MOps should transition from reactive order-taking to proactive, strategic leadership
Most marketing operations teams are caught in execution mode. That makes sense in the short term, but long term, it’s risky. If all your team does is respond to incoming requests, there’s no time to question whether those asks are useful, let alone strategic. This is a clear path to inefficiency.
The real value of a MOps team isn’t in how quickly they can build dashboards or fix automations. It’s in their ability to help the business work smarter, move faster, and scale better. If they don’t have space to think, strategize, and lead, then you’re only using a fraction of what they can deliver.
At events like HubSpot’s INBOUND conference. People present clever workflows with plenty of rigour behind them. But then they realize they’re not using these same workflows in their day-to-day operations. Why? Because they’re too busy reacting. Buried in tickets. No time to zoom out, evaluate, and iterate.
This gap between what’s possible and what’s applied is where opportunity lives. But access to that opportunity requires a shift in mindset and organization structure. MOps has to be recognized, not as a service desk, but as a strategic function. Teams need time to challenge existing assumptions and systems. That freedom is where innovation happens.
According to Debbie Qaqish, author of From Backroom to the Boardroom, strategic MOps leadership stems from integrating marketing expertise, digital fluency, and business acumen. It’s not about trying harder; it’s about operating at a different level.
C-suite leaders need to recognize this. Your MOps team isn’t just building tools. They’re capable of identifying inefficiencies, improving engagement models, and steering digital transformation. If that capability stays buried under reactive execution, you’re losing leverage across your growth stack.
Dedicated time blocks, such as “Future ops” periods, are essential for strategic planning
If your calendar, or your team’s calendar, is wall-to-wall with meetings and ad hoc tasks, strategy won’t show up. Not because you don’t want it to. It’s because it literally can’t. Innovation needs space. Plain and simple.
Blocking 1 to 2 hours per week for what we’ll call “Future Ops” is one of the highest-leverage things a marketing operations team can do. No meetings. No tickets. Just uninterrupted time to think, explore, and question current systems. It’s not wasted time. It’s protected time.
In practice, it means investigating new product updates, listening to call recordings to catch friction points, and reviewing reports beyond surface metrics. Ask “why” more than once. Find optimizations that aren’t on anyone else’s radar yet.
The simplest changes often make the biggest impact, but only if you notice them. And here’s the thing: you won’t notice them if you’re always heads-down, stuck in workflows. You need margin to observe and think critically. That kind of thinking won’t come from putting out fires. It comes from stepping back.
C-suite leaders should prioritize and enforce this kind of space. Block it. Put it in calendars. Make it untouchable. If you give your MOps team room to think ahead, really think, you’ll stop just keeping up. You’ll get ahead.
Strategy doesn’t emerge by accident. It needs structure. This is that structure.
Maintaining a strategic ideas backlog helps preserve and nurture innovations
Every MOps team has good ideas. But without a system in place, those ideas get forgotten, lost in meetings, slides, and Slack threads. The backlog changes that. It turns concepts into assets instead of letting them expire.
A strategic ideas backlog is a deliberate move to preserve opportunity. Use practical tools, Notion, Asana, OneNote, whatever your team will actually use. The content doesn’t need to be polished. It just needs to be captured. Screenshots from webinars, insightful LinkedIn posts, notes from 1:1s, useful Reddit discussions, all of this is raw material that could inform the next iteration of your ops architecture.
Too often, the “we’ll get to it later” pile disappears into the ether. When there’s a place to store ideas that matter, they stay accessible long after the suggestion was made. That means you don’t have to start from zero the next time innovation is back on the table.
Teams that track what they want to try next stay ahead of teams that don’t. And C-suite leaders should encourage that mindset. When strategic ideas are logged and reviewed consistently, innovation becomes operational, not occasional.
Treat this as part of the core system, not a side project. The backlog isn’t a wishlist. It’s proof that your team is paying attention, testing assumptions, and staying connected to the broader market conversation. That situational awareness is valuable. But only if you capture it.
Allocating a small percentage of operational capacity to controlled experiments drives innovation
Most operational teams are locked at full capacity. That leads to stagnation. If everything in your process is optimized only for delivery, there’s no room left to explore better ways to operate. That’s where controlled experimentation makes the difference.
Dedicate 5% to 10% of team resources to testing. No need for massive projects. Keep the scope tight. Try a new lifecycle model. Run a proof-of-concept for AI-generated personalization. Tweak an automation sequence. Each of these tests should start with a clear hypothesis, what do you expect to happen, and why?
Simple questions create strategic leverage: “What if we stopped doing this step?” “What if we changed the entry criteria?” “How might we adjust this to move faster or convert better?” Asking these kinds of questions helps uncover inefficiencies and build smarter paths forward.
The goal isn’t perfection, it’s insight. Some tests will lead nowhere. That’s fine. Failure here isn’t waste; it’s a step forward in understanding what works. When experiments are lightweight and intentional, you can afford to run many of them without disruption.
