I've never been a huge fan of a lot of maturity models, mostly because they feel subjective, but lately, I've been thinking through one for an Operations career.
One way in which maturity models can be helpful is that they answer two important questions:
Where am I?
What are the steps to take to progress to the next level?
These aren’t always easy questions to answer when evaluating your career, so applying a framework to add context can be a useful tool.
So, what does this model look like?
Phase 1: Focus on “How”
In this phase, you’re very focused on the tactical steps of things that need to get done.
In the context of using a tool, you’re learning the features and which buttons to click and at which time. For a new process, you’re working through each of the steps and making sure that you’ve got them in the right order.
This is a critical first step because it lays the foundation for everything that comes after it. If you can’t successfully complete a task or follow a process, then it doesn’t matter if you can prioritize the tasks appropriately or communicate how you’re doing them.
Repetition can have an outsized impact in this phase. The more you do something, the faster you’re going to master it. At this phase, the destination is much more important than the journey. Your process may be inefficient or rudimentary, but if it gets the job done then it is enough.
A lot of documentation is focused on the “how” part - how to send an email, how to set up a campaign, or how to filter a dashboard. Creating documentation is helpful not only for others, but it gives you a quick and easy refresher when coming back to something so you don’t have to figure out the how for something you haven’t done for a while.
How do you know when you’ve “completed” the phase?
Consider how much time you spend figuring out how to do things, particularly things in a tool you use often, or a process that you follow regularly. If you understand most or all of the “how”, you’re probably ready for Phase 2.
If you think critically about what you’re doing and start to find and fix areas of inefficiency, then you’re headed into Phase 2.
Phase 2: Improving how things are done
Once you’ve mastered most (or all) of the big “how do I do this?” questions for your situation or role, you’re ready to take the first strategic step and begin optimizing your processes.
There are a few different approaches to this phase:
Find bottlenecks and dependencies that are unscalable
Tackle the things that are difficult or error-prone
Add in additional capabilities and functionality
In Phase 2 you’re still focused on how things are getting done, but now you’re working on the process itself. In this phase, it can be helpful to assume the role of an observer following you throughout your day or week. Capture places where you get stuck or you’re waiting on someone else, places where mistakes can easily be made, or where an additional data point or feature would provide a major benefit. These are the places where you should focus your effort.
How do you know when you’ve “completed” the phase?
Finding ways to work more efficiently can often be motivated by the discovery of a major bottleneck or broken process. If you’re still bogged down in finding and fixing these issues, you’re not necessarily ready for Phase 3.
Becoming efficient in a variety of tasks leads to time savings. If you take that free time and plow back into the next ticket that comes across your desk, you’re probably not ready. If you use that free time to catch your breath and consider which of the 4-to-5 things you could be working on is the right thing, then you’re headed for Phase 3.
Phase 3: Doing the right things
When your processes have reached a certain level of efficiency, it can be helpful to start evaluating them to determine your return on investment (typically time, in this case), or even better, return on effort.
Your list cleanup process may be extremely dialed in, but is that the best use of your time?
This is a great strategic thinking exercise - you’ll start comparing the things that you have to do with the things that you know you should be doing. Making time for both involves making tradeoffs, finding even more efficiencies in the things you have to do, and understanding the true outcomes of the work you’re producing.
It may be that some tasks are better performed by someone else on your team, or an agency or contractor, freeing you up for more impactful work. If you don’t have access to those types of resources, then it can help to be open and transparent about why you’re prioritizing certain work, and leverage support from your manager and others when you have to say no.
Questions to ask yourself:
How do you know when you’ve “completed” the phase?
Working on the right things means that you’ve developed the ability to prioritize and focus. These are challenging but important skills for Operations pros to continue to develop throughout their careers. If you understand what basic data points you need to consider to prioritize one task over another, then you’re likely ready to move to Phase 4. Having the focus to get that task completed according to a deadline is a bonus.
Phase 4: Communicating your work
The Ops version of the phrase “no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care” could be revised as “no one knows how much you do until you tell them how much you do”. Certainly not as catchy, but equally as true (and important).
So many Ops teams operate in the background, and the things they do aren’t well understood by the teams they support.
Just like GTM acronyms like MQL or SQO need some explanation, so do concepts like lead scoring, data enrichment, automation, and integration. Things that you take for granted now might seem like a foreign language to those you work with frequently. Take the time to explain how ideas like these work on a basic level and then - more importantly - how they can benefit what others are doing.
Even if it’s not in your nature (it’s certainly not in mine), take frequent opportunities to promote the work you’re doing. Present in team meetings, create lookback writeups and retrospectives, create documentation, and highlight the positive impact of your work to more than just your manager.
It’s easy to forget to do this, so I believe it’s best to create a habit. Get a standing appointment with your stakeholders, or request some time in the team meeting on the last week of every month. A level of commitment will keep you accountable and help shine the light on all of the positive work you’re doing.
How do you know when you’ve “completed” the phase?
Finding your approach to communicating about your work is a major milestone here. The timing, content, and method will all depend on you and your organization. There will likely be a mix of different approaches. If you have an established communication process and cadence that you’re adhering to, you are likely ready to start focusing on Phase 5.
