Michael Hartmann: 0:24

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Opscast, brought to you by MarketingOps.com and powered by all the MoPros out there. I am your host, Michael Hartman. Today I'll be talking with our guest about one of the most persistent challenges in marketing operations, how you can how you change the business while still running the business. So to join to do that, joining me is our guest Adele Kirky, senior marketing operations lead at Avon. Over the past several years, Adele has built and led global marketing ops functions through major change, including top-of-funnel redesigns, evolving go-to-market strategies, and large-scale transformations, all while keeping day-to-day execution running across distributed teams. So this episode is going to be all about the reality of transformation inside marketing ops. Hopefully, marketing is a little bit too, balancing BAU work with long-term initiatives, creating transparency across global teams, securing the leadership buy-in for technical change and figuring out when frameworks like Agile help and when they don't. We'll have an interesting conversation about that, I expect. So, uh Adele, welcome and thanks for joining so late since you're in Linway.

Adele Kurki: 1:28

Thank you. Thank you. It's 8 p.m. here in Helsinki, and it's definitely dark as we are recording this on February. Um, thank you for a warm introduction and invitation. I've been following your podcast uh for a while, and I must say I'm deeply grateful to share my perspective today. So um I serve as senior marketing operations lead, as you mentioned. Uh a significant recent change is already now. Uh, we, for instance, moved the marketing operation team to a revenue operations organization, which adds a little bit of a spice for today's conversation. Okay. Is that a new thing since we last talked? That is a new thing since we last talked. But, anyways, we're focusing definitely on marketing operations. Uh, more tech operations and analysts in how we are working with our stakeholders uh in in moment of transition as well as day to day.

Michael Hartmann: 2:22

Um, so why don't we start there, like talk through a little bit like in in so this is like a pullback the curtain moment a little bit. So uh when I say Adele and I spoke before, it's um yeah, it varies from guest to guest how long ago that was. Um, but I think we we are recording in early February of 2026, and I think we spoke in early October, if I remember right, something like that. So it's a few months. So um that's not that long, but it sounds like some change. So like maybe walk us through your role. Um and I'm I'm really curious um about the like the global nature of what you do. So we we like I've had global teams managing them from the US, but people in other countries, and we've had a few people on who manage global teams from Europe and other places. So I'd love to get your perspective on that as well.

Adele Kurki: 3:18

Absolutely. Actually, let's start first kind of like getting the scope and globe in place. Uh, indeed, we are a mighty team of marketing operations specialists uh serving our stakeholders across the US, uh APEC, and Europe. So practically we are serving our sales colleagues and supporting colleagues around the globe. Um, we are specifically in Europe and US, so that we are able to ensure these 360 uh view support uh every single day. Um, maybe kind of like opening a little bit of a like what does it mean? What is the scope and what is kind of like the team supporting with? Um we are practically ensuring that we have optimized customer journey. So practically we in improve sales and marketing alignment, uh, we lead initiatives that boost operational efficiency. Uh practically, the team kind of owns the funnel ink, like everything top of the funnel. Is it tracking, operations, tooling, marketing analysis uh and analytics is our team? Okay, we set the targets in the beginning of the fiscal years, we own AI workflows for marketing.

Michael Hartmann: 4:33

Targets for like leading marketing leads and things like that, funnel funnel metrics.

Adele Kurki: 4:37

Exactly. Okay, funnel metrics, setting the targets in the beginning of the fiscal year. Like, hey, if our sales target is here, how as marketing function are we able to support to kind of like get us there? Yeah. Right. Um indeed, and of course, there is this admin part, which is not always so cool, which is like the admin. Of course, we have always privacy, security. When we're thinking about a global business, there are Europe is very like strict with their data privacy, same like all the states might have slightly different elements. So all of that work is also monitored and controlled uh in our team. If you think about like, okay, we have this global element, we have that work element, what else there are there is there is a ton of stakeholders. Um we work day to day, obviously with marketing, it's part of the name as well, right? Uh but day-to-day with sales, is it kind of like a sales rep or sales leadership? There need to be day-to-day alignment so that we actually connect the businesses together. Um, we have sales uh motion, but we have also product motion. So we own part of the product motion. We work day to day with product teams to ensure that we are the same map, we are roadmap support each other. Um and also, of course, if they are end-of-the-life cycles, who owns the customer communications, we're raising our hand and supporting there as well. Then, as we have analytics, analytic engineering, all that planning. So it's really, really interesting uh core business that we're doing here in the in the marketing operations.

