You don’t need another glossy “state of Marketing Ops” report. You don’t need a vendor telling you that everything will be fine if you just buy their latest platform.
What you need is honesty. And the honest truth is this: Marketing Ops is broken.
We’ve built machines so complex that most teams spend more time babysitting the system than actually moving the business forward.
Forty-seven dashboards.
Nineteen tools.
Hundreds of workflows nobody remembers building.
On paper it looks impressive.
In reality, it feels like running a Formula 1 car on supermarket fuel... Lots of noise, very little speed.
And the worst part? We did this to ourselves.
How we all quietly broke Marketing Ops
It didn’t happen overnight. It happened drip by drip, in ways that looked smart at the time.
Take dashboards. Somewhere along the way, they became the product. We’ve seen ops teams spend ten hours a week updating “executive dashboards” that looked beautiful in a meeting but never changed a single decision. Everyone applauds the graphs, nobody acts on them, and the cycle repeats. Dashboard theatre.
Or take automation. Every new request becomes a new workflow, a new rule, another branch in the tree. No one ever deletes the old stuff because “someone might still need it.” The result? Stacks of zombie automations still firing years after the campaigns they were built for have vanished. People joke about “ghost in the machine” errors, but deep down we all know the machine is more graveyard than engine.
And then there’s the cult of the MQL. Everyone admits it’s broken. Everyone admits a downloaded PDF doesn’t make someone sales-ready. Yet the reports keep counting them because it gives everyone cover: Marketing gets “influence,” Sales gets a scapegoat, Execs get a neat chart for the board. It’s a polite fiction, and we all play along.
Meanwhile, process became cosplay. Flowcharts and RACI charts so intricate they could be mistaken for modern art. We’ve sat in meetings where more time was spent arguing who was “responsible” vs “accountable” than actually doing the thing. Process should accelerate work. Instead, it often immortalises inefficiency.
And now we’re sprinkling AI on top like glitter. Lead scoring. Copy tweaks. Fancy enrichment tools. But if your foundation is shaky, AI doesn’t fix it, it just exposes it faster.
We’re watched teams roll out AI pilots only to discover their data is so messy the outputs are laughable. That’s not innovation. That’s chaos at scale.
Why "we" let it happen...
The truth is, the industry didn’t just tolerate this complexity, it invited it in.
Dashboards give us status in meetings. Automations give us the illusion of progress. Vanity metrics give us cover when the pipeline’s soft. Process gives us the feeling of control. Complexity is comforting. It makes us look sophisticated, even when it’s slowing us down.
If we’re being brutally honest, we like the safety blanket. “Look at all the things we’re doing.” Never mind whether they’re the right things.
What actually matters
Strip away the noise and Marketing Ops is about one thing: Speed.
Not speed as in “we launched a campaign in record time.” Speed through the system:
How fast an insight becomes an action.
How fast a change shows up in production.
How fast that change creates measurable impact.
How fast that impact gets captured and turned into a repeatable lesson.
We once asked a CMO how long it took their team to go from “we saw this pattern in the data” to “we changed something in-market.” Their answer: “About three months, if we’re lucky.” That’s not ops. That’s molasses.
Companies that can close that loop in weeks, or days, are the ones that leave competitors in the dust. Because while you’re still debating which dashboard is “real,” they’ve already learned, adapted, and launched again.
What fixing it really looks like
Here’s the part people don’t want to hear: Fixing this isn’t about adding more. It’s about stripping away.
It looks like admitting that if a dashboard doesn’t drive an actual decision, it’s just décor.
It looks like celebrating the deletion of a workflow as much as the launch of one.
It looks like being brave enough to kill MQLs and replace them with signals that actually matter to sales.
It looks like giving every process an expiry date. If nobody revisits it, it dies.
It looks like refusing to add another field or object until you’ve proven the existing ones can’t do the job.
It looks like treating AI not as a shiny toy, but as a tool for boring, repeatable stuff, QA, dedupes, routing, so humans can focus on judgment and creativity.
Fixing ops doesn’t make your stack bigger. It makes it smaller, lighter, faster.
What changes when you do
When you strip things back, the change is palpable.
Meetings shrink because dashboards trigger action instead of debate. Campaigns launch quicker because workflows aren’t tangled spaghetti. People stop waking up at 2 a.m. to fix a lead routing error caused by a field nobody remembered existed.
There’s a sense of clarity. One system of truth, not three competing ones. Fewer metrics, but each one tied to a real decision. Fewer automations, but every one of them actively defended. Ops stops being the team that says “no” and becomes the team that gives everyone else momentum.
And culturally, something shifts. Deleting an old process becomes a moment of pride. Simplifying something is celebrated as much as building something. The team moves faster, but also breathes easier.
Why this matters now
The gap between “bloated” and “fast” is widening.
AI isn’t closing it, it’s widening it further. If your ops is already messy, AI just automates the mess. If your ops is lean, AI supercharges it. This is the fork in the road.
In five years, companies that still cling to bloated dashboards, endless automations, and vanity metrics will be irrelevant. Not because they didn’t have enough tools, but because they couldn’t move fast enough.
The ask
Let’s be blunt.
Most dashboards don’t change behaviour.
Most automations create more weight than they remove.
Most “strategic” metrics are just politics with better fonts.
Most processes are fan fiction.
And it’s fine. Because admitting the problem is the first step.
From there, it’s simple:
Delete what’s dead.
Stop measuring what doesn’t matter.
Use AI to remove friction, not responsibility.
Build a machine that’s smaller, sharper, faster.
When Ops becomes the fastest learning engine in the company, everything else follows -revenue, budgets, talent, retention.
Not because you said it would in a slide, but because the system makes it inevitable.
Marketing Ops is broken. You broke it. But we can fix it.
If we’re honest enough to start now.