From a leadership perspective, encouraging small-scale experimentation signals that innovation is expected, not optional. This isn’t about permission. It’s about progress. Giving your MOps team space to test new ideas strengthens the system. It keeps things evolving.
Without this, you’re at a standstill. And in any growth-oriented environment, standing still is moving backward.
Conducting an energy audit helps optimize work and reduce burnout
Operational efficiency isn’t just about systems. It’s also about the people who run them. If your team is constantly drained, the quality of their decisions, and their output, suffers. That’s where the energy audit comes in.
An energy audit is straightforward. Identify which tasks energize your team, and which ones exhaust them. Some work feels frictionless. Other work slows progress, creates mental fatigue, or pulls attention from high-impact priorities. The goal is to map these areas out clearly.
Once that clarity exists, you can act. Automate tasks that don’t require human judgment. Delegate work that doesn’t belong in MOps in the first place. Eliminate anything that no longer serves a purpose. These aren’t just optimizations; they’re essential if you want a team that’s both fast and resilient.
The idea comes from Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky’s book Make Time, which focuses on creating space for deep, focused work. Their insight applies directly here. A high-functioning MOps team needs energy to think ahead, not just to get through the day.
For C-suite leaders, this is not just a people ops issue, it’s a strategic one. Burnout kills progress. But even aside from retention risks, a burned-out team stops seeing opportunities. They focus only on what’s urgent. That mindset limits growth.
Fixing this starts with frequency and discipline. Run energy audits regularly. Act quickly on the insights. You’ll see reduced turnover, sharper thinking, and higher output without needing to scale headcount.
Regular peer-led show-and-tell sessions can unlock collective insights and foster collaboration
When people with overlapping goals but different perspectives share what they’re working on, change happens. Fast. This is where peer-led show-and-tell sessions prove their value. They create a steady exchange of tested ideas within and across operations teams.
It doesn’t have to be complicated. A monthly session where one member walks through a recent campaign automation or system update is enough to surface missed opportunities. Feedback flows naturally. Inspiration follows. These forums also foster visibility, people start understanding what others are building, and why.
The article references this dynamic in HubSpot User Groups, where people frequently leave with a new implementation idea they hadn’t considered before. It works the same internally. Whether it’s lead scoring, qualification rules, or custom integrations, someone is always experimenting with something you haven’t seen yet.
From a leadership perspective, these sessions signal that innovation is a shared effort, not an isolated job. They break habit cycles and expose people to perspectives that trigger better questions. That’s how you refine processes that already “work”—you simply make them work better.
C-suite leaders should support this by making space for those sessions and acting on what comes out of them. If one team builds something valuable, others should learn from it. This cross-pollination is structurally simple and strategically effective. It keeps ideas moving, not just sitting in pockets of the organization.
Gaining strategic visibility is crucial for MOps to be recognized as business enablers
Marketing operations teams that stay hidden behind service requests rarely get a seat at the decision-making table. If all stakeholders see is task execution, then strategy stays out of reach, regardless of capability.
That’s the core issue. Talented MOps professionals often have deep knowledge of customer behavior, process systems, and marketing outcomes. But when they operate solely within request queues, their strategic insight goes unnoticed. Fixing that starts by changing how these teams work, and how leadership views their contribution.
The article outlines clear steps: block time for strategic work, maintain a backlog of intelligent ideas, test those ideas, and share the results through collaborative sessions. This operational model is not just more efficient, it’s more visible. MOps teams that engage across functions, drive conversations, and bring original thinking to the table change how they’re perceived across the business.
Debbie Qaqish points out that true MOps leadership is about combining digital fluency with business insight and marketing intelligence. It’s not execution with polish. It’s execution with foresight. That’s what earns credibility at the executive level.
Executives need to create the space, and set the expectation, that MOps professionals act as strategic operators. Treating them only as implementers wastes high-leverage talent. These teams understand the full stack. They see the bottlenecks, track system-wide performance, and often notice trend shifts before anyone else.
This is not about visibility for its own sake. It’s about influence tied to real insight. A visible, empowered MOps function puts the business in a stronger position, not just operationally, but competitively. Keep them buried, and that leverage stays untapped. Bring them into the core, and you make the business faster, smarter, and more connected.
Recap
Marketing operations isn’t a backend function anymore. It’s a strategic lever. But you only get that leverage if you make deliberate space for it. Blocking time, tracking ideas, running tests, and fostering visibility, these aren’t minor workflow tweaks. They’re structural priorities that change what’s possible.
If MOps stays reactive, your organization runs on outdated playbooks. But when MOps steps forward as a strategic operator, connected to both systems and outcomes, you gain real acceleration. Faster execution, smarter decisions, and clearer signals across every part of your marketing engine.
Executives set the tone. If you operate like MOps is tactical by default, that’s what you’ll get. But if you back the team with intent, structure, and visibility, you unlock a capability that moves the business forward, fast, and on purpose. Make the shift. The ROI is systemic.
