What can a professional poker player teach us about operations? Well, for over 20 years, I had the wrong assumption about a superstar poker player's name. It made me realize how easily we repeat these mistakes in daily operations or planning, and while it's quicker to assume and act like we know it all, questioning our assumptions is far more rewarding for building a solid marketing ops foundation.

You know what they say about assumptions, right?

Have you ever been pulled out of a movie because of unrealistic visuals that completely distract from the story? That’s exactly what happens in marketing ops when we don’t invest the time to build sustainable, end-to-end systems and processes. Instead, we end up obsessing over the symptoms of those mistakes rather than addressing the root causes. It’s as much about the right mindset and approach to long-term solutions as it is the actual implementation.

Effectively managing MarTech involves careful planning and critical thinking that goes far beyond the tools themselves. It's more about strategy, setup, process, and the thoughtful structure of repeatable flows. So much time and energy go into comparing and learning tools, but we can save time and effort by thinking beyond the tool and focusing on our mindset and approach in marketing operations.

Many companies overlook the importance of thoughtful onboarding. Success at work is about much more than "hitting the ground running" or taking over high-stakes projects, it's about setting up new staff with a sustainable path for long-term success. 

Lead scoring is an invaluable tool when properly implemented, yet many companies rush to launch it without considering deeper strategies or long-term planning. This often leads to overthinking, underthinking, or creating an unsustainable model that quickly becomes outdated, ultimately making it less effective than having no scoring at all. Marketing operations teams understand there’s much more to it than just assigning a score—it’s time to take their insights seriously.

Many companies struggle to find a sustainable source tracking and attribution model due to a mix of legacy issues and complex end-to-end challenges. But the tools and attribution models alone can’t save us from bad data and inconsistent source hierarchy foundations. It’s time to think more critically about how we organize and construct our source labels so we can build upon a strong base to innovate. 

Are some of the assumptions we've been making all this time serving us? Are we setting ourselves, our teams, our tools up for success? There are several times in marketing operations that it pays to seriously ask questions that help understand if the things we keep doing every day are actually working, and if not, what can we do to change that.