Ops Cast After Dark: MOps & IT Alignment, DAMs + MOps, and Project Management Challenges with Naomi Liu, Mike Rizzo and Michael Hartmann

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 the Mopros. Today is another, what are we calling this? OpsCast After Dark episode. So you got me and Naomi Liu and Mike Rizzo. Say hello.

Hello.

Hi. Oh, he came up with a new one. Nice.

I had to try something. I don't know. I was sitting there like getting a little nervous. Heart palpitations.

You have to say it in a different language every time.

Yeah, right.

You didn't know, you didn't, you didn't know that was coming at you.

Is that it, Mike?

I know, I was just getting nervous about how am I gonna say it.

So, um, I wonder, you know, uh, what was that? It was kind of big last year where you could hire like a B-rate celebrity to do a little video thing for you. Do you remember what I'm—

Cameo?

Cameo. Maybe we could get like some people for like to do Cameo and do introductions for that for us.

That'd be fun. We'll just like skip any other introduction. We'll just have like cameo guests come on, play.

I actually bought one of those. It was actually pretty, it was actually pretty good. I, I got a Ghostbuster guy, Ernie Hudson, to do one.

Well, the community chipped in and had, uh, what's his name? Um, oh my gosh. Co-founder of Apple.

Yeah. Oh, Wozniak.

Wozniak. Yeah. They did it like some of the chairpersons and stuff. I think Naomi, you pitched in on that maybe. I don't know. Mm-hmm. And they had Wozniak wish me a happy birthday. Last year was right when we were launching this podcast.

The other Steve.

The other Steve.

The other Steve. Um, all right, enough chitchat. Like, I know that this is a fun thing. And so first off, I'm gonna throw out, like, to those of you listening, um, if you ever wanna join us for one of these sort of more informal, just, you know, ride-alongs and, uh, and join us, let us know. Reach out to us directly either in LinkedIn or, or Slack and we'll make it happen.

No sales reps, please.

No, I'm just kidding.

You're welcome to, you're welcome to. We'll have a drink.

Oh no, we're gonna get hammered again in multiple ways, I think. So, well, let's just— I'm gonna open up the floor. Like, what are you— like, what's eating at you these days? What are the challenges you're facing? Anything interesting that we can share with the community?

So for me, not so much a challenge, but something I think that I don't see or hear or read rather get talked about a lot is, you know, folks are always talking about You know, marketing strategy and alignment with sales.

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Did you just say a boot?

I, I, if I did, I'd neither confirm or deny.

I, that's my favorite thing ever.

Did I really say that?

I think you said a boot.

You, you, you were really close. Oh my gosh. Really? Yeah. This is— that's okay.

Like, it's a moment. It's captured in audio history now.

I mean, we just gotta embrace it, eh?

If we get on the subject of digital asset management later in this, like, because that's top of mind for me. We might store it in our—

You just missed when I said, I purposely said A and you missed it.

Oh, I, I was, I was gonna ask, I was gonna ask, I was just gonna tell everybody I'm gonna lie, but I'm gonna tell everybody that you're also wearing a toque, you know?

No, I am not. You know, actually, I'm not, I'm not actually, but—

All right. All right. So align means—

sorry about that.

No, it's okay. So yeah, so what I was saying is, you know, you don't often see the topic discussed as much as you do about, you know, marketing strategy and alignment with sales. sales and your chief revenue officer and revenue operations and whatnot. But that's like marketing strategy and alignment with IT and building alignment with your CIO. And the reason it's top of mind for me today is because I actually had a meeting with my CIO and it reminded me about how much I love working with our IT team, which I know is not something that you generally will hear coming out of the mouths of you know, someone who works in marketing, but I really have a great relationship with our IT team, great relationship with our CIO. And, you know, it's, I think it's really important to get a seat at that table to understand, you know, what their challenges are, what their resource constraints are, because especially in a larger organization, we rely heavily on them. And so as much alignment as you can get with that side of the business, I think is super important. So I'm curious what you guys think about that.

