Stop Taking Orders: 5 Ways MOps Can Drive Strategy
▼ Summary
– MOps professionals often become reactive order-takers rather than strategic partners due to constant demands and lack of time for innovation.
– Staying in execution mode prevents strategic thinking, such as evaluating current practices, testing new tools, and advising the business effectively.
– Practical strategies to reclaim strategic time include blocking weekly future ops hours, creating a backlog of ideas, and dedicating capacity to small experiments.
– Conducting an energy audit helps identify tasks to automate, delegate, or eliminate, improving job satisfaction and efficiency.
– Engaging in show-and-tell sessions with peers fosters learning, uncovers new insights, and enhances strategic leadership in MOps.
Marketing operations professionals form the essential infrastructure that supports modern marketing efforts, yet many find themselves trapped in a cycle of reactive tasks rather than shaping meaningful strategy. The constant stream of urgent requests and system emergencies often pushes MOps teams into a support role rather than a strategic one. Without intentional effort to reclaim time for innovation, these experts risk becoming mere executors of other people’s ideas instead of drivers of growth.
Remaining in a purely reactive mode carries significant consequences. When you’re always focused on execution, you lose the ability to step back and evaluate whether current systems still serve their purpose. There’s no room to explore new tools or methodologies that could transform efficiency or effectiveness. Most importantly, you sacrifice the chance to provide valuable counsel to the business because you’re too occupied fulfilling immediate requests.
Consider this real-world scenario: while preparing a workflow demonstration for an industry conference, the presenter realized their team hadn’t incorporated several powerful new platform features into actual marketing campaigns. The reason was simple, no one had dedicated time to learn, test, and implement these innovations. This gap between what’s possible and what’s practiced highlights the critical need for MOps professionals to carve out space for strategic work.
So how can marketing operations specialists transition from order-takers to strategic leaders? Here are five practical methods to create room for innovation and influence.
First, establish protected time for future-focused work. Block out one to two hours weekly exclusively for strategic exploration, no meetings, no tickets. Use this time to review new product releases, analyze customer call recordings for recurring pain points, or examine reports with a critical eye. This dedicated space allows you to move beyond maintenance and into improvement.
Build a strategic ideas backlog similar to a product team’s roadmap. Capture promising concepts from webinars, industry forums, internal conversations, or even social media threads. Platforms like Notion or Asana work well for organizing these thoughts. Regularly revisiting this backlog ensures good ideas don’t get lost amid daily urgencies.
Launch a test-and-learn initiative by allocating 5-10% of your capacity to experiments. Whether testing AI-driven personalization, new lifecycle models, or prototype integrations, small-scale trials can yield significant insights. Frame these experiments around questions like “What if we changed our approach to segmentation?” or “How might we improve lead response times?”
Conduct an energy audit to identify tasks that drain your focus versus those that engage your creativity. Inspired by productivity principles, this exercise helps pinpoint activities that could be automated, delegated, or eliminated entirely. Streamlining repetitive work frees mental bandwidth for higher-value strategic thinking.
Organize regular show-and-tell sessions with peers inside or outside your organization. These exchanges expose you to new methods, technologies, and perspectives you might not encounter otherwise. Learning how others solve similar challenges often sparks innovative approaches you can adapt for your own initiatives.
Strategy rarely emerges from incoming request tickets. To be viewed as a leader rather than a service provider, MOps professionals must proactively create opportunities to influence direction. By deliberately carving out time for exploration, maintaining a repository of ideas, experimenting with new approaches, optimizing energy expenditure, and learning from others, you can transform your role from operational supporter to strategic driver. The first step is granting yourself permission to focus on the future, then watching what happens when you lead with vision rather than just respond to demands.
(Source: MarTech)
