Why don't we focus more on Project Management with Evan Dunn

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 in your marketing operations career.

Hey everybody, I am not Michael Hartman. But I am one of the co-hosts of the show, and today we are joined with Naomi, our other co-host. Naomi, say hello.

Hello. Hi, not Michael Hartmann.

Yeah. Hi, not Michael Hartmann. I get to be the host today because Mr. Hartmann is busy with probably some marketing operations work, as we all are. But thank you for joining us on this episode. Our guest today is Evert Dunne. Evan is currently the Director of Growth Marketing at Syncery. Prior to joining Syncery earlier this year, he's held several roles in marketing, including other leadership roles in growth marketing, digital, and social media. In addition, he has experience in customer success. In addition, he has experience in customer success as well as being VP of Product at Resonance AI. Evan, thank you for joining us today.

Thanks for having me, Mike, Naomi.

Cool. I know you and Hartman had a chance to sync up before, no pun intended on the Syncery bit, but—

You pronounced it correctly.

I did get it right, which I think that's just due to all the conversations I've been having with you and the team lately. But before we go too far, I know the overall theme is why aren't we talking more about project management in marketing operations? And so I'm excited to dive into that, but you're the second person that has a background in linguistics and apparently you do some performance poetry. So could you maybe tell our listeners about how you went from linguistics to marketing and product development?

Yeah, the linguistics track is unsurprisingly one of real necessity, we'll say. Had to get a different job, non-linguistics, that made money and ended up bouncing around a bit and freelancing for— do you remember when people used to pay have their own blogs produced.

Yeah.

Back in the day, I did Twitter marketing and WordPress and some email stuff, and that was half of a full-time job. And from there, I went to the agency side and then that Resonance AI startup analytics company, really fun. And yeah, the performance poetry thing happens occasionally, not on podcasts.

Not on podcasts. So we won't get any poetry out of you today.

Maybe, but probably not.

All right. So merging the worlds of linguistics, performance poetry, and the social medias, broetry.

Social medias.

What is your feeling on broetry?

Broetry. I only know it as a slur. I don't—

You're like, it's a really good growth tactic. It's the only way to hack the algorithm of LinkedIn.

I have attempted 2 poems For work to be shared as work products. It is not easy to poetify professional things.

Yeah, I doubt it.

A couple weeks ago I was in LA and my friend got me tickets to something called Freestyle Love Supreme. I don't know if you've heard of it, but it was, I think, The backstory is it's Lin-Manuel's old college trope where they do improv singing, rapping, hip-hop, and they take feedback from the audience. And everything is live. It's all on demand. It's absolutely amazing. So I can just— it gives me a greater appreciation as to how difficult it is to rhyme Completely unrelated words and phrases together. I feel like that's something you'd probably enjoy.

I like doing that.

There's a documentary too, I think, on Hulda.

Oh yeah. I will check that out. I, uh, it sounds familiar. I definitely can't freestyle. That is a whole separate category of skill. I like being alone in a forest when I'm composing. It's a bit different. There is weird synergy, to use a terrible word, between linguistics and poetry and marketing. You're thinking all the time about what people are going to react. And in linguistics, there's some really wonderful nerdy names for the things we think about all the time in marketing. There's pragmatics and semantics. Pragmatics is— semantics people know, right? It's your brain producing meaning. Pragmatics, it's how the meaning is perceived. So what happens in the other person's brain? And they're 2 completely different disciplines because they're 2 completely different activities. Yeah. So there's a lot of things to pull from when you think about audiences and how they hear what you say. As we all know, it's so hard not to get caught up in excitement about your product and your ideas that as a marketer that you get lost speaking to your audience.

Yeah, I find that really hard in every role I've ever held around the marketing and growth side of things, getting outside of talking because you're just inside the organization. You're constantly inundated with what does the product do? What is it capable of? And pulling back and going, okay, what does the audience actually want to hear? They don't want to hear just about us all the time. Like, how do you speak to them in a way that resonates? But speaking of products, okay, sounds this topic that we're talking about today. So project management, the importance of that in the marketing and revenue operations sector. There are, this topic comes up frequently in the community, not just the tools that are used, but also a little bit about the methodology. I have pretty strong opinions about whether or not Agile is really a framework that, that whether you're in marketing ops or marketing broadly is actually a thing that you should be doing. But it sounded like from your experience in leading product development, Um, that sort of helped shape your opinions on the value of project management. And now it seems like you're taking some of that experience to apply that to your marketing function and growth. And I don't know about marketing ops. I know that the team at Syncery's got different toolsets available to them, but wondering just, hey, how has that experience shaped your view of the importance of project management as it relates to the role that you're doing now?

