can I, like, this, this is so important. This is so cool. This is high impact. But if you go to your leadership, like, ah, there is this lifecycle and these objects and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, elements to bring to the table to kind of like create this invisible bridge. First, communications and preparations. Find the annexures, like find what is important in the, in the leadership level. What, like what matters? And then try to model some sort of an impact. It doesn't have to be perfectly fine. Like after all, we are not looking at like, okay, was it like dollar-wise?

It's not like accounting data and financial data, right?

So, but kind of like an estimate, like, okay, you can all, for instance, in this lifecycle side or this AI flow, you can see where the gaps is.

Something reasonable that you could defend As a benefit, right? Even if it's—

Yeah. And, and get the attention because then the conversation starts when you are able to get into that table with that first pitch that, hey, this is actually relevant and we want to solve it because it has a dollar value and dollar values are important for you to make it through this fiscal.

Absolutely.

So that's kind of like how we, how we started the conversation. And then the other thing, uh, with some of these projects is that It's really important that you build authority inside the company so that you have certain level of trust within the leadership, which means that, okay, you do your day-to-day, like within your team in a, in a good level. You keep the constant transparency, you are visible, but for sometimes it is a good thing to do like an official audit. Or bring an external to support you into this conversation. It is something that I learned a little bit like in an uncomfortable way because I think I'm like, ah, but I know my business.

I've been here.

Maybe more. I know what they're going to say. But, um, we brought a great, um, consultancy, CS2, not advertised, but they did really good, good work with us. Uh, we brought them to the table and said like, hey, Guys, um, we have this problem. We really think that this is important. We already calculated how much this would be bringing us value. Um, can you kind of like jump into with our leadership and let's have a chat, like with additional authority to make it through? Yeah.

Yeah. It's validation. Yeah. Sometimes validation.

And, and it was amazing. We did like a proper audit. The validation went through, the leadership worked, workshopped with us, like, okay, how does the good look like? And we were able to start this process as we planned.

Yeah.

So that's kind of like an additional element, which I didn't maybe realize earlier that, hey, actually this is an asset.

Um, can I just, oh, so go ahead and finish and then I, I want to follow up on a couple of threads there.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There are so many things that we could discuss. Um, but maybe I want to also touch base, which we will discuss also later, is that It's really important that you have day-to-day trust in the team that is in the team and you bring constant visibility for everyone in the team. It is so, so easy, especially in marketing operations, to just like do the admin, you know, close the fires, please collect the closest stakeholders, but it's really hard to bring the success cases to the organization or these development projects or the actual impact, but that's really important if you are willing to bring these big, big projects into the table and want to have that first conversation.

Yeah. So, a couple of things, just, I want to see if this sounds right. So, a couple of takeaways for me. One, it's important to speak the language of the stakeholders who have the control, the purse strings, right? Who can say yes or no on your ideas. And I think that's a critical one and people should spend time understanding what that language is. That's, I think, is important. I think you're, there's an element of what I would call doing the BAU work well earns you the right to go and trust to go do other things that may be over here, right?

Yeah.

And sometimes it means also including the right to bring in an expert authority on something to help you prove a case. But I think it's really important here. I'm a little torn here on the last point you made about trust in data. And I think part of that is what I find a lot of people do with marketing and sales data is they try to treat it when they get grilled as if it should be right, accurate, whatever word you want to choose, as if it was something that has high levels of control, accounting, finance, operational data, if you were like, say, manufacturer or something like that, which it doesn't. And I think there's a level, like there's a part of this is like, yes, you want to build trust. To me, part of that is setting expectations that like, what is right, what is like, is not going to be the same level. And also being honest, like, And I think we've all probably, I was talking to somebody earlier today about these weird anomalies I would see inside, in this case, Salesforce data that would lead me to go down a path and go like, why am I seeing this? Right? And it turns out there are ways that the sales teams were operating, which I don't really, like, I have an opinion about whether or not that was the right thing to do, but it doesn't really matter, right? That was how they operated and the data led to that.

Yeah.

So being able to go like, hey, we can, we can't do this. We can get close. We can get directionally correct. Right. Right. And I think that's setting that expectation there and being honest about the quality and completeness and accuracy of the data.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Okay.

Absolutely. And I think like something that's really good to understand from what makes like marketing analytics, for instance, quite specific is that we have the top of the funnel. Where you cannot measure everything, even if you'd like to, it's always directional.