Michael Hartmann: 6:10

It's all because this is it just struck me as you were talking about, and now we're gonna talk more about the the tension between run the business, change the business kinds of things. But also, I just was it sort of hit me as you were describing one of your roles is to help the business, um, whether it's efficiency, velocity, effectiveness of things that are going through the funnel, but also um, and I think about this as being an advocate for customers, right? Whether it's privacy, compliance, doing kind of doing right by them. And it does feel often like those are also intention. Do you in and you got the global differences that make it more complicated? You see, do you feel that too?

Adele Kurki: 6:48

Yeah, absolutely. And also something that's really sometimes you forget is like, okay, when you are in like an operations enough, actually, that backroom role is actually sometimes the most customer-facing, is especially if we think about like, for instance, AI workflows, which I mentioned here. It's like sometimes actually today you're creating in operations an AI that is actually for us to serve the whole customer flow until the closure.

Michael Hartmann: 7:14

Yeah.

Adele Kurki: 7:15

Which is quite interesting uh perspective as well. So then for that perspective, it's really, really good to be connected on those stakeholders that are there to actually monitor and like setting the standards.

Michael Hartmann: 7:28

It's interesting. Sorry, I was kind of smiling because I just had a personal experience. It was not a sales funnel thing, it was more of a support thing, which you know, it was a you know AI chatbot, whatever. And I asked about two questions, didn't understand it, asked the second one, another one. It told me kind of, oh, if you want this, ask this. I put it in. Like, I don't understand what you're saying. I was like, I just put in what you just told me to do. Yeah, and it would not it, I just got the same don't understand over and over and I was five.

Adele Kurki: 7:58

And honestly, those things you want to avoid, right? Because it's actually not helping the customer, it's just creating the frustration. Then you're like, I remember this brand, but not on the most positive way.

Michael Hartmann: 8:10

Yeah, and if I'm I can't remember what it was, but I think it was like a well insurance thing or something like that. And I'd like no choice, right? I'm like, so uh it's not like I could do anything about it. Anyway, solely off topic, but um so when we talked before, you said that we you know, over the last few years you've led several major initiatives. Um maybe walk us through what some of those are that you want to highlight. Um and maybe go even a step back and like what kind of what was the the trigger or catalyst that led to like why we wanted to pursue those changes to the business.

Adele Kurki: 8:47

Yeah, absolutely. I could maybe share kind of like three key elements and then we look a little bit on like how to bring it to the to the board and what kind of like triggers those. Maybe if we think about what drives change from marketing operations side, like okay, if it's not like given change, which which sometimes happens. It's um after all, we are the architects, we are building the invisible bridges between the data points, we're bringing the actions, we're bringing the insights. Okay, from that perspective, often the change is that hey, we cannot bring, like we are missing some bricks from this invisible bridge. And that is what at least uh in our case have been triggering a couple of um cool work projects where one, for instance, is that hey, we need to find a good way to automate and build marketing attribution, as simple as that.

Michael Hartmann: 9:49

Okay.

Adele Kurki: 9:49

Do you have the the bricks in place so that you can tell the story to your leadership that, hey, okay, this is what sourced, this is what tipped, this is what influenced, and you know, this is the storyline of the deal. And these is these are the ways where we should invest. And if you want to make a change, this might be the way where you're leading towards too. Another project is from pretty much the same elements. It we started quite early within AI marketing flows. Okay. Of course, they've been kind of like quite along in the business, but it wasn't kind of like that mainstream to bring them uh, let's say four years ago or so. And there the conversation started, like, okay, we have again this invisible bridge, and we see their gaps. How can we fill it when we don't have resourcing in place? Okay, how do you replace basically additional human partners? Are there gaps that we can do? And we started building actually proactively, like, hey, actually, let's let's do a POC. Let's try so that we can sell later for leadership that okay, actually, if we are investing in this, we can provide X times return on investment.