Yeah. I don't know about you guys, but I am not natively organized. I had never used a calendar tool when I graduated college, like not even a planner, never recorded appointments. That started becoming problematic pretty quickly. And I never wrote down to-do lists and I have a terrible memory. And—

How did you ever get anywhere?

I cannot relate to that at all.

I'm sorry.

I hope there's sarcasm there for my sake. It was so bad that it was actually a problem at the first job I had out of school. And since then have basically become a huge fan of bullet journaling and these sort of disciplined approaches to managing your priorities and your schedule. 25-minute focus chunks. The brain can only focus for 42 minutes. Those kind of things I'd pepper throughout my productivity. Obviously with little children, they break your frameworks all the time. But yeah, to your question exactly, there was a specific event, recurring event that we started creating at Resonance AI that took us from literally from P&E, product engineering, not knowing what next week held to actually getting several weeks out, months out visibility roadmap. And that was— What was that? That every Thursday afternoon we had a meeting at 3, I think. And if requests for demos and new product features and sort of things weren't in by that time, they did not happen the next week. And this taught me so many things. This taught me the power of forcing functions, of setting boundaries and saying, look, you can't ask us to build a landing page in 2 days in marketing writer. You can't turn around and say, hey, we got a big customer coming. Can you do a demo with them within 2 days? This kind of thing. It created rhythms, it created breathing room, and it created At first we knew what we were doing next week and then it just rolled forward. But then people knew. Imagine if marketers knew what they were doing a month from now. We laugh because it's hard. Marketing ops and marketing together, we could talk about that for a minute, but I have a lot of ideas about how the two seem more disjointed than they need to be. There's ultimately marketing ops is a strategic contributor and knows what works. They see the data more than anyone else. They're looking at it all the time. So they should be feeding marketing executioners, if you will, with the rhythms and the intel to drive that strategy forward in a way that isn't helter-skelter. And you brought up Agile. I think there's a point where for a lot of people trying to deploy these frameworks, they are making efforts. They've got ClickUp or Airtable or Wrike or these different tools, and they're trying to do short standups, but what's happening is they're still pivoting daily. They're still changing what they're working on daily. They're just documenting it a little bit better and having meetings about it a little bit. So yeah, lots there.

Yeah. I've felt that through the majority of my career, but I think that stems from the work environments or just like the stage, rather the stage of the organizations that I've worked for. I don't have— I'm glad Naomi's on this episode with us because there's A, she's been in her role for quite some time and built a lot of rigor just from past episodes and having many conversations with her. And so I'm curious to hear sort of your feelings on project management and how it's related to the way that you run your org, Naomi. But I definitely resonate with the who's got the loudest voice in the room or the next shiny object that we could look at or do, or the, the idea that's like, oh, that's a good one. Let's go do that right now. Whether that's here in the community, we, Sometimes we do that, or in the organizations that I advise, I experience that on a regular basis. Most of those are pretty early stage. And I think that, as I said at the start of this, that is indicative of the stage of the organization oftentimes as well, just because you're, I don't know, there's a whole bunch of different ways to turn a phrase on that one, but everybody's just like trying to look under every single rock every day, trying to figure out what's the next thing that's going to move the needle. And sometimes your go-to-market messaging and motion isn't refined enough, and so you're just Like, I don't know, someone make a decision, please. But anyway, Naomi, I'd love to hear your thoughts on like larger org marketing, project management, how that actually pans out for you.

