Scott Brinker would build one deep specialty to judge AI’s confident mistakes, grow cross-functional range to bridge marketing and engineering, and lean into technical skills like SQL and APIs to turn ideas into working systems. More
Category Archives: career
179: Tiankai Feng: The comeback of data quality and how NLP is changing the data analyst role
Data governance feels like the Jedi Council, steady with its rules, while marketing ops moves like the Rebel Alliance, quick to adapt when perfect data never arrives. Tiankai believes progress comes from blending discipline with curiosity, bringing data in early as a partner, not a critic.More
174: Joshua Kanter: A 4-time CMO on the case against data democratization
Joshua spent the earliest parts of his career buried in SQL, only to watch companies hand out dashboards and call it strategy. Teams skim charts to confirm hunches while ignoring what the data actually says. He believes access means nothing without translation. You need people who can turn vague business prompts into clear, interpretable answers.More
173: Samia Syed: Dropbox’s Director of Growth Marketing on rethinking martech like HR efforts
Samia Syed treats martech like hiring. If it costs more than a headcount, it needs to prove it belongs. She scopes the problem first, tests tools on real data, and talks to people who’ve lived with them not just vendor reps.More
171: Kim Hacker: Reframing tool FOMO, making AI face real work and catching up on AI skills
Tool audits miss the mess. If you’re trying to consolidate without talking to your team, you’re probably breaking workflows that were barely holding together. The best ops folks already know this: they’re in the room early, protecting momentum, not patching broken rollouts. Real adoption spreads through peer trust, not playbooks.More
170: Keith Jones: OpenAI’s Head of GTM systems on buying martech with cognitive extraction and ghost stories
The best martech buying process isn’t a spreadsheet. It’s a cognitive extraction exercise.
Keith Jones asks stakeholders to write what they want, say it out loud, and then feeds both into GPT to surface what actually matters. That discipline applies to agents too. Most teams chase orchestration before they have stable logic, clean data, or working workflows. More
169: Elena Hassan: Visa acquires your startup but nobody warns you about the tech stack aftermath and culture shock
Elena has done what most startup marketers only guess at; made it through multiple acquisitions and now leads global integrated marketing at Visa. In this episode, she breaks down what actually changes when you go from scrappy to enterprise and why most martech tools don’t survive security reviews.More
168: AI’s talent crunch: Marketing jobs on the brink and those set to thrive
At risk are campaign operators, generic content creators, and report-pulling analysts. Set to thrive are resident AI implementation experts who select worthy tools, data orchestrators connecting proprietary data to AI, product/customer marketers with genuine empathy, ethics guardians preventing bias issues, and localization specialists understanding cultural nuances.More
167: Moni Oloyede: The marketing ops identity paradox, attribution is a waste of time and GTM engineering is just sales ops
Your buyers can’t remember why they bought from you, our brains physically can’t store that information correctly. But we’ve built elaborate attribution systems pretending otherwise. Moni helps us understand why we need to stop crediting random touchpoints and start measuring how effectively each content piece performs its specific job in moving people through your funnel.More
166: Constantine Yurevich: Visit Scoring, an alternative to MMM and MTA few marketers know about
Multi-touch attribution is a beautifully crafted illusion we all pretend to believe in while knowing deep down it’s flawed. The work is mysterious, but is it important? The big ad platforms sell us sophisticated solutions they don’t even trust for their own internal decisions. Is it time we accept marketing causation is a thing we can’t measure?More