Yeah, it's an interesting one. I don't know that I have exactly that same scenario, but I also have found it really useful to have a good relationship with IT leadership or similar types of organizations. So for example, where I'm at, there's a digital product team and there's overlap with with like website marketing technology and that kind of stuff. And so making sure that we're aligned on who's got what and all that kind of stuff has been a really— I wouldn't say it's been easy, but it's been a good thing. And I think recognizing that and playing off each other's strengths, you know, I think it's the same thing with sales and marketing alignment, right? You kind of want to know, okay, who's got what role? When do you, you know, where are those overlaps and where do you work together? And then just, you know, I think having that is really good. And on the IT side, I've never really— I never really thought about it till you brought it up. But I, when I think back about it, like every place I've been, I've had, if not, you know, senior IT leadership, people at a lower level that we just work together regularly to solve problems. And that was always an important piece of being successful.

Yeah, I think the relationship building part with them is really important too, because, you know, some folks who are listening to this might be wondering, well, how do you— what you do with IT? How do you work with them? And at least within EFI, I rely heavily on them for things like security reviews, right? Helping us with GDPR, things like that. So whenever we get a GDPR request, for example, it's like a full-scale, like, cross the organization, you know, we got to check to see what systems the person is in, how are we going to delete them, how are we going to, you know, do we retain them if we need to, things like that. And there's also situations where there may be skill sets in-house that we can leverage as opposed to outsourcing for certain projects or to even use support for specific vendors that we're using. And it's interesting because I know that for certain applications that I've brought into EFI, when you develop a relationship with IT and you can show them that marketing is not necessarily just— well, marketing is not just arts and crafts, and that these tools that we're bringing into the organization are there for a purpose, are not just kind of like a band-aid silver bullet. You tend to find that there are IT folks that, at least I've encountered, that are really excited about things and they'll be the first in line to say, I think it's a great compliment when folks in IT get wind of a project that we're working on or bringing in a certain tool or platform, and they'll actually proactively reach out and be like, Hey, Hey, I want to learn this so that I can support you. This seems super interesting, and I think it would help my career too on the IT side. And they're like, you know, I just, I want to learn about it. And how do I get, you know, like having IT guys come to you and say, how do I get Marketo certified? I think is actually pretty amazing.

Oh, wow. That's pretty, that's, that's pretty interesting. Oh, and did you—

If the audience could see my face, like my eyebrows went all like askew. I was like, what the fuck?

Your very well-manicured eyebrows are like—

Yes.

Yeah, for the audience that's just listening to us today, I got dressed today and I went outdoors. It was amazing. And Naomi keeps saying that my eyebrows are on point.

Yes, your eyebrow game is on point today.

So, so I think it's interesting. One of the things that I think, I think it would benefit IT people as well to become friends with their marketing ops, marketing tech folks, because I don't know if this is still true, and I think it is, but the amount of tech spending is happening in most businesses, there's a ton of it happening in the marketing side, right? And so a lot of what's really sort of changing and evolving in the technology space is in marketing and probably sales tech to a lesser degree, or maybe not. But I think that, so if they do wanna advance their career, helping them understand that would make sense. So, But I, you know, kind of like you, like I also, there's things about some of the technology stuff that I actually would rather have somebody take, right? So I've, in several of my roles, I've had responsibility for like website kind of infrastructure and a little bit of strategy. And like, I don't wanna deal with like managing our domains and, you know, all the kind of stuff that goes with that or hosting. I just want it to happen and be done. Um, if I have to manage it, I will, and I'll probably outsource it. But like, like, if we can have somebody that can handle that and work together, then that— I'm all for that. So anyway, I think this is an interesting one. Um, maybe we need to find some IT people to come on as guests.

I think that'd be really cool.

I think that would be really— yeah, I think that'd be super interesting, actually.

Um, Yeah.

I mean, so if anybody's listening knows somebody.