Yeah, I, it definitely wasn't something that just came about overnight. It's definitely something that is multifaceted. It's evolved over time and it's changed as well, even though maybe the people have not changed, the business changes, process changes, COVID happened. There's always things that will change how people are working together and just trying to make things more efficient. For us, it's a matter of not just like project intake and just keeping the bandwidth on the team balanced, but it's also communicating out to our business partners that this is the bandwidth of the team at any given point in time so that they can see and give us heads up that, hey, if we have major integration projects or if we want to onboard a new vendor or we want to do some kind of mass migration, that they know what our bandwidth is, that they're not stacking things on top of us that we can then either not handle and have to go back and say, hey, you really should have given us this as a heads up earlier so that we could handle this and give you appropriate timelines. For us, a lot of it is just this constant feedback and also enforcing SLAs. I think that's something that a lot of people don't necessarily talk about. They talk about how am I tracking the work? How am I accepting? How, what does the intake look like? But they're not necessarily talking about what are the SLAs for? What is an acceptable amount of time to turn an email campaign around? An email campaign with 10 languages, an email campaign that has multiple follow-up steps or landing pages or trigger actions or things where we need the SDM to follow up and give us that feedback back. But those are all things that are like super complex that we try to bucket into groups. It's not an exact science, but it's something that I'm super curious about with other organizations too.

If one email estimated at 30 minutes and this nurture sequence has 5 of them plus, the formula could potentially be worked out, but it never seems to actually happen that way.

And then there's always scope creep too. So it's, can we also add this? What about this? Oh, by the way, I have 6 more different languages I want to add to that. So, oh yeah, we do personalization, dynamic content.

So I haven't been in a marketing ops seat, but I've known some really good marketing ops folks. And I'm curious what you guys think about this phenomenon. What I often notice is that the ops folk tend to have some discipline around creating SLAs, enforcing Communicating and intake, right? Prioritization. But if the marketers have none, like zero real discipline, none—

Not there.

The question often from the ops side seems to be, are you sure about this strategy given limited resources and time and focus? Like, this is way different from last week's requests. How do you play a role in helping the company grow, which is the ultimate goal, right? When you have this seat where probably because of habit or role or title, it doesn't seem like it's okay for you to say, this is a terrible idea, which I'm sure you have terrible ideas all the time.

What?

I would say segmentation is a huge thing too, right? It's not always just building, if you just send an email, but like sometimes a more complicated piece can be segmenting out your audience, especially if you have the If you have a complicated business model, making sure that you're validating your data, are these actual customers or are they, it's just, it's not, it's just not always, let me just send this email out to everybody in our system.

Are you ready with the right messaging for an exec versus an operator or what have you?

Exactly.

Yeah. It's exactly the reason why organizations need to have some marketer, whether it's a marketing ops person proper or someone that has at least enough acumen to say, there's a certain level of data inputs that we need so that we can then go back and say, okay, here are the standards that we can leverage, right? Like personas or segment by product type or what have you. And so as you go to execute campaigns, you're being advised by the data inputs that you established right at the foundation, because most of the time, just as we were saying a moment ago, like you've got ample opportunity to put a promotional campaign out the door of any kind. And you're looking at a blank piece of paper or a blank Google Doc or whatever, and you're going, who's this for? And sometimes the goal of who you want to reach isn't actually possible because the foundation wasn't built. And we keep arguing that the marketing ops person needs to have the strategic sort of seat in the room and be a part of those discussions to enable— it's an enablement function. To be able to say, hey, this is what's possible given the state of what we've got today. Here's what we need. And you're right, most of the time you don't feel comfortable, I think, saying, hey, this is crazy. Like, why would you try this? But oftentimes it's because, at least in my experience, I felt that that individual who is close enough to the foundational elements of what it takes to put a campaign out wasn't brought into the discussion soon enough. And then you're just like, it's basically just going to be a no. Like, we just can't do the thing. And here the team spent all this time coming up with this They're like, sorry, we don't have the skills to do that or the tool or whatever.

Yeah, this is why I think that question was what I presented to you all for a topic was why aren't we thinking more about project management disciplines? Are you familiar with the RICE scoring model for prioritization? So it comes from product engineering land, right? Reach, impact, confidence, effort. The reach is how many people will this impact? The impact seems redundant, but it's, it's what level, what degree of change would this tactic or—

How significant is this going to be on the business? So you're going to reach a certain audience, potentially large or small, but the impact of the effort on the organization, depending on what lever you're pulling on, if that's acquisition or revenue or what have you, with, to what degree is it going to impact that particular lever?

