ORG & CULTURE DESIGN 01 | MARKETING OPERATIONS
Defining a new role in the marketing technology function
Director, Marketing Operations · Program Management · Marketing Technologists · Capability & Feature Development
SITUATION
Work in the marketing technology function was split across three roles: a business program manager who owned the business layer and served as connective tissue to business stakeholders, a marketing technologist who owned the build, and a capability lead who owned maturity and enablement.
The seams between them created diffuse accountability, institutional knowledge, vendor dependency, and lossy handoffs. Staffing three specialists against every program was neither affordable nor scalable.
APPROACH
I consolidated the three roles into a single unified role with end-to-end ownership of a program or domain. I built a competency model that defined the skills the role required, established multiple levels mapped to the company's leveling framework, and preserved genuine specialization where delivery coordination still called for it. I made the scope legible through lifecycle ownership maps and role-clarity artifacts.
IMPACT
End-to-end ownership replaced diffuse accountability.
The team grew more resilient, because managers could flex across programs rather than being locked to a single specialty.
Role clarity improved onboarding and calibration, and gave the team a defined career path for the first time.
ORG & CULTURE DESIGN 02 | MARKETING OPERATIONS
The Clean Slate Initiative: Removing Silos for Agility
Group Manager, Marketing Operations | Agile methodology | Team Restructure
SITUATION
The team was organized into three heavily siloed verticals. Prestige dynamics had calcified between them, no cross-vertical coverage was possible, and work surged unevenly with no way to move capacity to where it was needed. Individual contributors had grown so siloed that they leaned on vendors rather than owning the work themselves.
APPROACH
I gave the team six months to cross-train voluntarily. When that effort did not take hold, I implemented a clean slate: every assignment was wiped and every person reassigned to a new vertical.
Success now depended on cross-training, so cross-training happened. I deliberately mixed the teams to dissolve the prestige dynamics, and people who were invested in status rather than the work self-selected out.
IMPACT
The silos dissolved.
The team became genuinely agile on capacity, able to surge wherever the work was heaviest.
Technical capability moved in-house and off vendors.
The team's composition strengthened through the natural departure of status-motivated individuals.
ORG & CULTURE DESIGN 03 | MARKETING OPERATIONS
The Three Pillar Model: Structuring ownership for scale
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SITUATION
After the clean slate, the team had agile, cross-trained people but no durable functional operating model. Organizing by work type had never mapped cleanly to functional need. Execution staff absorbed platform work because no one owned that layer, planning fell through the cracks, and unplanned intake landed on the execution team with no front door.
APPROACH
I designed a three-pillar functional operating model: a planning and enablement function to serve as the front door and connective layer, an experience operations function to own hands-on delivery, and a platform operations function to own platform health, configuration, and governance. I sequenced the ownership transitions to operational reality rather than forcing a single cutover, holding certain handoffs until dependent migrations were complete.
IMPACT
Every layer gained an explicit owner.
The model scaled with the business because it was organized by function rather than work type.
Intake was governed through a defined front door.
Several team members stepped up into pillar leadership.
ORG & CULTURE DESIGN 04 | MARKETING OPERATIONS
Team Alignment Lab
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SITUATION
A reorganization merged two teams with a history of friction into a single group, adding platform operations and planning to an existing management team. The org chart combined them; the culture did not. There were two rival camps, no shared standards, no shared definition of success, and no common role identity.
APPROACH
I designed and facilitated an alignment session built around a neutral shared theme that neither team owned, using a light touch of humor to let hard messages land. It opened with a compact I made to the team, setting expectations of myself before setting them of anyone else. From there it moved through a set of non-negotiable operating principles covering psychological safety, ownership, delivery standards, and communication, then introduced the unified role and its competency model, and closed with concrete individual actions tied to each person's development plan.
IMPACT
Two rival cultures left with one shared set of expectations, established in a single session.
Culture was made explicit and enforceable through behavioral standards rather than left to chance.
Status dynamics were defused through a neutral frame and a shared role identity.
The session set the cultural foundation the later structural reorganization was built on.
TECH MGMT 01 | MARKETING OPERATIONS
The critically delayed platform migration no one thought possible
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SITUATION
A business-critical event management platform had been built on a CRM marketing module that the product group then deprecated, with a hard removal date. Three-quarters of the platform was custom-wired to infrastructure that could be removed without warning.
The migration had been known to be necessary for roughly two years, but was repeatedly deprioritized against competing demands and stalled even after it was funded.
When I inherited the scope, the platform was already months past its deprecation deadline. To my knowledge, it was the first migration of its kind the organization had ever attempted, with immediate customer-facing exposure if it broke.
APPROACH
I moved first into triage: assessing the true state of the platform, convening stakeholders who had been scattered across the effort, and escalating for executive visibility.
I converted a stalled initiative into an owned, actively driven program with a clear owner and a defined execution framework, and drove the cross-functional alignment the migration required.
When a cloud update later retired the underlying module and the platform went down, the groundwork was already laid, so the outage landed on a migration that was already in motion.
