Over the last decade, I’ve watched MOps teams add more and more tools to their stack, yet somehow the work never gets easier. The requests still pile up. Priorities still shift daily. Stakeholders still bypass the process. And the team still feels like it’s drowning.
Here’s what I’ve learned: the difference between a struggling MOps team and a high-performing one has almost nothing to do with technology. I’ve seen teams with Salesforce, Marketo and a six-figure tech stack that can barely keep up with demand. I’ve also seen teams with half the budget operating smoothly and efficiently.
The real difference comes down to five operational capabilities that the best teams have quietly mastered. Think of these as a maturity model for marketing operations — a way to assess where you are today and chart a realistic path forward. In practice, most teams are still operating at the earliest stages of this maturity curve, which explains why so many of us feel stuck. Here’s how high performers do things differently.
1. They prioritize strategic alignment
One time, I sat in on a prioritization meeting with a struggling MOps team and watched them spend 45 minutes debating whether to build a new nurture campaign or fix the scoring model. The loudest stakeholder won. The actual business impact never came up.
This is the default state for most marketing operations teams. Work gets prioritized based on who asks first, who asks loudest or who has the most political capital. You’re constantly in reactive mode, jumping from one urgent request to another. When you’re firefighting, you don’t have time to step back and assess whether the work actually matters.
High-performing teams have cracked this problem — and not by working longer hours. They’ve established frameworks that make prioritization feel less like politics and more like math.
I helped that team transform its approach by implementing a simple weighted scoring system. Every request that came in was evaluated on four criteria: strategic alignment with company OKRs, potential revenue impact, effort required and number of people affected. Frameworks like RICE or the value-versus-effort matrix can help your MOps team prioritize its workload. The key is using them consistently.
At that point, they made the trade-offs visible. When a VP asked them to drop everything for a new project, they didn’t just say yes. They pulled up their prioritization dashboard and showed what would get bumped. Sometimes the VP still wanted to proceed, but now it was an informed decision.
The maturity progression here is clear.
- At Level 1, you’re completely reactive. Whoever yells loudest gets their work done first.
- At Level 2, you’ve documented some basic criteria, but they’re not really enforced.
- Level 3 teams have a formal framework with genuine stakeholder buy-in, and everyone knows how decisions get made.
- Level 4 teams use data from past initiatives to continuously refine their prioritization model based on what actually drove results.
Most of the teams I work with are stuck between Level 1 and Level 2. They know they need a better system, but they haven’t built the muscle to actually use it.
Dig deeper: Strong MOps is how marketing runs on time and at scale
2. They govern without gatekeeping
Governance may be the most misunderstood aspect of marketing operations. Say the word and people immediately think of bureaucracy, red tape and someone stamping “rejected” on their creative ideas.
But without governance, you get chaos. Campaigns launch without legal review. Tools get purchased without security vetting. Brand guidelines are ignored because nobody knows they exist. I’ve seen the aftermath — the emergency board meeting after a compliance violation, the scrambled audit when you discover seven people have admin access to your database, the brand crisis from an off-message campaign that bypassed review.
The teams that do governance well understand it’s not about control for control’s sake. It’s about creating guardrails that let people move fast while avoiding disasters. The best governance models actually increase speed by reducing ambiguity.
I helped a team rebuild its approval process. Previously, every campaign required sign-off from five different people, and requests would sit in someone’s inbox for days. They redesigned it using a DACI framework, identifying who needs to be the driver, approver, consultant and informed. Suddenly, most campaigns required only one or two approvals, with everything else automated through notifications.
I also built governance into their self-service tools. Instead of requiring manual brand-compliance checks, I created pre-approved templates. Instead of reviewing every email for legal language, I built a snippet library with pre-vetted copy. The governance was still there, but it was invisible to the end user.
The maturity levels for governance follow a familiar pattern.
- Level 1 teams have no formal governance. They’re just reacting when things go wrong.
- Level 2 teams have policies written down, but enforcement is inconsistent.
- Level 3 teams have clear decision rights and processes that people actually follow.
- Level 4 teams have adaptive governance that adjusts based on risk level and campaign type.
The crucial insight is that good governance enables faster execution. If your governance is slowing things down, you’ve created bureaucracy.
Dig deeper: 3 MOps bottlenecks killing your campaign velocity
3. They create boundaries as a strategic asset
This may be the most complex skill for marketing operations teams to develop, and it’s the one that separates good teams from great ones.
Every yes comes with a cost. When you say yes to a one-off report, you’re saying no to fixing the broken dashboard everyone relies on. When you say yes to a rush campaign, you’re saying no to the strategic project you’ve been trying to launch for months. The problem is that these trade-offs are invisible until you’re burned out and wondering why nothing important ever gets done.
I spoke with a MOps director who told me her team had a 92% stakeholder satisfaction score. Sounds great, right? Except her team also had a 70% turnover rate. They were saying yes to everything, working nights and weekends, and slowly burning out. The stakeholders were happy. The team was dying.
High-performing teams have learned that saying no is a strategic capability. They establish clear boundaries around what’s in scope and what isn’t. They use data to show the impact of overcommitment. Crucially, they offer alternatives rather than flat refusals.
Consider creating a simple service-tier model.
- Tier 1 requests — aligned with strategic priorities, proper lead time and complete requirements — get full service.
- Tier 2 requests get template-based support.
- Tier 3 requests get directed to self-service tools.
Anything outside those tiers gets consulting support to help the stakeholder do it themselves or goes into the backlog for the next quarterly planning cycle.
The beauty of this system is that you aren’t exactly saying “no.” You’re saying, “Yes, and here’s what that means.” Want it rushed? Here’s what will get delayed. Want it custom? Here’s the timeline for that level of work. Want it now? Here’s the self-service option.