Yeah.

And then there is this additional element is like, what, from what angle are you watching the data or what angle are you reporting the data? The source, for instance, like if we are looking for, hey, let's see, um, how marketing build pipeline. Yep. You can look at it from so many angles. Um, there can be as many manual adjustments, opinions even sometimes, that it's always directional.

Yeah.

And you have to be very specific. For instance, when I'm providing numbers, let's say to the board deck or something, need to be quite open and honest. Like, hey, the data you're looking today describes that X, Y, Z, and you can like Again, speak the language, but also be honest. Okay. It means if it's sourced, they came to the system XYZ, can be 2 years ago, 3 years ago. Now, if they converted, there might have been actions XYZ happening in between. On this other, like other window, when we are looking at, okay, it was tipped over or kind of like, hey, the opportunities process started. From this marketing action. It tells a very different story if it was like that. 3 years sourced, can be from marketing, tipped by sales, or hey, sourced by sales, tipped by marketing. Which one do you want to have?

Yeah. So I think we could spend all, and we probably have before, spent a whole conversation on just that kind of topic. And it's just, I think it's, I like to reinforce that because I think, I still think there's a lot of people who are are being held accountable to a level of quality on data that is, I think, unreasonable for most marketing and sales teams, even the ones who have a focus on data quality. It's just, it's just the nature of it.

Yeah. And I think in, in any ways, like you aim to keep it as clean as possible, especially in the times of like automations and AI. You want to be as directional, as good as possible. You want to provide those different visibilities or different life cycles, but it's good to be realistic.

Yeah. Well, and the other part that I always tell people, like when I coach people who are going to be, whether they've been on my team or I do, you know, independent coaching, who are being asked to do reporting, right? If you, I tell them like, if you see something, like you should be keenly aware to look for things that don't match a pattern. Because I guarantee you someone will ask the question if you just throw these numbers or charts up and you need to be prepared to answer the question of why does it say that? Yeah. It doesn't mean you have to have, like, it doesn't mean it has to, you change it or fix it, right? But you go, for me, like, hey, I'll give you an example, right? Started seeing, we first launched Marketo, but we started tracking attribution and we started seeing influence on opportunities that were created well before we launched. And I'm like, I don't know what's going on here. Like, so I had to go figure out why, because even I was like, I don't, that didn't make any sense, right?

Yeah.

There's a logical reason why, was able to explain it. But I think that like, that's the other part, right? So don't, don't just go like, oh, well the data just can't be good. Yes, you should try to make it as good as possible for automation, AI, all those things. And also, Be prepared to answer when things aren't correct or don't look correct, right? Because for people who aren't familiar with it, they won't get it. All right, I'll get off my high horse there.

Okay.

Okay, so let's get into this, the topic of you got these big projects, but you, like you said, like we still have to keep the machine running, right? If you will. How How do you think about balancing those 2, like run the business, like we keep referring to it, run the business, change the business in a practical day-to-day sense? Like what do you, how do you think about that?

Well, honestly, when we have, well, first of all, I believe in something called like 80/20 or 70/30 type of a modeling that you have. Constantly elements that are like supporting short, mid, and long-term growth. And practically that means that, okay, you have this day-to-day, so we keep the business running fine, but we have always development projects on the side that support like mid and longer-term elements. Now there is of course different sizes of fires. Let's say that we have, um, decided that, okay, one of these growth, uh, projects will take place.

Mm-hmm.

Let's say this lifecycle project? We plan. We plan so that we have that in our roadmaps from the very start. And we plan it in a timeline that makes, well, always is ambitious, but it's still making sense so that we have the capacity to run the day-to-day. Obviously, if you, and all the operation teams have always a huge backlog, you need to be Just able to prioritize. This is always there. And then from the fires, you have, for instance, 70% or 50% of your week, depending a little bit, dedicated for those. You do the prioritization inside that time that you have available.

Yeah.

So you have just like different buckets of time that are dedicated for different swim lanes, and you prioritize inside those what makes sense. In these projects, the good and easy thing is that you have, you have to provide already to the top, like to the top level or to the leadership, some sort of roadmap. And you want to proactively update, uh, the organization about changes or expectation setting that, hey, again, you have to overcommunicate. 1st of April, the change will be there. The change will like mean this and this. And then you can like track from there, like what needs to happen at what deadline. And that's like already set, it's predictable. It's in your operational roadmaps. Your team knows exactly what's happening, so they can focus only on, uh, on that. The challenge, I think the real challenge is that when something else happens on top of this.