Exactly. And then confidence is how successful will we be at pulling this off? And effort is how many hours dollars is this going to take? So there was a hypergrowth unicorn I was at where we were looking at launching more sophisticated paid efforts, and I created a spreadsheet and loaded in 20 of my own ideas and everyone else's ideas and just started scoring them across these parameters so that we could sit down. Marketing ops did review it and say, look, here's where we're capable, here's where we're not, and here's what surfaces as obviously we all believe is going to be the best use of time. I think in marketers, there's this inherent resistance to taking the time to list out and score a list of tactics and strategies that we could invest in for X period of time and then stick to them. And I'm still puzzling through why we are so averse to slowing down to speed up, because we move a lot faster if we all work together on what we're going to work on. Right.

I, yeah, I totally agree. I It seems in my career so far, and I don't know about you, Naomi, how you guys do any prioritization around managing work and things like that. I think probably on the campaign ops side of things is where a lot of this is centering on right now. But I definitely experienced that there's just, there's always this R established for the organization and then they trickle down and then somehow it's like completely diluted and you almost don't even know. Like what part of the metrics you're trying to impact with the go-to-market motion. And I don't know if that's a reflection on bad messaging or bad project management or bad leadership or some mix of all of that, but it's a struggle. So campaign ops, I think, let me just hear from you, Naomi, before I pick up on another thing. I wanna hear what your thoughts are around campaign ops and all that stuff.

For us, it's like we have it actually, we, we fleshed out an SLA where we say if we're just completely, there's really only so many hours in a day. that when we all have the same amount of hours, if there are conflicting projects that we just do not have the bandwidth on the team to execute them all, it goes in order of time sensitivity. So, things like webinars and in-person events or anything that absolutely cannot be moved date-wise, and then it goes by lead gen, and then essentially everything else, unless it is something around a critical bug failure or something where there's a really massive recall for a product or ink or something like that, then those will take precedence. But it's just, thankfully we haven't had too many situations where we've had to just really sit down and be like, okay, we can do these 2 things, but it means we can't do these 2. We haven't had too many of those. There's just, there's a handful of times that I can recall that's happened. But, but most of the time it's, yeah, time sensitivity and lead gen definitely take precedence above all else.

Do you ever hit points where there's so many time-sensitive things that you have to make trade-offs even within that scheme?

Before COVID definitely, just because there were, we were doing a ton more of in-person events. It's definitely started to pick up again, but most things are Now virtual, but those things can be moved if they need to be, but you cannot necessarily move trade show that you've signed on a year in advance type of thing. Before COVID definitely. Yeah. Now not so much.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I like that you're— I think if I was to think about the frameworks that we've talked about, at least the one right now, we touched on productivity. So maybe there's a Pomodoro technique that you leverage to stay focused as an individual. Prioritizing a roadmap could potentially be done based on RICE scoring. And then it seems like the output of a RICE score may fall into a, okay, we've decided these are the items we want to prioritize. And some of them will be time sensitive because we decided that a webinar was an important thing for us to do. Evan, I don't know if your team currently has this sort of tooling built in or program, but I think it's the marketing ops person's responsibility or that part of the org's responsibility to be able to say, we have the ability to pretty much execute roughly one X number of in-person or online events per week, per month, per quarter, whatever the timeframe is. Maybe I'm wrong in that though, but Naomi, are you advising your org on what the capabilities are in terms of like How many, and that's why it doesn't come up. There's like less conflict of, look, we set the baseline, like we can do 2 a week or 2 a month or whatever.

No, because we've always been able to manage and it's, I feel like we've shot ourselves in, like we're, it's shot ourselves in the foot that way because we have streamlined things to a point where it's really easy for us to flex. It just depends on how much postmortem they get. So now we're at a point where if we're really slammed, you're probably not going to get a post-campaign write-up or postmortem or a, hey, we probably shouldn't ever do this again, or if we do this again, this is what I would change. You probably won't get that automatically, if at all, unless you ask us.

Mm-hmm.

But if we do have a bit more bandwidth and there is breathing room, We will definitely take more time to sit down and just do a proper review and full end-to-end workup. And those are like bonus add-ons for our business partners that they definitely like, and they do see it too. If we're just slammed, there, there, there's gonna be things that they're not gonna get. We will very rarely miss like major deadlines, but something has to drop and that's usually what we'll drop first.

That's such a shame too, cuz that's like core to the business, like understanding of is this working or not?

We'll pick it up afterwards. We will do, we do our marketing ops QBRs where we will review them and say, hey, these are the top 5 campaigns and these are the top, like bottom performing ones.