Phase 5: Enabling others to do great work
In this phase, it’s helpful (if you haven’t already) to begin to thoroughly understand the impact that your work has on others.
If you’re a people leader, this is a bit more of an obvious exercise. The type of manager you are has a significant impact on not just what your team works on, but how they work on it.
As an individual contributor, you may have put forth a bit more effort to understand how you can enable others to do their best work.
Here are some key areas to consider:
Are you only delivering on what is asked, ignoring ideas or observations you have that might help improve the overall deliverable or resulting process?
Are you hitting agreed-upon deadlines?
Do you provide specific and detailed responses to questions?
Is the quality of your work at the level that you expect from others?
This phase is all about ensuring that you’re contributing to the success of the team as a whole. Ops pros are in a unique position because often the work they do not only helps achieve a positive outcome, but it allows the team to get there faster, easier, and more efficiently than before.
How do you know when you’ve “completed” the phase?
It can be helpful to leverage the framework in considering the work others on your team are doing. Are they at the “how” stage, or have they progressed to a further phase?
You should be able to point to specific things you’re doing to facilitate the great work others are doing. Simply working with people who are doing amazing things doesn’t mean that you’ve achieved what you need to in this phase. If you’re able to point to intentional things that you’ve done that have had a direct impact on enabling others, then you are likely succeeding in this stage.
Phase 6: Focus on Impact
The “title” of this phase could easily be shortened to just the word “Focus”. Despite all of our best efforts, there will never be a day when you log on to your computer and find that your workload has decreased. There will always be more to do than time to do it in.
The trick is knowing where to spend your limited resources - time and energy.
Past newsletter interview guests, including Jason Widup and Cody Guymon - both operators who have made significant progress in their careers - have highlighted the need for a high level of focus.
This means getting comfortable with the fact that you’ll most certainly come across things that you’d like to do, or that you should probably do, and you won’t do them. Or you won’t do them yet.
Growth and progression in your career come from showing the impact of your work, and it’s incredibly hard to do meaningful work if you can’t give it the adequate time and attention it needs.
Spreading yourself too thin is a recipe for burnout and unmet expectations. Establish clear priorities, do the work to make sure that those priorities are agreed upon by your stakeholders, and then don’t add anything new until something already on your list is completed.
How do you know when you’ve “completed” the phase?
You’re able to draw a clear line between the work that you decided to prioritize and complete and a clear business outcome, usually financially related.
Others recognize and appreciate the attention you pay to the tasks you do decide to work on and understand why other projects may not have “made the cut”.
Congratulations - you’ve reached the pinnacle of the Marketing Operations Maturity model. You can now retire and live a life full of happiness and satisfaction!
Or, much more likely, you’ll find that after not too long you’re in a new situation that takes you right back to Phase 1.
Moving to a new phase is essential to keep learning
One thing to remember is that our career journeys are not linear, and we don’t always move in one direction. You may be at Phase 5 or 6 as an individual contributor, but then you get promoted to a people manager role and you’re back at Phase 1, trying to figure out how to be a manager.
Whitney Johnson, strategic business thinker and C-suite advisor through her business Disruption Advisors has popularized the concept of plotting your learning - and your career growth - on an S curve. This thinking makes it easier to visualize what it’s like to be in a position where you need to start, or at least accelerate, learning in your new situation.
When you reach the flatter part of the “S” in the Mastery part of the curve, in reality, you’re at a new launch point, ready to accelerate into the sweet spot of learning and progression.
If you want to know where you fall in the model, think about what you spend your time thinking about, especially when you have some free time, and what you wish you had time for. Chances are, the things you spend your time thinking about align with your current position on the model, and the things you wish you had time for will be in the next phase.
Does where I work matter?
The short answer is no, but there are some factors to consider.
For example, if you’re the first Ops employee on a team or even at a company, it can be easy to focus on a lot of the “how" things are getting done because it usually hasn’t been defined before. You can get stuck in a loop of feeling like you’re accomplishing a lot because you’re creating new processes and onboarding new tools.
While this influence could keep you personally in Phase 1 or Phase 2, the distinction. you need to be careful to make is between what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. You can be very strategic and still focus on impact despite doing very foundational work. This is an example of a situation where understanding the maturity model can be powerful because decisions made as the first anything in an organization have an outsized impact on the team.
Wrap Up
If you’re interested in some more context on this idea, I discussed it in this recent podcast episode.
I’ve talked before about the paradoxes of Marketing Ops careers, and there are a few that can apply to this model.
The most relevant one is that you might be at different phases for different aspects of your career. Overall you may be at phase 5 or 6, but in a specific use case, like learning a new tool or a new skill, you may be at phase 1 or 2.
It’s important to frame this model as an opportunity to learn, rather than a need to improve. If you’ve used a maturity model with a specific tool, you know that you’re typically not going to scrap everything you’re doing and cancel your contract because your usage of the tool isn’t fully mature. It’s been my experience that seeing what’s possible is a motivating experience.
Being at an earlier phase in the model doesn’t mean that you’re contributing any less to the success of your team or that you’re not making an impact. Keeping in mind that the model is cyclical and repeatable will help, as will looking at progressing to the next phase as an opportunity to learn, rather than to improve will make it easier to keep a positive frame of mind, rather than being discouraged with not reaching a specific level of proficiency.