Michael Hartmann: 11:05

Okay.

Adele Kurki: 11:06

And then a third big one, which was actually a quite recent one, is that um sometimes in marketing and especially in marketing operations, we tend to think and simplify that hey, our customers are living only one life cycle. So we are looking like, okay, they entered the system, they did this, and then they either closed or did not. And um we wanted to solve it. Like, hey, okay, how do we create more transparency on if our uh like um prospects are going through with different life cycles? Okay, they might not enter to the opportunity process this time, okay. Let's end like enrich, engage, blah blah blah, and then they come again and again. Yeah, and we created a process on how to bring that transparency to the table. Now you can already hear, like, okay, so how did you explain it to your level because it sounds already quite technical and complex?

Michael Hartmann: 12:04

Well, that one is that's another one that's like it's hard to explain because everyone's so used to there's already a linear funnel model, right? Which it it's an easy framework to get, but there that's not the reality. Think of how people research actually behave.

Adele Kurki: 12:20

Yeah. And especially if you have product that you can try for free, or you can kind of like bring your colleagues into, or you change businesses. Uh, and it's a missed opportunity if you somehow lose the ends after the first life cycle, as we wish. So uh and honestly, with this project, I had a lot of difficulties to figure out like, okay, how can I like this this is so important, this is so cool, this is high impact. But if you go to your leadership, like, ah, there is this life cycle and these objects and you know blah blah blah blah blah. So elements to bring to the table to kind of like create this invisible bridge first, communications and preparations. Yeah, find the annex, like find what is important in the in the leadership level, what like what matters, and then try to model some sort of an uh impact. It doesn't have to be perfectly fine, like after all, we're not looking at like okay, was it like the stuff?

Michael Hartmann: 13:20

Nothing like accounting data and financial data, right?

Adele Kurki: 13:22

So but kind of like an estimate, like okay, you can all, for instance, in this life cycle side or this AIF law, you can see where the gap is.

Michael Hartmann: 13:30

Something reasonable that you could defend as a benefit, right?

Adele Kurki: 13:33

Even if Yeah, and and get the attention, because then the conversation starts when you are able to get into that table with that first pitch that hey, this is actually relevant, and we want to solve it because it has a dollar value, and dollar values are important for you to make it through this fiscal.

Michael Hartmann: 13:49

Absolutely.

Adele Kurki: 13:50

So that's kind of like how we how we started the conversation. Then the other thing uh with some of these projects is that it's really important that you build authority inside the company so that you have a certain level of trust within the leaderships, which means that okay, you do your day-to-day like within your team in a in a good level, you keep the constant transparency, you are visible. But for sometimes it is a good thing to do like an official audit or bring an external to support you into this con conversation. It is something that I learned a little bit like in an uncomfortable way, because I think I'm like, ah, but I know my business, I've been here. Um I know what they're going to say. But um we brought a great um consultancy CS2, not advertised, but they did a really good work with us. Uh, we brought them to the table and said, like, hey guys, um, we have this problem. We really think that this is important. We already calculated how much this would be bring bringing us value. Um can you kind of like jump into with our leadership and let's have a chat like with additional authority to make it through? Yeah, yeah, it's a validation. Yeah, sometimes validation. And and it was amazing. We did like a proper audit, the validation went through, the leadership worked, workshopped with us, like, okay, how does the good look like? And we were able to start this process as we planned.

Michael Hartmann: 15:25

Yeah.

Adele Kurki: 15:26

So that's kind of like an additional element which I didn't maybe realize earlier that hey, actually, this is an asset.

Michael Hartmann: 15:32

Um can I just go ahead and finish, and then I have I want to follow up on a couple of threads there.

Adele Kurki: 15:39

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There are so many things that we could discuss. Um, but maybe I want to also touch base, which we will discuss also later, is that it's really important that you have data trade trust in the team that is uh is in the team and you bring constant visibility for everyone in the team. It is so, so easy, in especially with marketing operations, to just like do the admin, you know, close the fires, please collect the closest stakeholders, but it's really hard to bring the success cases to the organization or these development projects or the actual impact. But that's really important if you are willing to bring these big, big projects into the table and want to have that uh first conversation.