Something unexpected.

So something unexpected, let's say we change a sales motion, which actually happened, uh, or we change a team or we change, you know, a structure or something like that, which creates— You hit an integration point.

Oh yeah. That you can, you know, yeah.

Something, something random, which, um, which requires some time somewhere.

Yeah.

And, um, then it's really good to go back to the team like, hey, okay, this is still our roadmap and we still want to ensure that we don't just drop everything and pick something as urgent, but have that long-term vision at the same time, which is kind of like a little bit sometimes like, oh, but, but this is like really urgent. Like we need to fix this fire. But if we fix every single fire immediately, we'll never stop firefighting.

Right.

And this function needs to look like longer term to the horizon. Like, okay, what this business needs tomorrow. And for that reason, we kept Even we had this organizational change, for instance, we kept this long-term process. We keep, we make sure that this swim lane is not touched. Then we have all the operational tasks or admin stuff. Okay. What can we change there to ensure that this urgent fire, for instance, is fixed? In our case, it was actually, we had to change, or we moved out of one sales sales team, which happened to be the sales team we were handing over our leads. So we need to figure out like, oh, okay, well, let's figure out like, um, a new way of routing and figuring out when and how we do handover leads and what do we kind of like hand over from marketing, for instance. Um, so that's, that's a little bit of a fire, but anyways, it's something that we can solve, like peace of mind. Let's focus on figuring it out. SAP. Let's say we have 3 days and the team or the resources or the hours that we are focusing on building this long-term, they continue. We need it still tomorrow. We have a deadline.

So, in my, so when I've led teams, I'm with you, right? And sometimes it's, I'm not sure early in my career I would have had the enough breadth of knowledge and experience to be able to, in the moment, on the fly evaluate, is this something that really needs to be addressed now? Or, you know, can we solve an immediate problem and then the bigger, longer-term fix? How do you— because the reason I bring this up is I've also had teams come to me where I go, something's come in unexpected, we all have to jump. And then they get frustrated over one of two, sometimes both things, right?

Mm-hmm.

One is, you know, Why is this always like, how does this keep happening, right? Why are we getting these fire drills? How can we stop that? The other is, I've committed to a longer-term project and now this is impacting my ability to execute. How do I, you know, what's good? Because then it becomes a reflection on them. It may have an impact on their compensation, right? How do you, I guess I've kind of, I don't even know that I've written it down. I guess I have a little bit of a mental model about how I think about it. The prioritization and that kind of stuff happens and how to evaluate it, but what's your take?

Well, of course it comes back to then, what is that? Like, what is the fire? Um, I always go back in my chair because always when you are like, everything is urgent, everything's fire, it actually means that you need to calm down.

Yeah.

Um, what is the actual business impact? Uh, who is driving it? Is this urgency for a person, for a certain team, or is it actually like a business-wide impact? And if you were to create or solve the problem from scratch, sometimes you don't have, you are given like, oh, this is urgent, you need to do this. I always challenge my team to really think like, okay, what is the problem we solve? Okay. If we decide that this is, you know, this has actually quite big business impact, what is the best way to solve it? Okay. Uh, what is the sufficient way? It doesn't have to be perfect, especially if it's like a short-term, like, okay, hey, actually we need to just like preach it through how much time we dedicate for it compared to the other things that are on our table.

Yeah.

So that's, that's where we are coming, um, usually.

Yeah, I think about it, let's take a system down kind of issue or a break in integration, something like that. I think what gets mixed together sometimes is, not only we've got to immediately fix that, and at the same time, we have to figure out why it happened. And one of the simple things I try to do is separate that. Let's solve the immediate problem. Then let's go separately in a less, you know, urgent thing. Let's go try to understand how that happened and how can we minimize the chance it happens again.

Yeah, absolutely. Of course, in all these roles, it's really important to understand the root cause because otherwise it can be, it can be sometimes actually wider. Like, oops, luckily the result was this small fire because it could have been massive, something else. So definitely that's, that's really important. And that's actually something that we expect quite proactively also. If you note something, it's really good to check if it's, if it doesn't require too much to just like deep dive or like check what is the root cause, even if we wouldn't fix that fire immediately. Yeah.