Yeah. When I was at Mavenlink, like I got to work with Roger, who was our like CIO, um, pretty like, you know, just in general it was a smaller organization back then. And, um, we talked a lot about like the needs of the technology stack and stuff. And we talked a lot about taking product level data and letting that pass through to kind of the marketing side of things cuz they were a SaaS company. But I never, the relationship didn't really go much, much beyond that. Um, but I'm sure like over time that it, you know, it continued to expand, but it's fascinating that you have such a close relationship with yours. Cause like, I've, I know how busy he was just managing the rest of it. So, um, it's cool that they take the time and then you've got these people asking to get certified. Like that's, that's pretty special.

Yeah, that was really cool. I, I remember when we were first implementing Marketo and I was in our office in SF, and I was just walking down the hall and one of our IT guys at the time came up to me and I hadn't worked with him before. I think he was in the database team or analytics team or something like that. And he came up to me and he tapped me on the shoulder and he introduced himself and he's like, hey, I heard about this Marketo project that you're working on. And I just wanted to tell you that whatever you need, I would love to kind of be on that team to learn the system and how it works and just get to know it because, you know, I've just, I just think it would be really beneficial to like learn some of these tools that are outside of my wheelhouse. And I was like, yeah, for sure. So I totally took him up on it. And I think maybe he regretted that after because I was like, yeah, how about this? You want to learn this? Can you do this? That's awesome.

All right.

So, so we just need to put that the big ask out there. If you are in IT, pro or, you know, an IT pro who would— who is either interested or has a good relationship with marketing ops, marketing tech, let us know. Let's, let's have— let's, let's make that a topic for a future episode. So, Mike, I think I heard you say that you've got, you've got something that is kind of top of mind for you. What's, what's your hot button today?

I mean, it's— I wouldn't call it a hot button. It just was relevant, uh, like, or just timely. This morning I had a unique opportunity to connect with the CEO of a digital asset management company, and we were just talking shop about the value of a product like that. And I happened to have worked for a digital asset management company. And so my line of thinking was like, yeah, when I went into that role for the very first time, kind of thinking about growth and demand gen for this SaaS digital asset management company, Coming from a marketing ops background, my, I was like, hey, where the heck has this thing been? Like through my entire career. And what's fascinating is DAM, like digital asset management, has been around for like longer in most cases than a lot of the marketing automation platforms out there. But for whatever reason, like it never makes its way into the tech stack. for most of us. And I think it should, but like, I don't know why that is. Do you? Like, I think before we started recording, you both had opinions on digital asset management that you could share.

So I had a couple of thoughts. So actually, I'm thinking back to the conversation we had when we had the folks from Cabinet M on and how one of their big findings was that Yeah, there are a lot of things that were— people were putting in their tech stack that they were documenting there that were not, I think, what most people wouldn't think of as marketing tech per se. And I think digital asset management is one of those ones because I think that has historically gone under the domain of like a creative team or something like that.

Yeah.

And my, my, my experience with them is I think conceptually they're great. The really hard part is managing versions and managing the taxonomy so that it's easy to find the right thing quickly. And that is— and I've never had an experience where that has gone super well. I've seen some that are close. Yeah. But I also like, it's, it's, it's a heavy lift to get it right. And it's just one of those things where it's like, I struggle with like, who should really own that? Should that be under a creative or content team or should be under marketing ops, marketing tech, if you're going to get it. I see the value in having one place where, you know, okay, this is the, this is the place where we have our best versions at different sizes or whatever it is. Right. So I don't know. I've kind of got a, like, I'm on the fence, I guess, about whether or not I would want to— I'm all that interested in them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, for me, I think The, the, the sort of like bleed into marketing operations, um, is, you know, you're right, based on the experience that I had working for an organization in digital asset management, and even from the conversation we were having today, um, it usually does come down from a creative team or, um, you know, a head of marketing that is looking to sort of like manage some of those like design assets. But when somebody comes to us and says like, hey, I need to be able to at scale, like, distribute assets to people all across the globe, right? I've got reps in the UK, Australia, China, you name it, right? And I need all of those things to be like managed properly. Sometimes that comes to IT. Right. Like, how do I do that? Is it a SharePoint drive? Is it like, you know, is it—

