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
Tag Archives: career growth
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
165: Ashley Faus: Building content that matches actual human thinking by integrating lifecycle, content and product marketing
Marketing frameworks often fail because they ignore how humans actually behave. People don’t follow neat, linear paths; they explore, double back, and leap ahead based on genuine interests. Drawing from her diverse experience across corporate communications and lifecycle leadership, Ashley exposes how artificial walls between marketing functions create dysfunction while offering a solution. More
163: Danielle Balestra: Building AI and martech stacks inside regulated enterprise is more rewarding than startups
Beyond all that regulatory red tape and the perception of inertia, martech in regulated enterprise can be a ton of fun and provide the balance that tech startups just can’t. Vendor selection, proof of concepts, team structures… everything takes a unique form that requires you to become an internal business consultant, despite being a FT employee. More
161: Angela Rueda: Meta’s Director of Martech on build vs buy, vendor selection and hybrid stacks
Angela walked into Meta’s engineering-first culture, discovering a sprawling mess of DIY custom martech solutions, and leading the organization through a fundamental mindset shift about build vs. buy decisions. She brings us through the technical and emotional journey of aligning more than 150 stakeholders ultimately forcing them to embrace a hybrid build-and-buy approach during a pivotal merger. More
160: Mac Reddin: How to leverage dinosaurs to get warm intros and drive better pipeline
Mac treks through the Jurassic wilderness of modern sales, where outbound campaigns cannibalize themselves while AI-powered sequences are degrading response quality by the day. Real marketing power flows through human networks, forward-thinking companies are transforming their SDR teams into relationship architects who measure success through network depth and authentic engagement. Be the team that does better.More
159: Ana Mourão: Privacy-first data literacy and modernizing legacy martech at a global enterprise with data templates and POCs
Ana created the Experimental Marketer framework to help marketers have a more strategic view (and be more hands-on) with martech and become better allies in using and realizing martech value. She takes us on an adventure through a big martech transformation project with a global enterprise and how she applied that framework to help them scale.More
158: Jeff Lee: How Calm’s Billion customer message machine unites martech and engineering
Jeff built a billion-message marketing machine at Calm with three people. But it was a journey. Push notifications sparked a three-year battle until a new CPO, unburdened by notification trauma, green-lit the project in six weeks. It was a four-year battle for ML recommendations but the data tells an unexpected story. Jeff also shares tactics for winning over the most skeptical product and engineering teams. It starts with operational empathy by taking a stab at a working prototype of your idea but also recognizing that product and martech decisions often stem from personal bias that requires champions who have experienced positive outcomes.More
156: Chris Golec: The Godfather of ABM is on his 3rd company and he’s solving attribution for B2B marketers with AI
The Godfather of ABM takes us through his humble beginnings in Detroit’s industrial trenches to category creation and entrepreneurial expeditions. His journey spans building magnetic company cultures, cracking the code on remote work, sharing candid hiring wisdom, and transforming marketing failures into fuel for growth. Now building Channel99, he’s rewriting attribution with a touch of AI engineering, predicting marketing ROI, using a white box approach.More
155: Meg Gowell: Typeform’s full stack marketer on growth experiments, brand momentum and warehouse-native stacks
Marketing leadership in 2025 is a wild time. After years of learning martech and technical concepts to become a full stack marketer, you finally land that dream director gig… only to watch your hard-earned tech skills collect dust while you drown in meetings. Megan helps us see the way forward.More