So, um, I think we've hinted at this a little bit. There's this idea of, I think you even used the word transparency at one point. Like how, and communication, like how important is it, do you think, for marketing ops teams to be both transparent about their capacity, what's on their roadmap and communicating that well, as opposed to kind of holding back and just, I mean, it becomes easy to be discounted and focus, just focus on the urgent. Those things are right in front of you.

Well, honestly, honestly, and what we're trying to do here is that you as a marketing operations leader and you as marketing operations team want to be a strategic partner instead of, you know, help desk or ticket mastering function. And The first thing in order to change that, especially if you are in the situation that you figure out like, ah, oops, you're listening to this and you're like, ah, well, my Jira is full and it's actually like everyday fire only. How you start doing the change is to bring this transparency. What, what is the function doing? Honestly, it seems to be very cryptic sometimes and really hard to understand, but bringing it visible.

Yeah.

It's really important. And how do you do it is to first bring like, okay, this is my roadmap. This is kind of like the first level of expectation setting. These are expected to happen. I am committing to these things and my team is committed to these things. And also sometimes this is why we are not able to deliver everything that you're bringing to our backlog.

Mm-hmm.

And we have to practice no. When we are thinking about the transparency, it's these communication elements, this human to human, which need to happen in like manager to manager, manager to organization, team to organization. Your team has to understand also the roadmap. Why did we choose these elements? Why are they important? You are okay to say no if things are not part of the roadmap. And also this roadmap lives.

Yeah.

Like if we have these fires, like we are all, all, all okay to drop also something as long as we communicate to the stakeholders in the organization what's happening. Um, another interesting thing, which I find more like more and more important, especially for roles that are working in very like operative level, when it is sometimes hard, like, hey, I'm actually doing only admin work. Like my job is to ensure that you know, everything goes fine and it's invisible, um, is to plan together how can we bring this visibility to those roles? Um, is it then kind of like bringing them to the kind of like function meetings or like find the cross-partners, but also technical transparency. Ensure that everything that is done is, hey, this is visible to sales.

Yeah.

This is visible to, to the product. We are actually connecting the dots. Um, That is really, really important that it's not only about these humans and the text and they're being in the meetings, it's also they're visible in the technical execution.

Who did what?

Everything is transparent.

I love that you brought up the idea of being transparent. If you're a leader, being transparent with your team, because I think it's a mistake I made probably early in my career as a, as a people leader, and I see others do, is they try to In the name of trying to shield their team from the politics or whatever, they don't address the questions that the team will have. Like, if things start shifting, you know, we've got this roadmap, but we're getting into, you know, we're indicating like how, I guess it's really important for me at least, I want a culture where I'm like, I'm going to share as much as I can, right? And I, you know, be honest when I can't.

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Because I think it's, um, that if, if you don't do that, people start to ask questions about why did direction go this way or that way? What's my role, right? Am I able to push back? All those kinds of things. Um, 'cause what I've had, I've had to do literally at times is like, do I just sort of describe those situations, right? We had a roadmap, big project stuff we're working on, and something came up and it Sidetracked us for a longer time than we had hoped, and it was going to impact that timeline for the big project. And I've had to say like, this is why, especially if it was me, like I made the decision that we had to do that. Like I will be like, I'm going to own that, right? I'm not going to hold you accountable for change, right? As long as you were doing things as appropriate. But I think I, I would be as transparent as I could about the why.

Absolutely. And especially if you want your team to be also proactive problem solver, if you want them to, you know, feel comfortable on bringing like, hey, I noted this anomaly, like something off, or you want them to solve independently and grow and keep the curiosity and something. In order for them to solve the business problems, they need to understand what's happening in the business. It's being transparent on what's happening, why things are happening, why things are not happening. And then also building that business acumen constantly. Like, this is the way the business works in our industry, in our, like, you know, type of a business so that they can work independently, especially when you're working in global companies, because then there is this time zone things and different stakeholders. You want that your team is speaking the same language because Because nothing is more uncomfortable that everybody are a little bit confused.

Yes. Yeah.

And, and you are then kind of like the operational center, which is supposed to tell the truth.

Yeah. Well, and worse, everyone thinks they're on the same page, but they're actually not.