Yeah. I mean, I think if you think of it as, if you think of it as just sort of a general, um, document management, which is, I think, where a lot of digital asset management stuff started from was document management. And that's, I think, got a different feel, right? Because it's usually you're talking about documents with text in them. So then you do things like you've got OCR and you're scanning them and you can— so which means like all that stuff about taxonomy and searching is just sort of Part of the process of getting your assets in there. Whereas with it, with it, with purely visual or even video stuff, right? That's, you have to then add that after the fact, unless now, truth be told, like I haven't looked at that technology in years and years and years. So, um, maybe there's stuff out there that does some of that and through intelligence, but I think that's, that's where it breaks down a little bit. It's just that capturing that consistently over time is, is hard. Yeah.

Right, right. And for me, like, I think, I think when your reps need the most up-to-date version of your go-to-market PDF or your most up-to-date version, or like, you know, there's been solutions that have been created to dynamically create presentations or PDFs or whatever inside of Salesforce, right? I've seen those tools out there too.

Like, yeah, I see that.

It inevitably ends up being a part of the sales op, revs op, marketing ops tech stack. And the reality is, is like a lot of that stuff can be managed by a DAM, but like people don't know that and they don't realize that you can manage not just like version control, but also like geo-based, like location access so that reps logging in from a different place can only see the documents that they need to see. Right. And so like that kind of stuff, when you're thinking about scalability and go-to-market reach and you're enabling your marketing and sales org to just get what they need when they need it, and it's the right one, especially if you're in like a compliance-like situation, finance or government or, you know, it's not only for them, but in those situations, I think digital asset management needs to like come further into this marketing ops conversation. Because we deal with a lot of those problems all the time where they're like, hey, did you set up the Google Drive like to have all of the right decks in there? And we're like, yeah, like here's the link. And then, you know, inevitably it ends up being like someone else created another Google Drive or whatever. And I'm not saying like these solutions like DAM will solve for those people problems, but it certainly can help standardize and control access in a way that's Very different than a Dropbox or a Drive or a SharePoint. And yeah, you can hack your way to have SharePoint do some of those things, but it's still not going to like look at compliance like you were talking about. Michael's giving us a thumbs down on the, on the SharePoint thing. And yeah, so anyway, I just, I personally like have experience working for a DAM company and I was like, why do we not use this more? Like, I know people have these problems, right? It's just, it's crazy to me. And now they're talking about things like headless DAM where like you can make sure that those assets, no matter where they live, just get updated. So like you update it in one place and wherever else it's displayed, it just like makes it, makes its way there, which is pretty cool. So I don't know. Naomi, any thoughts on, on DAMs? Any DAM thoughts on DAMs?

DAM thoughts? Um, to be honest, like it wasn't until you brought it up that it crossed my mind again. It's definitely something that I don't think about at all. But you're making me, you're making me feel like I should think about it. So that's all I have to say about it. Yeah.

Well, that was my, that was actually what I said, shared, because this, this CEO said like, do you think like marketing ops people think about this stuff? And I said, actually, I think that they think about it by accident. Like, they're faced with a problem all the time. They just don't— like, I was completely uneducated about what the heck digital asset management was until I found a job in that role, right? Like, I'd have— like, it's been around for decades.

And I was like, I think—

So if you give them a thread to pull on, like, yeah, you're going to, like, start getting people thinking about it and they're going to be like, oh, I think this actually solves a lot of the problems we have in our company.