I definitely wanted our listeners to hear that Naomi and her team are really lazy and they never follow through with reporting.

Yeah, exactly.

Evan, so do you have like guidelines established right now within your team at Syncery on what you think is possible, or is it really just like, no, this is what we need to do? It's driven by the go-to-market motion more than anything else. So figure out how to make it happen. And now you're leaning on groups like Naomi and their team where they're like, yeah, we just made it work.

We're definitely young go-to-marketers in seat here at Syncery. So we're still figuring out how to build this stuff together. And I don't, and I think that's part of it is there's no, the code is not written right on exactly how to become productive as a team. It depends a lot on the tools you guys like and how, what you've seen work in the past. And also so much as we're talking, like, Twice now we've delved into specific channel types and tactics, right? Events and email. We haven't even touched on paid, on demand, all this other stuff, and what it takes to run a website. We were joking about this the other day, Mike. It's the websites are the worst, hardest to maintain, most fragile, most sensitive, most public products ubiquitously worldwide, and marketers are stuck. I think a lot of our franticness stems from that. So At Sigiriya, we're still figuring it out. There are definitely strong opinions I have in terms of how can organizations begin to build these muscles.

Mm-hmm.

In a time like this, right, where people are wondering how long they have till their org realizes they are burning too hot cash flow-wise, that they can stick around in their jobs, now is the time for us to deploy personal discipline, team discipline, and leadership discipline that feeds healthier processes when in fact, I think most of us are actually turn— as you mentioned, turning over every rock, trying to find growth to stave off the threat of any sort of contraction as a business. We should instead find these rhythms together now. And that might look like individuals learning how to work with paper or bullet journals or just their own sort of task lists. It might look like deploying a project management tool to great effect. It might look like leaders really leaning in and you mentioned how OKRs often just get created and then abandoned. Really true. But leaning in and tracking those for their teams, even if you're a marketing leader and you have an ops resource, right? Still lean in and learn the data enough so that you can help create the visibility, the throughput from tactic to outcome all the way up to strategy.

Yeah. I think the best marketers that I've ever had a chance to work alongside, knew the data that, you know, was available to them. Like they took the time to go study that, which means hopefully they had a good partner in the marketing org and the data org, marketing ops side of things to help them get there. Um, but I think you touched on some key things, right? Currently at the time of this recording, the state of things is there's a series of layoffs happening and organizations. I think there's a correction happening. We've all been seeing it in the SaaS tech sector in general.

Yeah.

To each their own on the opinions of why those things are happening, but the ability to report on your team's capabilities, your go-to-market motion, the cost of those things, and aligning that back into those key decision makers to help them make the right decisions definitely can stem from project management. One of my, my gripes, I guess, with the word project management Is that it's like nebulous in nature. There's a lot of folks that when they hear project management, they don't think about people and resource management. That doesn't, that part doesn't come into their, to their mind. They're thinking more about, oh, I just have to like, for event managers, it's like more about ordering the stuff and making sure the power's there. And there's project management in that fashion that has very little to do with staffing and resourcing and planning. For growth of an org. There's project management, Naomi, with the work that you've done on integrating systems or anything like that, that don't have a reliance on people. But I think when you go to organizations like Project Management Institute, PMI, the real standard of, I would argue, the closer standard of project management is really about the people and the resources themselves that it takes to go execute on Doing all the rest of the work. But I'm curious, like, when you, both of you, I guess, whoever wants to go first, when you hear project management, at least in your orgs or in an interview process, whether it's interviewing candidates or roles that you've interviewed for, is that where your head goes? Like you think about, oh, I need to know like how much time someone has to be able to work on something. Or do you go the other route, which is like more like task management and all those kinds of things? I don't think people talk about project management enough. Naomi, you go first.

I think it's a little bit of column A, column B, and I think every— right? I do though, but I feel like every organization's gonna be different. You can't, I don't know. I just, I don't like pigeonholing it like that because it's always, you're always gonna have situations where it changes. I don't know. Yeah, that's just my 2 cents, Mr. Not Michael Hartman.

Mr. Not Michael Hartman. This is the fundamental problem of, okay, everybody's saying like, why don't we talk about project management more in marketing? It's like, which part?

