My Time at MOPs Camp
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Alright, so this is gonna be a bit on the raw side. But that’s the right voice for this one, considering my actual voice is also on the raw side after three straight days of conversation at MOPs-Apalooza in Anaheim, CA.
For those not in the loop, MOPs-Apalooza was a Marketing Operations conference run by the MarketingOps.com team, bringing together hundreds of operations professionals from around the world. Sponsors were, for the most part, confined to the expo hall: this was an event by practitioners, for practitioners. And while ChatGPT and the ongoing surge in LLMs did get a fair bit of focus, so too did core MOPs skills, philosophies, and best practices.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. So here’s some modicum of structure to keep us on track:
Now that there’s at least a few bounds on my rambling, let’s dive in. Because I’m sitting in an airport, my brain’s abuzz, and writing’s a great way to get your thoughts in order. And kicking things over to AI ain’t quite the same thing.
The Conference Itself
Ok, so I’m new to the conference circuit. I got my intro to MOPs back in 2018 and only really started to find my feet in, of all years, 2020. No Marketo Summits for me, and certainly no Will Smith parties.
This was the biggest conference I’ve been to in the largest hotel I have ever seen. I hit 10,000 steps every single day of the conference without going outside. 3-4 sessions ran in every time slot and the keynote kicked off with the kind of light show I’d expect from a concert. Mike Rizzo and co. pulled off something truly impressive and I’m excited to see where they take things in the future.
People keep asking me about my takeaways…
Because this was one of the first events I’ve seen where community took center-stage. I don’t want to oversell things, but I’m a student of history and really exciting things start to happen when professional groups form, distinct from any particular employer.1 More on this in future posts.
The People
So I mentioned the sessions but, if I’m being honest, I skipped quite a few… because I kept getting sucked into conversations with brilliant people doing amazing work. Professionals working in-house, trying to figure out the next stage in their careers. Consultants running solo, connecting with friends and drumming up business. Agency founders and their teams. People building new SaaS products aimed at solving the biggest problems facing Operations teams. And a lot of people who just lost their jobs:
Layoffs were (sadly) a common theme with attendees, but I’ll touch on that more in my next section.
If I started listing everyone I talked to and the awesome things they do, this post would triple in length. But I do want to give a special shout-out to EMMIE Collective and the Society of Marketing Technology Consultants. Sydney Mulligan ☕️ and Lauren Aquilino 💕 crushed the expo area with flash tattoos, custom shirts, and friendship bracelets and I had a great time talking through the ins and outs of solo consulting with Courtney McAra 🤠, Bryan D’Andrea, and Carey Picklesimer.
Emmie Collective brought a special kind of energy
I’ve got a lot of follow-up messages to send out and I’m looking forward to keeping the conversation going on Slack and over Zoom! If anyone I talked to wants to chat more, grab time with me here.
The Zeitgeist
It’s rough out there folks.
With layoffs sweeping the industry, the constant drum-beat of new technology, and ever-tightening budgets, the community is definitely feeling the squeeze. There’s a reason the session on translating Geek-speak to CMO-speak saw such good attendance, and my hunch is it’s only partly down to the presentation’s admittedly fantastic quality.
That said, there’s also a simmering sense of potential in the air. With the growth of LLMs, generative AI, and an increasing focus on 1st party data, Marketing Operations teams are at the cutting edge of the changes sweeping through the tech industry. The wide-ranging technical skill this work requires plus the tight tie to revenue puts MOPs teams in a unique position to drive change and shape the way GTM teams operate through the implementation of new technology and frameworks.
Whether that change should live under MOPs, RevOps, or whatever new Ops discipline arises, I’ll leave to the true theorists. But change was definitely in the air.
Closing
Well I’m in the air now myself, and my laptop is on its last legs. Thank you to the MarketingOps.com team for putting on such a fantastic event, and to all the amazing people I met in the process!
I’m going to go sleep for a week.
Me trying not to fall asleep on the last day
Syndication
Follow-up here when I finalize a post on ‘professionalization’ and the guild system↩︎
Written by Jack Segal. Shoot me an email with questions or comments, and if you'd like to support my writing, you can send me a tip using Stripe!
Date
2023-11-09Subscribe
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