But I think you're right that it comes up by accident. And the way, the way it's always, almost always come up for me is that someone said in the, on the creative team or content team said, we need a DAM. So I want to be able to say that, say that too, since y'all are trying to monopolize it. But yeah, we need a DAM. But, uh, you're the tech guy. You go figure out, you know, what we should do. Right. And, um, but I'm not really, I don't have a huge stake in the outcome of it either. So I think that's been the challenge. So I will say that the one time where I saw it get close to being useful is when we implemented a project management system that we use for all of our go-to-market activities. So across marcom and marketing ops, martech, and that the platform had sort of a bolt-on basic digital asset management system, and they could kind of communicate. And there was some real value there because then you're, you know, otherwise in a project management system, if you can upload assets, right, you can say, okay, for this project, this is the asset. And some of them—

Right.

You have where you can do reviews and annotations and do versions and all that. But then you have— that's that version of that thing for that project, right? If it's the master, there's not really usually a good place. They don't— the project management systems don't generally have a great sort of like file storage that's independent of the projects.

Right.

And so that was the one time where I saw it have some value. We still had the challenges of making sure that we were really good about, you know, tagging things that were in the digital asset management system the right way so that we could find them based on whether it was an audience Or a type of, type of tactic we were doing or whatever. Right. But being able to sort of have that linkage between project management and the file management system for, for the DAM was definitely useful.

Yeah.

I mean, that's the time where I've seen it.

That makes sense to me. And that, that too comes up a lot, right? When it's like you're talking sort of like campaign ops, right? Like as someone goes to make a request for, you know, some campaign that needs to be deployed, a part of that inevitably ends up being like digital assets, oftentimes visual or video or whatever, or even a PDF. And that still has to translate back to some sort of like system that's, uh, that, you know, like project manage that all the way through. And I think if you set it up the right way, you know, with some of the technology that's out there in DAMs, you can create a campaign ops process that sort of adds a taxonomy to the output of the file. Because of the type of request that comes in. And then you sort of like hop, skip, jump through the, the problem of like, how do I find that thing or make sure it's stored in the right place? But yeah, I think, I think there's a huge opportunity for that category to sort of like come back to life. That's not just for brand people, but I think marketing ops people need to take like a harder look at like, is there value there for them? But the project management piece, like we did a bit of that even at Mavenlink where we had like a version kind of thing. But you're right, like it's stored against the project and yeah, it's, it ends up being really, really complicated. There are so many project management tools.

Oh, okay. So, so I was just gonna get into that because this is another one that I, I struggle with a little bit sometimes. And I guess there's sort of 2 or 3 things that I would like to get your thoughts on from a project management standpoint. So one is, Mike, you mentioned campaign ops, right? And I think campaign ops and managing those kinds of projects, in air quotes, and projects, right, kind of has its own scenario. Then you've got what I would think of as more of the IT-type projects that we do within Yeah, and they could be small to big, right? But there's sort of, there's a technology or change management process that you have to go through and you, that's a little bit of a different kind of beast. And then the third is, and this kind of goes at the full marketing level where you've got, here's our overall high-level goals for the next year, the next quarter, right? And so I've, I've, what I've, I've struggled with is what's the right system or what's, there's never been a system that I found that handles all 3 of those really well.

Yeah, no.

Right.

Right. And especially that high level versus like execution level. Right. And connecting the dots. Like, so here, here are the projects and/or campaigns that are tied to this goal.

Right.

And where is that? Right. So I'm, I'd be curious, like, have you, like, Am I the only one that struggled with this?

Oh gosh.

Or, um, what do you know, what do you do to solve for that?

You, uh, you take some duct tape, you print out papers, and you create a Gantt chart made out of paper and string. No, I'm just kidding.

That's what it feels like though. PowerPoint with bars.

Yeah.

PowerPoint. Yeah. And lines to mark the months or quarters. Yeah, Naomi's got this like really serious look, like she's like holding back. She's like, you guys are idiots.

Let me tell you about project management.

I have, I have no comment actually to— I'm just, I'm just happily listening. I'm learning from the best.

Oh my God.

So why is that funny? I don't understand. Why are you— why do you laugh when I say that?

Because I don't— because you learning from the best and me being on the other end I love that compliment. I'm learning from the community, which is the best. So at the end of the day—

Yeah. You know how the moss hangs off the trees in South Georgia, right? That's the sarcasm that's dripping off your face.