Oh yeah. And that's, that's the worst. And that's why, uh, these kind of like frameworks, especially in global environment, works well. Like, okay, roadmap, always up to date, better if it's living somewhere. Um, also as some kind of like living elements such as Jira.

Yeah.

In epics, you can put epic, like epics for development, which is, here we go. But it actually kind of like creates some sort of transparency and living elements in a way, which helps also stakeholders then to go independently, let's say in APAC time zone, to review like, okay, hey, how was my project? Or I think I did drop a ball, what is the status of it? Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

That type of a thing.

Yeah. So you hinted at Agile stuff, and I feel like we had, I'm trying to remember, like, this is the downside of not having talked to you in so long, but I think maybe we had a slightly different, uh, opinion or point of view about where Agile fits in and where it doesn't. Because I, to me, it feels like it works really well, generally speaking, for like the the regular recurring repeatable stuff, tickets, if you will, and maybe on some project stuff. Ooh, but it feels like there, I also like personally, I think there's work that doesn't really match that. Like, which, how do you, do you guys use Agile for what you do? Is it like universal? What do you like, how do you think about it?

Well, I think we don't like use the official Agile framework as such, but we have like agile elements.

Right.

Um, I do like frameworks. I think it's kind of like for every operational person at some moment of time, you have to certain level of control freakiness. Um, but we, for instance, work on, on, on targets and, uh, roadmaps and Jira boards to ensure that we have certain level of execution and technical, um, transparency, meaning not technical with not in the systems, but in this kind of like ticketing system to have documented communications and stakeholder management, and then this global visibility. We loop that back to our kind of like living roadmap. So we have, you know, the classic document that you can showcase in different environments and share, but then we also try to keep it livable and actionable in Jira in visual manner so that we can also track, hey, are our sprints actually supporting us to finish our goals? Do we see blockers? Should we readjust? Were we too ambitious or too, like, less ambitious than we wanted? Um, so for that, the agile works. Maybe the other, like, that's maybe the less agile part as such. Um, but it is a tool that helps us to monitor and understand in 2-week sprints if we're going the right direction. And that we are like controlling our deliveries.

Yeah.

Um, I said it is really easy to go to that firefighting mode. Uh, the other thing that we already touched base is this, um, percentage. It's like, okay, in moments of crisis, you might have 50/50 development firefighting, 70/30, you know, have this percentage conversation like, hey, this week Where are you focusing today? What are your key priorities in these swim lanes? Okay, we have a special week coming ahead. We might need to change a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and that gets to, I mean, I think that's a really good, like, I don't want people listening or watching to miss this, right? This idea, like, the goal is 80/20 or 70/30 split between run the business, change the business, or whatever that number is. But that's a goal, like any given week, right? You may have to adjust because You've got a time-sensitive campaign or an event or someone's going to be on vacation, right? And so you have to be—

Something breaks.

Adaptable to shift, right? Yeah, something breaks. So it's interesting because as I was thinking about you talking about Agile, because I like, so full transparency, I've used lots of different methodologies. I've built methodologies. And conceptually, I like the idea of Agile. What I find with almost all methodologies is that people are super hardcore advocates. Generally, there's a lot of them who use it as a very rigid structure as opposed to a tool to help them, right? And taking advantage of the things that make sense and don't make sense for a given thing. That's probably my big—

Yeah.

But also, it just hit me as you were just talking about it because you brought up Jira. And I think I tried really hard to separate the tool that you're using for it from the methodology. And I think I've used Jira, I've used several other project management tools, and I am a believer in having that, right? Because I think to your point, like one of the things that helps you uncover, if you don't already have a way of doing, is the 2 important things to understand what you can actually deliver. Which is how much work is coming at you or do you have on your team's plate and how much capacity do you actually have that still allows for maybe a little bit of development time, time off, whether it's sick, vacation, holiday, whatever. And if you don't have a way of doing that, you're going to get yourself in a lot of trouble because you'll just take, especially if you're not comfortable pushing back. Go like, you're just going to say, keep saying yes. Because I think a lot of people in ops, um, want to, want to help, you know?

Absolutely.

And it's hard to say no.