Yeah, I definitely would happily switch out the word for something more ambitious like discipline or rhythms because ultimately everything costs something. It is amazing how much it costs to correctly set up Marketo channels and programs and Salesforce campaigns in alignment for any tactic you want good throughput attribution on. And people don't realize that when they ask marketing to go execute stuff, like, sure, and you'll have no idea how it did. But I do think, yeah, project management is a very pigeonholing term. I can agree with you there. I definitely have seen organizations that try to do time tracking and stuff, and that just seems— to me, it's like the emphasis on in-office. The emphasis should instead be on outcomes, actual work products produced, and how those are rolling up toward OKRs and towards revenue impacts or however you're measuring. How much time you spend and how much and where you do that. Time. It's a bad phrase, but you do that time is arbitrary, entirely arbitrary, right? And this is where ultimately we're talking about outcome management, right? You're expected to produce X in your role. You should know what that is. You should have your opinions and your boss should have your opinions and the ops person should have opinions about what that is. And same goes for ops teams. But often I think what happens in marketing is there's digital technology and all these different tactics and Changing landscape has vastly fragmented what we work on. And so any given day, I can go learn a new tactic or try a tactic that I think will work. And that conundrum almost precludes the very thing we're emphasizing. It makes it so hard for us to focus. Aim small, miss small, focus is fortune. Those kinds of things really do hold water in these environments that are so fragmented.

Yeah, I totally agree. It's incredibly difficult, I guess, no matter the size of the org. Naomi's made it clear that there are times where it can get pretty hard, even with really good rigor that they built over time.

Michael, you and I were talking right before we started recording this about some of the projects that are coming onto my team's plate that are completely outside of our day-to-day. And so, Mm-hmm. There's only so much we can handle, but with all these massive projects that we're also expected to deliver, at what point, what takes the precedence, right? It's obviously we wanna make sure that these large-scale projects, whether, and this goes for anyone in ops, right? Whether it be through acquisitions or divestitures or whatever you might be working on, those are things that are gonna distract and take away from your day-to-day campaign ops and execution and just like self-learning and keeping on top of the things that you're supposed to know as part of your job. So how do you manage and juggle all of that?

Yeah. Did you read the release notes? Because no, I'm dealing with all this other stuff. Oh, you didn't hear about the release notes?

I signed up for the webinar that talks about it, but haven't watched it yet.

It's okay. Maybe that's what we'll do in our next podcast that we launch. It'll be just a read of notes so people can just hear them like injected into their ears.

Like an ASMR type of situation. I see.

They're like, okay, I'm just going to fall asleep now. So I wanted to talk, touch on something that I think you, Evan, and I, Evan, you and I were talking about earlier and you hinted at it just a moment ago. It's this problem of optimizing for done and the struggle, like the real struggle that comes from like this demand gen sort of marketer org and the marketing ops org. How sometimes there's this misalignment and I myself like have experienced this where I have to wear both hats sometimes as a marketer and a marketing ops person, a growth person, what have you. It's, I'd really like to get that campaign out the door because it's a good one, but I don't have all of the little inputs built. I didn't use the UTM builder that I signed up for and I didn't hook up, I didn't pre-build the campaign, but I know how important that is for me because at some point I'm going to want to know how that thing went. But the business needs to grow and it feels like the demand gen marketer part of me is like pulling and optimizing for done. And the marketing ops person is trying to pull back to say, slow down to go faster, as you said earlier. And no, it's just such a struggle.

It totally is. And I think both ops folks and marketers need to ask themselves, what is actually essential? What fields do I actually need in place to measure? What programs and campaigns in Salesforce, Marketo, et cetera, do I actually need in place to collect the right amount of attribution? Not complete, not perfect, not every UTM content variable, what have you. And then for marketers, right? What meetings do you actually need on your calendar? Because those one-on-ones where you rehash what you did at your weekly sync probably aren't always so crucial. Or the 5 tactics that might not drive much impact aren't as crucial as the one that's really going to Be worth the investment. And it does take serious time to consider these things. And what I challenge, like all of us with our bad Slack habits and sleep habits to think about it is how do you give your brain space for diffuse thinking? You're familiar with diffuse versus focused thinking. Focused thinking is what we're doing right now. It's exhausting. We're engaged, we're focused. We will be so tired after this conversation. This is why Zoom fatigue is a thing. Diffuse thinking is you're washing the dishes, you're vacuuming, you're you're making dinner and you're cleaning up the yard, your brain has backup space it uses to solve problems. You'll find yourself so creative after not focusing on the problem, but we're not giving ourselves the room today as humans, right? To step away from the screen, step away from the meetings and come back fuller, readier to focus, readier to prioritize and make those trade-offs that we need to make together to succeed and continue to grow.