Are you talking about— I learned this. Are you talking about lichen, or it's called old man's beard? Did you know that?

That's what it's called. I think it's more the old man's beard. It's the really dangly stuff.

Yeah. So that actually only grows where— and this is completely off topic, but I learned this recently. It only grows where there are areas of very low air pollution. It will not grow. It's like super fragile. So if there's like, if it's clean air, no air pollution, it'll grow.

Whoa.

I know. Learn something new today.

Clearly there's nothing I don't know.

Did I learn you something new? Learned?

I'm learning from the best now.

Now I know.

Yeah, project management. And so I really appreciate like Like you calling that out, Michael, like the attention on just the disconnect between like top-level KPIs down to like project execution, whether that's like for actual campaigns that tie back to, you know, the goal for the KPIs or just like the internal stuff that needs to be done in order to facilitate that, those things, you know, sometimes it's fixing integrations that break, right? Those are fires that we have to put out all the time. None of that is easy to manage. And then like, like, let's just step back for a second. Are you, are you agile project management? Or are you waterfall project management? Or like, you know, what's your methodologies like?

Scroll, just pretending to say that you know what those things are, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I'll be honest.

Like, I would be faking it for sure.

So, you know, I obviously worked for a— well, not obviously. For those that don't know, I worked for Mavenlink. Yeah, not obvious. Mavenlink makes a solution that is tailored to managing people and resources around the space of project management. It's not exactly project management.

Are they a sponsor, Mike? I'm just wondering.

No, no. We just happen to be talking about our experience and you touched on project management, so it's your fault. And so, but because of that, I learned a lot about waterfall, and then I learned a little bit about agile because people would come to the booth and be like, oh yeah, do you guys do agile? You have a Kanban board? And all this other stuff. And anyway, even with that, I still couldn't describe to you what agile is perfectly by any stretch. And I personally don't think that marketing teams, I haven't seen teams execute agile project management at an agency or internally very well, because I think we have long-term projects and there are things that just need— there are dependencies no matter what. And when you're trying to break them down too small and you try to turn them into swim lanes that are for agile Scrum kind of management, there's a disconnect in back to your comment earlier, Michael, in like, what is the point of this thing that we're doing and what else is it tied to? Right. So like, as you give me a task to go execute on some campaign or whatever, and I lose the bigger picture of that, this is for this persona or this audience or this go-to-market strategy. Like, I don't think Agile is a good practice for that. And so you have to like create the process in Agile to adhere to tying it all back, right? You need all of the details in your story that's written. And who's the persona, all this other stuff, and it has to live on every single card that you take on in that project. So it's a painful thing, I think, everywhere. And one of the sessions that I got to jump in on yesterday, and obviously at this recording, that'll be many days or months or years ago, but Smartsheet, AJ, who's been a guest with us.

Oh, yeah.

He now works for Smartsheet as a marketing ops guy. And he— they ended up doing a session where it's like, how does marketing ops at Smartsheet use Smartsheet? And I was like in love.

How they drink their own champagne? Yeah, yeah.

I was like, oh my God, this is so cool. So I'll try to find a link to that and I'll post it in the show notes for people to go watch because I think—

I meant to watch that too and join that. I really wanted to hear that.

Yeah, I mean, at a bare minimum, even if you're not using Smartsheet, right, like you can get ideas on how to think about managing your process and using a tool like theirs or others to, to do that. I thought it was really, really cool.

