Casey Winters: preference

Transcript context

…And this point that you made that ops is often a sign of inefficiency on a product team because in theory, a lot of the roles should be done by software, eventually. I'd love to unpack this and hear your take on this? I think I originally got the idea for the post in that I had written another essay on MarTech. And how MarTech to be really successful, it's really got a target engineers more so than marketers. And that a lot of MarTech businesses just aren't very good businesses. And I think I got an invite to speak at a MarTech conference to a bunch of marketers about this post. And it's like, well, that sounds like a terrible idea. I'm basically telling a bunch of marketers that what they're investing in isn't that important, and that they're not the most important target customer. And I remember reading something about the conference that was like a conference for the growth of the marketing operations professional. And then I was like, oh no, that's not what I want in the industry at all. Like having marketing ops means you suck at marketing. And obviously that's a bit of hyperbole. I'm not against the concept of a marketing ops role or a product ops role, we have a product ops team at Eventbrite, but as someone who ran a double digit million marketing budget at GrubHub without marketing ops, because we invested in automation and we invested in process, it scares me when the first tactic people go to is to add people to help scale. There's nothing wrong with people obviously, there's nothing wrong with operations people. The thing I have a problem with is normalizing ops as a distinct stable function where operations rules are amazing and how we utilize them at Eventbrite is their explicit job is to go find inefficiencies and build process or software to root out that inefficiency, so then they can go find other places to be more valuable. When you say, oh, their job is to do this manual process long term. That's where I get super concerned because you're not rooting out efficiency in how you build your company. And that's where I feel like a lot of this can go if you're not careful, Intercom has a really good blog post on this from a while back around their business operations team. And they basically up front in that post say the goal of business operations is to not exist, and I definitely very much agree with that. I think in general functional ops roles, whether it's product ops or marketing ops or whatever, they're a hack to deal with some sort of functional issue on your team. And it's totally okay to have functional issues. Startups are going to have functional issues all over the place, but if the way they deal with that functional issue is by building larger and larger operations teams and roles. That's basically exacerbating an inefficiency issue, a functional issue, it's not fixing it. It's a form of empire building and in general empire building is something I don't have a lot of tolerance for. You're making more of a function unable to operate without human intervention by saying the goal is to scale up marketing ops or product ops. building is something I don't have a lot of tolerance for. You're making more of a function unable to operate without human intervention by saying the goal is to scale up marketing ops or product ops. Whereas what the goal should be is let's use our brains to run experiments, to make us more functional with less people. We're more efficient, we could add more value to the customer, and to the business. And if that means I don't actually need to have this product operations job in a year. That's awesome. And guess what, if you've shown you've done a really great job at rooting out inefficiencies. Every part of the company's going to want you to do some other job if that job is no longer valuable, because you've done such good job eliminating the need for it. There isn't this real concern that I'm going to lose my job by being too effective at it. It's like, no, you're going to show that you're just awesome at many types of jobs that product leaders or marketing leaders care about, so that's my perspective.…

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