I led the emergency rebuild under direct executive scrutiny.
IMPACT
A potential catastrophe became a controlled recovery.
More than a thousand events were migrated off the dead module.
A risk that had been stalled for two years was finally executed.
The organization completed the first platform migration of its kind in its history and established a repeatable playbook for the next one.
OPERATIONS 01 | MARKETING OPERATIONS
Implementing the EU Data Boundary commitment in post-sales campaigns
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SITUATION
As acting business program manager, I coordinated a cross-organization effort to bring post-sales marketing campaigns into compliance with the company's regional data residency and privacy commitments.
The scope did not stay still: what began as a narrow regional concern expanded to cover the entire campaign estate regardless of target market, against a fixed and critical deadline.
The work also had to be coordinated with several large parallel efforts, including a platform migration and the standup of a new region-compliant sending instance, while upstream data changes kept moving underneath the plan.
APPROACH
I built and drove a single implementation plan for rolling out the required segmentation changes across a campaign estate spanning more than a dozen product lines, and shared it broadly so every team executed from one source of truth. I built a bi-directional mapping of data streams to campaigns so we could rapidly assess impact whenever upstream changes hit, an asset that paid dividends repeatedly. I led enablement across the individual campaign teams to find where routine work and compliance work intersected, so the effort closed the gap without creating new technical debt. I ran a weekly operating rhythm, kept leadership current on status and risk, escalated judiciously, and owned incident management for every blocker.
IMPACT
The implementation was completed on time, against a fixed deadline and a scope that expanded to the full campaign estate.
It landed with minimal data issues despite touching a dozen-plus product lines and many data streams, and earned direct recognition from the upstream data partners the effort depended on.
By deliberately finding the intersections between routine and compliance work, it closed the gap without leaving new debt behind, and the data-stream mapping became a reusable asset well past the original deadline.
OPERATIONS 02 | MARKETING OPERATIONS
Recovering erroneous opt-outs when data goes rogue
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SITUATION
The enterprise tracks, for every customer, whether they have opted in to receive communications on a given topic, through a central consent and preference system.
A newly introduced event platform was integrated into the marketing technology stack without following established data-integration practices, and as a result began transmitting incorrect opt-out signals into the consent system.
Tens of thousands of contacts were marked as opted out of communications they had never actually declined. This arrived while the organization was already struggling to reach its eligible audience, so the erroneous suppression both compounded a contactability problem and created a consent-integrity exposure.
APPROACH
I owned the recovery end to end. The task was to determine, for each affected contact, whether they had genuinely opted out before the faulty signal and should stay suppressed, or had been wrongly suppressed and needed to be restored. I did this by reconciling four separate datasets spanning more than a hundred thousand customer records, tracing each contact's true consent state prior to the erroneous signal. The work was painstaking because the stakes ran both ways: restore someone who genuinely opted out and you contact a person who did not consent; leave someone suppressed who did consent and you block communications they wanted. I spent two weeks in that reconciliation.
IMPACT
Every erroneously suppressed contact was identified and restored to their correct opt-in state, a one hundred percent recovery.
Consent integrity was re-established.
Tens of thousands of contacts returned to the eligible audience, easing the strain on outbound reach.
The scale of the failure made the cost of skipping integration discipline concrete, and informed how new platforms were brought into the stack afterward.
MARKETING STRATEGY 01 | MARKETING OPERATIONS
When nurture campaigns don’t nurture
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SITUATION
When an attendee registers for an event, they are tagged with a marketing motion aligned to that event, and each motion is meant to trigger a specific nurture email series: a first email within a day of the tag, then one a week on a set cadence.
On paper the experience was clean. In practice it had decoupled from its design.
The pre-sales nurture series had never been built for an event audience, no bridge connected event registration to the series that followed, and the creative was dated.
There was reason to suspect the experience was broken operationally, not just aesthetically, and the finding would also inform a broader case to move off the legacy marketing automation platform.
APPROACH
I traced the full journey from registration tag through eligibility to delivery and cadence, and found a systems failure at scale: only a low single-digit percentage of event attendees were receiving the nurture experience as designed, while the overwhelming majority received nothing as intended. The root cause was not the nurture logic but the platform itself, which had been extended through custom integrations to the point where it no longer performed reliably. I compiled the analysis for event and marketing leadership with a direct message: what you believe is happening to your attendees is not what is happening. Then I offered three paths, in order of uplift: a bridge email to give attendees context for the series they were about to receive; event-specific nurture series tailored to the event and motion rather than the generic pre-sales default; and a modular approach that would let a small set of composable templates flex across events, which the current over-engineered platform could not support and which strengthened the case to migrate.
IMPACT
The data on the failure rate made the case for change undeniable, and leadership approved piloting the event-specific strategy.
The entire post-event nurture architecture is now being rebuilt on those recommendations.
Early pilot results show a significant engagement lift, with open rates in the mid-to-upper forty percent range.
And by demonstrating both the operational failure and the strategic ceiling the legacy platform imposed, the analysis became a key pillar in the broader platform migration argument.