Michael Hartmann: 16:24

Yeah. So a couple of things just I want to see if uh this sounds right. So a couple of takeaways for me. One, it's important to speak the language of the stakeholders who have the control of the first strings, right? Who can say yes or no on your your ideas, and I think that's a critical one, and people should spend time understanding what that language is. That's I think it's important. Thank you. Um there's an element of what I would call doing the BAU work well earns you the right to go and trust to go do other things that may be over. Right. Um and sometimes it means also including the right to bring in a uh an expert authority on something to help you prove prove the case. But um the the um I think it's really important here. Yeah I'm I'm a little torn here on the the last point you made about uh trust in data. And I think part of that is what I find a lot of people do with marketing and sales data is they try to treat it when they get grilled as if it should be um right, accurate, whatever word you want to choose, as if it was something that has high levels of control, accounting, finance, you know, operational data, if you were like say manufacturers, like that, which it doesn't like and I think there's a level, like there's a part of this is like, yes, you want to build trust. To me, part of that is setting expectations that like what is right, what is like is not going to be the same level. And also being honest, like like and I think we've all probably I was talking to somebody earlier today about these weird anomalies I would see inside uh, in this case, Salesforce data, that would lead me to go down paths, go like, why am I seeing this? Right, and it turns out there are ways the sales teams were operating, which I don't really like. I have a opinion about whether or not that was the right thing to do, but it was doesn't really matter, right? That was what how they operated and the data led to that. Yeah. And so being able to go, like, hey, we we can or we can't do this, we can get close, we can get directionally correct, right? Right. And I think that's setting that expectation there and being honest about the quality and and completeness and accuracy of the code. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, okay.

Adele Kurki: 18:44

Absolutely. And and I think like something that's really good to understand from uh what makes like marketing analytics, for instance, quite specific is that we have uh the top of the funnel which where you cannot measure everything, even if you'd like to, it's always directional.

Michael Hartmann: 19:01

Yeah.

Adele Kurki: 19:02

And then there is this uh additional element, is like what from what angle are you watching the data, or what angle are you reporting the data? The sourced, for instance, like if you're looking for hey, let's see um how marketing builds pipeline. Yeah, you can look at from so many angles. Um there can be as many manual adjustments, opinions, even sometimes, that it's always directional. Yeah, and you have to be very specific. For instance, when I'm providing numbers, let's say to the Bordek or something, need to be quite open and honest, like, hey, the data you're looking today describes that XYZ. And you can like again speak the language, but also be honest. Okay, it means if it's sourced, they can the system XYZ can be two years ago, three years ago. Now, if they convert it, there might have been actions X, Y, Z happening in between. On this other bill, like other window when we are looking at, okay, it was tipped over, or can like, hey, the opportunities process started from this marketing action. It it tells a very different story if it was like that. Three years sourced, can be from marketing, tipped by sales, or hey, sourced by sales, tipped by marketing. Which one do you want to have?

Michael Hartmann: 20:28

Yeah, so I think uh we could we could spend all and we probably have before spent a whole conversation on just that kind of topic. And it's just I think it's I like to reinforce that because I think I still think there's a lot of people who um are are being held accountable to a level of quality on data that is, I think, unreasonable for most marketing and sales teams. Even the ones who have a focus on data quality. It's just it's just the nature of it.

Adele Kurki: 20:59

Yeah, and I think in in any ways, like you aim to keep it as clean as possible. Um, especially in the times of like automation at AI. You want to be as directional, as good as possible. You want to provide those different visibilities or different life cycles. But it's good to be realistic.