And something that you want to be mindful, like, I think there are 2 additional elements why I like keeping this kind of ticketing system, whatever it is, like Asana, Monday, blah, blah. Um, first is actually you get really good data on enablement needs. There are a ton of tickets that come like, actually, these clusters just don't know how to do their work. Like, this is not a ops task. Or, hey, we actually see a pattern that we, for some reason, none of the team, or we didn't have a flagging system, there is a bug somewhere. This is actually something that shows that there is a bug.

Yeah.

Um, the other thing.

That's really good.

That helps is that, yeah, the other thing is that if you have a global team, you, and also like the bigger the team, um, at some moment of time, when you have all these stakeholders all around the world, it might be really hard to understand what is actually the workload that comes to the team. And especially if you have a lot of ambitious junior roles, Um, as you mentioned about this kind of like people pleasing, if I translate it that way.

Yeah.

It, you don't want to burn them out. You want to ensure that the curiosity is there, the coachability is there, the mind is sharp. Um, and you're providing the growth by walking through, for instance, time to time, these conversations on like, not only on the sprints, but for instance, in your one-to-one, like, hey, actually, like we saw these tickets coming, like, Ignore, we'll solve them. Or we kind of like, or, hey, your workload has increased, uh, 25%. Let's open it up. What is kind of like making you busy? Okay. Is it hindering your development targets?

Um, you know, or there's a hidden queue.

It is a tool.

A hidden queue of things that are coming at you outside of the standard process, right?

Yeah, exactly. So it works kind of like. It works really well as a tool, um, also for these kinds of purposes.

Yeah. So like you're hinting at, maybe this is where we can wrap up, is you're hinting at using that as a tool to help with, um, development and growth for teams, right?

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

How do you, like, how do you think about that? Like, how important is that to you?

Um, well, the, the growth in general, if we, if we jump to that direction, Um, all operational roles are quite high demanding. Like it's not that easy any, like anymore to enter to the roles because it's not like, hey, I'm afraid. Exactly. Uh, and it can be very overwhelming because all like you have a bunch of stakeholders, especially when coming into these international companies. Like you have all these stakeholders, they're demanding hundreds of millions of stuff. They don't even know what they're demanding. And, uh, you then try to figure out, first of all, like run and understand what are the new ways of doing things? What is the smartest way of doing things? Okay. There are no benchmarks. How can I be smart at solving this problem in scale? And for that reason, you need to be able to keep that curiosity, that kind of like space for thinking straight. Um, and actually solve the problem the stakeholder couldn't even ask, and better if you are able to solve it before. So for that reason, I really, really, really want to invest in growing, mentoring, supporting, uh, the team members, both expanding their, you know, technical ability and it gives the space to learn, but especially keep their, you know, headspace healthy. Yeah.

Yeah, it's so easy.

Whenever it is in my powers, of course.

Yeah, right, right. Well, and also, I mean, the one thing I would add if I was in your— to your statement is at some point that's the person's responsibility to take advantage of it. Like you can create, you can create the space and time, but you can't make them do it. And if they choose not to, that's on them.

Yeah, absolutely. But I think it's it's really important to be able to build that space and protect that space. Is it then transparency, the systems, the roadmaps, especially in moments of change when it is overwhelming in multiple fronts? Um, and especially if you're in, in more junior roles.

Yeah. I mean, I, I, I've had people on teams who, I remember one who's pursuing an MBA. And I just, we just, we were very honest and direct with each other, you know, about how that would look, you know, and what commitments we still had to make. But on the occasion when that person needed to leave early or, you know, do a, you know, some sort of project or whatever, we just, we worked it out.

Mm-hmm.

But I think it ultimately, it benefited that person and it benefited the organization for that person. So giving them that ability, they became more loyal, they were willing to put in extra work and all these things. So, and it was good at the work. So anyway, we've covered a lot of ground here, Adele.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for a great conversation.

It was great. So if people want to continue maybe one of these threads or something or follow what you're you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that?

Well, I'm on LinkedIn, so you can find me with my name, so Adele Kurki. Feel free to reach out. I'm super, super happy to continue the conversation on any of these topics we covered today, this call.

Yeah, we did cover a lot of ground. We hopscotched a bit. Well, Adele, thank you so much for joining, especially late. I do know, I It's not easy. I appreciate that. So thank you. Thanks to our listeners and supporters and audience out there. We always appreciate that. If you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest, do like Adele did and reach out and we'd be happy to get the ball rolling. Till next time. Bye everybody.

Bye.