But that requires something many MOps teams don’t have: the organizational authority to push back.
- Level 1 teams can’t say no. They’re chronically overcommitted and constantly firefighting.
- Level 2 teams may decline requests only with manager support on a case-by-case basis.
- Level 3 teams have clear, documented criteria for what’s in and out of scope, and stakeholders understand them.
- Level 4 teams proactively plan capacity to prevent most conflicts before they start.
Getting to Level 3 or Level 4 requires executive sponsorship. Your CMO or revenue leader needs to back you up when you enforce boundaries. Without that support, you’ll stay stuck at Level 1 no matter how good your process is.
Dig deeper: 5 ways MOps can stop order-taking and start driving strategy
4. They manage intake
Let me paint a picture that probably feels familiar. Someone emails you a campaign request at 4:47 p.m. on Friday. By Monday morning, they’ve followed up twice, pinged you on Slack and mentioned it in passing to your boss. Meanwhile, another stakeholder submitted a proper request form two weeks ago and hasn’t received a response. Who do you think gets their work done first?
This is the intake crisis that plagues most marketing operations teams. Without a structured way to capture and track requests, you’re flying blind. You don’t know what’s coming. You can’t plan capacity. You can’t give accurate timelines. Politically savvy stakeholders learn to game the system by bypassing your process entirely.
I worked with a team that had 17 ways to submit a request. Email, Slack, hallway conversations, meeting mentions, the intake form nobody used, sticky notes on desks — you name it. They had no idea what their actual workload was until requests started missing deadlines.
The transformation was straightforward. I worked with them to centralize everything. One intake system, period. I implemented Asana, though Workfront, Monday.com or similar tools work just as well. The tool mattered less than the discipline to use it. The key was making the new process more straightforward for everyone.
We designed intake forms that asked for the correct information upfront: campaign objectives, target audience, required assets, timeline and success metrics. No more back-and-forth to gather basic details. We set up automated routing based on request type. We made status tracking transparent so stakeholders could see where their request stood without asking.
The real win came from the visibility this created. Suddenly, they saw that 60% of requests came from one business unit and that rush requests accounted for 30% of their capacity, even though they represented only 10% of the actual business value. That data allowed them to have different conversations about resourcing and priorities.
- Level 1 teams are drowning in email and ad hoc requests.
- Level 2 teams have implemented forms, but routing is still manual.
- Level 3 teams have a centralized system with automated workflows and clear SLAs.
- Level 4 teams use intake data to forecast capacity and are beginning to apply AI to support triage.
The maturity jump from Level 1 to Level 2 is relatively easy. You need to implement a tool and get people to use it. The jump to Level 3 requires process discipline and stakeholder training. Level 4 is where you start optimizing based on patterns in your intake data.
Most teams get stuck at Level 2. They have an intake system, but people still email them directly, and they haven’t fully enforced the policy requiring everything to go through the official channel.
Dig deeper: How to build a skill development culture for MOps success
5. They optimize workflows
I constantly see teams overengineer their processes. They create a workflow with 19 steps, four approval gates and mandatory fields that nobody understands. Then they wonder why people route around it.
The best marketing operations teams understand that not everything needs the same level of process. A simple email blast doesn’t require the same workflow as a multimillion-dollar product launch. A template-based social post doesn’t require the same level of governance as a brand campaign.
The magic is in designing for the 80% and allowing flexibility for the 20%. Most campaigns fall into standard patterns that can be templated and automated. Exceptional cases are handled using custom workflows.
High-performing teams also build in continuous improvement mechanisms. They don’t just document a workflow and call it done. They measure cycle time, identify bottlenecks and iterate. Hold a monthly workflow review to assess which processes are working and which ones people are bypassing.
The maturity progression for workflow design looks like this:
- Level 1 starts with undocumented knowledge. Everyone knows “how things work here,” but it isn’t documented and varies from person to person.
- Level 2 teams have documented their processes, but execution is inconsistent.
- Level 3 teams have standardized workflows and track efficiency metrics.
- Level 4 teams have adaptive workflows that learn from execution data and continuously improve.
Getting to Level 3 requires discipline and measurement. You need to track how long tasks take, where bottlenecks occur and whether your process adds value or adds steps.
Dig deeper: MarketingOps redefines success for the age of AI
Getting started: Assessing your current state
Every high-performing team I know started from chaos. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, start with an honest self-assessment. For each of the five capabilities, ask yourself one question:
- Prioritization: Can you explain why you’re working on what you’re working on today in terms of business impact, or are you just responding to whoever asked most recently?
- Governance: If I asked three different people on your team how to launch a campaign, would I get the same answer?
- Boundaries: When was the last time you successfully pushed back on a request that didn’t align with your strategic priorities?
- Intake: If your team left the company tomorrow, could someone else figure out what work was in flight and what was coming up?
- Workflows: Are people following your documented processes or routing around them?
Your answers will tell you where you are on the maturity curve and which capability needs attention first.
Most teams should start with either intake or prioritization. Why? Because these two create visibility, and you can’t optimize what you can’t see.
Fix intake first if you’re drowning in chaos and have no idea what your actual workload is. Fix prioritization first if you have decent tracking, but can’t seem to work on anything strategic because you’re constantly firefighting.
The 90-day roadmap looks something like this:
- Pick one capability.
- Assess your current state honestly — most teams are Level 1 or Level 2.
- Define what Level 3 looks like for your organization.
- Identify the top three barriers to getting there.
- Address those barriers one at a time.
The best marketing operations teams aren’t built. They’re grown, deliberately, one capability at a time.
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