Michael Hartmann: 21:17

Yeah. Well, and the other part that I always tell people like when I coach people are gonna be, whether they've been on my team or I do, you know, independent coaching, who are being asked to do reporting, right? If you uh if you see something, like you should be keenly aware to look for things that don't match a pattern. Because I guarantee you someone will ask the question if you just throw these numbers or charts up. And you need to be prepared to answer the question of why does it say that? It doesn't mean you have to have like it doesn't mean it has to you change it or fix it, right? But you go for me, like hey, I give you an example, right? Uh started seeing we first launched Marketo, but we started tracking attribution and we started seeing influence on opportunities that were created well before we launched. And I'm like, I don't know what's going on here. Like, so I had to go figure out why, because even though I don't that didn't make any sense, right? Yeah, there's a logical reason why I was able to explain it, but I think that like that's the other part, right? So don't just go like, oh well, the data just can't be good. You should yes, you should try to. Make it as good as possible for automation, AI, all those things. And also be prepared to answer when things aren't correct or don't look correct, right? Because for the people who aren't familiar with it, they won't get it. All right, I'll get off my eye horse there. Um okay, so let's get into this the topic of you got these big projects, but you like said, like we still have to keep the machine running, right, if you will. Um how do you think about balancing those two, like run the business, like we keep referring to it, run the business, change the business in a practical day-to-day sense. Like, what do you how do you think about that?

Adele Kurki: 24:27

Well, honestly, when we have well, first of all, I believe in something called like 80-20 or 70-30 type of a modeling that you have constantly elements that are like supporting short, mid, and long-term growth. And practically that means that okay, you have this day-to-day, so we keep the business running, fine. But we have always development projects on the side that support like mid and long-term, longer term um elements. Now, there is of course different sizes of fires. Let's say that we have um decided that okay, one of these growth uh projects will take place, let's say this lifecycle um project. We plan. We plan so that we have uh that in our roadmaps uh from the very start. And we plan it in a timeline that makes well always is ambitious, but it's still making sense, so that we have the capacity to run um the day-to-day. Obviously, if you and all the operation teams have always a huge backlog, you need to be just able to prioritize. This is always there, and then from the fires, you have, for instance, 70% or 50% of your week, depending a little bit, dedicated for those. You do the prioritization inside that time that you have available. Yeah. So you have just like different buckets of time that are dedicated for different swim lanes, and you prioritize inside those what makes sense. Um in these projects, the good and easy thing is that you have you have to provide already to the top, like to the top level or to the leadership, some sort of roadmap, and you want to proactively update uh the organization about changes or expectation setting that hey, again, you have to over-communicate. First of April, the change will be there, the change will like mean this and this, and then you can like track from there like what needs to happen at what deadline, and that's like already set, it's predictable. It's in your operational roadmap, so your team knows exactly what's happened, so they can focus only on uh on that. The challenge, I think the real challenge is that when something else happens on top of that.

Michael Hartmann: 26:51

Something unexpected.

Adele Kurki: 26:52

So something unexpected. Let's say we changed a sales motion, which actually happened. Uh, or we change a team, or we change, you know, a structure, or something like that.

Michael Hartmann: 27:06

Which creates an integration that you can, you know, yeah.

Adele Kurki: 27:11

Something something random, which um which requires some time somewhere.

Michael Hartmann: 27:17

Yeah.

Adele Kurki: 27:18

And um then it's really good to go back to a team, like, hey, okay, this is still our roadmap, and we still want to ensure that we don't just drop everything and fix something as urgent, but have that long-term vision at the same time. Yeah. Which is kind of like a little bit sometimes like, oh, but but but this is like really urgent, like we need to fix this fire. But if we fix every single fire immediately, we'll never stop firefighting. And this function needs to look like longer term to the horizon, like, okay, what this business needs tomorrow. And for that reason, we kept even we had this organizational change, for instance, we kept this long-term process. We keep, we make sure that this swim lane is not touched. Then we have all the operational tasks or admin stuff. Okay, what can we change there to ensure that this urgent fire, for instance, is fixed. In our case, it was actually um we had to change, or we moved out of one sales sales team, which happened to be the sales team we were handing over our leads. So we need to figure out like, oh, okay, well, let's figure out like um a new way of routing and figuring out when and how we do handover leads, and what do we kind of like hand over for marketing, for instance. Um, so that's that's a little bit of a fire, but anyways, it's something that we can solve, like peace of mind, let's focus on figuring it out. SAP, let's say we have three days, and the team or the resources or the hours that we are focusing on building this long term, they continue. We need it still tomorrow.