So yeah, I mean, my theory about why—

why—

well, I don't know if it's a theory, but there are 2, like 2 major things that I see in almost every place where this stuff starts to break down and it falls into 2 categories. So one is call it just sort of generally call it roles and responsibilities. You might call it RACI, you might call it swim lanes. And what I've found is that, and it's somewhat tied to the level of detail you break down the work, right? I think there's a sweet spot of, there's some that's too high level, too detailed. But what I found is that when you get people, like if you don't have that clearly defined roles and responsibilities, particularly around approvals, then, and you either get people who are moving out of their swim lane too much or they're not moving out, not recognizing when they need to actually move out of their swim lane and pick up and help. So that's like roles and responsibilities. And I guess kind of related to that, the level of detail you have. The second is, and I mean, like, this is something I really am a big believer in, is like project management is not a side part of your work. I mean, it can be at a smaller organization, But project management as a discipline is a really, it is a skillset that you have to learn. And most people who are doing sort of a functional job who are asked to be project management stuff are gonna fail, not because they can't or couldn't do it, it's because it's not their core job. They're not being measured on it, right? And so if you, there's a point at which, especially if you get in a large organization where if you don't have almost a dedicated project management function, I think you're setting yourself up for all those other— like, that can help address that other problem, right? So you have someone who can sort of reinforce, like, this is the roles and responsibilities, hold people accountable and all that kind of stuff. And—

I agree.

I've even to the point where I've actually fought for bringing in a project manager on big projects Partially to keep, to make sure that we were doing that well and to keep me on task, right? Because I wasn't like, I was not doing either thing very well.

Yeah, I totally agree. And I think, I think as organizations start to scale, having someone who's dedicated to actually seeing like task completion done, task assignment Updated and all of those things is like critical. We were faced with, you know, everybody just gets distracted by like the hottest thing that happens next. And, and, you know, and that's kind of a world where there's like not really a dedicated project manager. You sort of understand like the goals and things that you're working towards, but like you end up just doing kind of whatever you need But yeah, I totally agree. I, I would advocate for having a project manager. The one challenge though with having like somebody who's in charge of project management and like, or like a Scrum Master if you're doing like Agile, is like, it is that person's responsibility to absolutely like make sure that everything is like, like meetings don't go awry and like you don't just start talking about something totally different. Like, And it's hard. It's a hard thing to do because you kind of have to be like, whatever, like kind of stern, right? It's like, hey, hey, hey, that's not what this is for. And it's just like, that just feels bad, but like it creates efficiency.

I actually think most people in that meeting would appreciate someone doing that, especially if they're not an asshole about it.

Yeah.

Especially, and that goes to your defined roles, right? If that's your job, do it.

Well, I guess if we can circle back to the very first topic that we talked about, which was alignment with your IT team. If you have a good relationship with your IT team and your CIO, I've found that with larger projects where we've had to do implementations or renovations, I guess, of data or tech stacks or just projects where we're expanding out functionality, They're very— I, a lot of the project managers that, um, I've worked with are on loan to me or my team from the IT organization. They will assign a dedicated project manager, um, on an as-needed basis. So that really helps a lot.

Oh, that's— yeah, I think I've experienced that as well. I totally agree.

Mm-hmm.

I love it.

So now, now that we've come full circle, it's like a circle. Um, yeah, so I, like, I feel like we've only scratched the surface. I think we already, like, I think we need to have an episode with some, some IT leaders.

Yeah, we gotta do IT leaders. I wanna find, if you use a digital asset management product internally, I wanna talk to you.

And you wanna come on here and say the word DAM.

And you just wanna say the word DAM all the time. I wanna talk to you. And, uh, what else? Project management.

Yeah. Project management.

We're gonna have AJ come back and do more. No, it doesn't work in audio, but we'll have to, we'll just have to share. Look for the show note link. I'll send you a thing.

Cool. Any, any final thoughts before we sign off?

No.

No. All right.

I just wanna go to the store and go get some food. I'm hungry. Aw.

All right.

Thank you, both of you. This has been fun. Uh, I'm glad we're doing these, some of these. And, uh, for those of you listening, thank you for allowing us to invade your personal space. I can't remember where that's from. Um, anyway, uh, so thank you for listening. Thanks for joining us, supporting us. Uh, as always, you know, we've, we've thrown out there some ideas. If you're interested in any of those and want to reach out to us, feel free to on LinkedIn or, or Slack if you're in the MoPros community. Uh, until next time, we'll talk to you later. Bye.