Nobody Plans This Career. That's What Makes It Interesting.

I don't know anyone who grew up dreaming of becoming a Marketing Operations professional. There's no degree for it. No clear career path. Most of us just ended up here.

We came from marketing, IT, sales, analytics. And one day we looked around and thought: ok, I guess this is what I do now.

In this solo episode of The Oddinary, I go through five questions I think everyone in MOps has asked themselves at some point. Here's the written version.

Did you plan to work in MOps, or did it just happen?

For me it just happened. I started my career in the late nineties. "Marketing Operations" wasn't even a term back then. I worked with audio production, then web, then SEO, then project management. I ran my own business for a while, moved into ad operations, then product management, then analytics, then growth hacking and marketing automation at an energy company.

There's no pattern here. It's a winding road of "that looks interesting" and "someone needs to fix this" and "I guess I'm the only one who understands how these systems connect."

MOps attracts a certain type of person. The ones who see a broken process and can't leave it alone. The ones who ask "why are we doing it this way?" The ones who enjoy making things work better, even when nobody asked them to.

You can't get a degree in connecting HubSpot to Salesforce without messing up the data or losing your mind. So we come from everywhere. And one day someone calls you "the MOps person" and you think: yeah, I guess that's what I am now.

What skills do you need that nobody taught you in school?

Almost nothing I do on a daily basis was taught in any classroom I've been in.

The technical stuff is obvious: understanding how systems talk to each other. APIs, integrations, data flows. You don't need to be a developer, but you need to know enough to have a real conversation with one. To understand what's possible, what's hard, and what's "technically possible but please don't make me do that."

But the technical stuff is almost the easy part.

The harder skills? Communication. You need to talk to sales in their language, marketing in theirs, and IT in theirs. Sometimes translating between all three in the same meeting. You become a kind of interpreter between teams that don't always understand each other.

Then there's project management without authority. You're not anyone's boss, but you need to get people to do things, on time, in the right order, without breaking something else. And patience. You will explain the same thing ten times. Someone will ask how it works the day after you documented it. That's just the job.

None of this was in any curriculum. You learn by doing. You learn by failing. You learn by being the person who says "I'll figure it out" and then actually figuring it out.

Do you feel imposter syndrome in a role with no rulebook?

If you work in MOps and have never felt imposter syndrome, I'm not sure I believe you.

There's no certification that proves you're qualified. No exam that says "congratulations, you are now officially a Marketing Operations professional." You just do the job and hope you're doing it right.

Then you go on LinkedIn and see people posting about their impressive tech stacks and sophisticated attribution models. And you think: am I behind? Do they know something I don't?

Here's what I've learned after twenty-plus years: everyone feels this way. The people posting the impressive stuff have messy spreadsheets too. They have integrations that crash. They have campaigns that flop. They just don't post about that part.

Three things have helped me: community (realizing others have the same doubts), accepting that "good enough" is sometimes good enough, and remembering that asking these questions means you care. The ones who should worry are the ones who think they've got it all figured out.

What's it like being the only MOps person in the company?

You're the expert, but you have no one to spar with. No one to sanity-check your ideas. Everything falls on you: strategy, execution, support, documentation.

It's hard to take time off. It's hard to be sick. You know things will pile up. Or worse, someone will try to fix something and make it worse. I've answered emails from my phone on days I was supposed to be off. Not because anyone demanded it, but because I knew no one else could solve it.

There's a loneliness to it. You celebrate a win, like finally fixing that integration that's been broken for months, and nobody else gets why it's a big deal. You explain why something is complex and people nod politely, but you can tell they don't really get it.

But here's the other side: when you're the only one, you get to shape the role entirely. No bureaucracy. No "that's not how we do it here." You decide the priorities, build the processes, create something from nothing. When things run smoothly, you built that. That ownership is real and it's rewarding.

How important has community been for your career?

Absolutely essential.

The MOps community is unlike anything I've experienced in other fields. People share openly. They answer questions from strangers. They post their templates, frameworks, and mistakes. There's very little gatekeeping. Maybe because we all know we're figuring this out together.

Slack groups have been a lifeline. LinkedIn, despite all the noise, has a real MOps community sharing valuable insights every day. And conferences like MOps-Apalooza have been turning points. Being in a room full of people who understand the frustrations, the wins, the weird edge cases. You realize you're not alone.

I'm also a chapter leader for MarketingOps.com in Europe. What I love about that community is the willingness to help. People show up to share, not to sell.

If you're in MOps and not plugged into any community, find one. It doesn't need to be a big conference. A Slack group, a LinkedIn connection, someone you can message when you're stuck. Community replaces the colleagues you don't have internally. It's where you find your people.

The bottom line

Nobody plans this career. We stumble in from different directions, figure it out as we go, and build skills that no school would ever think to teach. The role is hard, often lonely, and constantly changing.

But the people in it? They're some of the most curious, resourceful, and genuinely helpful professionals I've ever met. That's not a coincidence. It's what the role selects for.

If any of this resonated, I'd love to hear from you. Connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/oddmorten