See, this is the thing with project management, In general, right? Like we've gone a bunch of different directions and I would argue that it all can really be helped by having really good pragmatic process and project management in your life, whether it's personal or on a team. Naomi can't push back and say, we can't do this without having the system in place to be able to say, we can't do this. If you don't know how much time is being utilized to go to market or whatever, like that, if I was tuning into this episode, right, I'd be saying. Project management, whatever version of it you're talking about, it, the outcome, to echo another phrase that we use today, is the ability to say yes or no to different work or give yourself the space to be able to go accomplish other work. And that's whatever version of project management that you want to go implement. I would say is probably one of the key takeaways here. What do you think?

Can I leave you with a quote that I feel like is in full agreement with that?

Sure.

Every time you say yes to something, you say no to something else.

Is that true? It's really making my brain hurt a little bit. It's probably because of what type of thinking is it that I'm doing right now?

Focused thinking.

I'm way too focused. And so like my brain is tired and I can't handle it anymore.

It's these boundaries, this time we have limited time and teams and yeah, we don't need to boil the oceans. We just need to channel the rivers.

Yeah, absolutely. I have to agree though, that I personally, like I've been trying to focus a little bit more on my health. I've been on 3 runs this week, which is incredible. Ask me in a week if that holds true or not, but it definitely opened up the creativity of channels. I felt like I was thinking of new stuff or coming up with new ideas, which is super important. So I think that message certainly resonated with me and I hope the rest of the listeners too. Before we wrap this episode, I do want to ask you, Evan, I think an audience that you interact with on a regular basis in the roles that you've had is marketing ops. I think Syncery has a unique purview on marketing ops in general, so you're probably getting inundated with a lot of that all the time. I'm curious, we haven't asked this question in a while, and I'm, maybe I'm dropping it on you cold, so I apologize, but what would you say is a fundamental thing, and it can't be project management, to become a certified marketing operations professional?

First, I have no idea, but if I had to take a stab, I do think like data architecture is huge. And I'm not just saying that because I work at Syncery. I'm saying that because part of the reason I joined Syncery was in the last 2 hypergrowth unicorns that I was a marketer at, performance marketer at, I was auditing every single lead that came through. Because picklist errors in HubSpot to Salesforce sync or what have you. And what helped so much was to have conversations where the ops person walked me through the data schemas, said, okay, here's what I've created. Here's how they relate. Here's the fields that are essential. Here's the optional context fields. I'd have those conversations. I'd come away and I would think of campaigns I could use just using those fields that existed already without asking for more data. I think marketers can be fueled by the data expertise the ops teams can bring to the table. But if they're not, then you're going to get asked for new data, for different data, for— they'll be updating the data, go all different ways. And so I think there's a— that's a huge opportunity ops has to serve marketing orgs is teach us how to think about the data we're working with.

I like that. I think the output of that too, as I'm trying to think in real time, like how do you test for that? If there was a certification program, like how does that actually work? Maybe the output of that would be like, you have to show us your A mock data schema lesson that you would teach to a demand gen marketer or something like that.

I don't know.

What do you think, Naomi? Data schemas, you in?

I'm in, definitely. I'm all about the homework evaluations and I'm being very sarcastic right now in case you can't tell.

Homework evaluations. Yeah. If it's not paid, don't do it.

Exactly.

That's the takeaway there. All right, Evan, thank you for joining us today. I really appreciate you taking the time. For all of you that are the avid listeners, or if you're new listeners, we are officially the podcast of marketingops.com, the home of the MoPros community. So come join us, hang out, talk shop, meet folks like Evan, Naomi, Mr. Hartman. Please keep listening, send your recommendations on topics, guests that we might be able to have. If you decide to create your free profile on the website, you can also ask to be a guest of the show. It's right there on your profile. You can, it'll be an email that reaches me or just Slack me or reach out on LinkedIn. So thank you. Please rate, review, listen, and subscribe. Until next time.