Why Marketing Ops Teams Keep Making It Harder Than It Needs to Be

Most marketing ops problems don't come from doing too little. They come from trying to do everything at once.

The 60-metre wall

Frans Riemersma tells this story about a bank. They mapped out their entire campaign process — every step, every approval, every handoff — on a wall of post-it notes stretching sixty metres. A genuinely impressive exercise.

The problem? When Frans interviewed the people who actually had to follow it, the answer was the same across the board: if I follow the process, I miss the deadline.

"They were very proud that they plotted it all out — as if they were God and could rule every single detail and task."

All that control. All that engineering. And zero room to move. Frans calls it boiling the ocean. I call it the most common thing I see in marketing ops.

The fix isn't a better process. It's fewer milestones with more room to breathe. Frans helped that bank collapse everything into seven checkpoints that work regardless of campaign type: brief, proposal, deal, execution prep, production, go-live, evaluate. Seven points. Everything else is judgement.

Operators, meet your new role

Frans makes a distinction that's been sitting with me. He says we're shifting from operators — people who make sure the workflows run — to moderators — people who check that the AI gets it right.

This sounds reassuring until you sit with the implication.

"You need to actually understand your craft to know when AI gets it wrong."

If AI handles the research, the lead scoring, the repetitive execution — then the floor for what a marketer needs to know actually rises. You can't sanity-check the output if you don't understand the input. Frans puts it simply: it's not one brief to an agency anymore. It's many micro-briefs to your agents.

The Frankenstack problem

Here's a pattern Frans has watched play out across dozens of clients: companies keep adding tools and never take any away.

"We've been adding tools only, building Frankenstacks."

Nobody owns the decision to deprecate. Customer success managers aren't incentivised to make exit easy. And without someone explicitly responsible for governance — someone asking what can we decommission, and why? — the stack grows by accumulation, not design.

Frans mentioned one client who had a rule: a vendor could only be onboarded if they could demonstrate how to decommission their own tool. Clean data export. User removal. The whole exit. I've never heard of another company doing this. It should be standard practice.

Who actually owns the journey?

Ownership is where the conversation gets honest. Frans argues the answer isn't better tools or more detailed processes — it's flipping the frame. Instead of campaign managers, he says companies need journey owners. People responsible for a journey end-to-end. People who lose sleep when it doesn't convert. People with the mandate to simplify.

The 80/20 rule applies here. Despite the infinite number of ways a customer might reach you, 80% come through one, two, maybe five paths. Own those. Optimise those. Stop trying to automate the exceptions.

Frans says maturity isn't knowing everything — it's knowing what you don't know and being okay with it. Know your 80%. Don't get distracted by the 20%.

The bottom line

Frans Riemersma doesn't talk about marketing operations in theory. He talks about what actually goes wrong — and why it keeps going wrong with the same underlying cause: trying to control too much, too soon, with too many tools and not enough ownership.

His most quotable line from our conversation: "If they focus on 20% of the data, 20% of the integrations, and 20% of the tools — you will get 80% of the results."

The hard part isn't knowing the rule. It's having the mandate to act on it.

Find Frans on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/fransriemersma