Michael Hartmann: 29:03

Yeah. So we have a deadline. So in my so when I've led teams, I'm with you, right? And and sometimes it's I'm not sure early in my career I would have had the enough breadth of knowledge and experience to be able to, in the moment on the fly, evaluate is this something that really needs to be addressed now, or you know, you know, can we solve an immediate problem and then the bigger long longer term fix? How how do you because the reason I bring this up is I I've also had teams come to me where I go, something's come in unexpected, we all have to jump, and then um they get frustrated over one of two, sometimes both things, right? One is, you know, why is this all like how does this keep happening, right? Why are we getting these fire drills? How can we stop that? The other is I've committed to a longer-term project, and now this is impacting my ability to execute. How do I, you know, what's good because then it becomes a reflection on them. It may have an impact on their compensation, but how do how do you I I I guess I've kind of I don't even know that I've written it down. I guess I have a little bit of a mental model about how I think about the prioritization and that kind of stuff happens and how to evaluate it, but what's your take?

Adele Kurki: 30:17

Well, of course, it comes back to then what is the like what is the fire? Um I always go back in my chair because always when you are like everything is urgent, everything's fire, it actually means that you need to calm down. Yeah. Um what is the actual business impact? Uh, who is driving it? Is this urgency for a person, for a certain team, or is it actually like a business-wide impact? And if you were to create or solve the problem from the scratch, sometimes you don't have you to are given like, oh, this is urgent, you need to do this. I always challenge my team to really think like, okay, what is the problem we solve? Okay, if we decide that this is, you know, this has actually quite a big business impact, what is the best way to solve it? Okay. Uh what is the sufficient way? It doesn't have to be perfect, especially if it's like uh a short term, like, okay, hey, actually, we need to just like preach it through how much time we dedicate for it compared to the other things that are on our table.

Michael Hartmann: 31:26

Yeah.

Adele Kurki: 31:27

So that's that's where we are coming um usually.

Michael Hartmann: 31:31

Yeah, I think I I think about it. We'll take a like a system down kind of issue or a break-in integration, something like that. I think what what gets mixed together sometimes is uh not only we've got to immediately fix that, and at the same time we have to figure out why it happened. And one of the simple things I try to do is like separate that. Let's solve the immediate problem, then let's go fix separately in a in a less you know urgent thing. Let's go try to understand how that happened and how can we minimize the chance it happens again.

Adele Kurki: 32:06

Yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 32:06

Right.

Adele Kurki: 32:07

Absolutely. Uh, of course, in in all these roles, it's really important to understand the root cause, because otherwise it it can be it can be sometimes actually wider, like oops, uh, luckily the like result was this small fire, because it could have been massive something else. Um so definitely that's that's really important. And that's actually something that we expect quite proactively, also. If you know it's something it's really good to check if it's if it doesn't require too much to just like deep dive or like check what is the root cause, even if we wouldn't fix that fire immediately.

Michael Hartmann: 32:42

Yeah, so another um I think we've hinted at this a little bit. There's this idea of, I think you even used the word transparency at one point. Like how um and communication, like how important is it, do you think, for marketing apps teams to be both transparent about the capacity, what's on the roadmap, and communicating that well, um, as opposed to um kind of holding back and just focus like I mean it's it becomes easy to be discounted and focus just focus on the the urgent things that are right in front of you.

Adele Kurki: 33:18

Well, honestly, honestly, and what we're trying to do here is that you as a marketing operations leader and you as a marketing operations team want to be a strategic partner instead of you know help desk or ticket mastering function. And the first thing in order to change that, especially if you are in the situation that you figure out, like, ah, oops, you're listening to this and you're like, ah, well, my Jira is full and it's actually like everyday fire only.

Michael Hartmann: 33:54

Yeah.

Adele Kurki: 33:55

How you start doing the change is to bring this transparency. What is the function doing? Honestly, it seems to be very cryptic sometimes and really hard to understand. But bringing it visible is really important. And how do you do it is to first bring, like, okay, this is my roadmap. This is kind of like the first level of expectations. I think these are expected to happen. I am committing to these things, and my team is committed to these things, and also sometimes this is why we are not able to deliver everything that you're bringing to our backlog. And we have to practice no. Um, when we are thinking about the transparency, it's these communication elements, this human to human, which need to happen in like manager to manager, manager to organization, team to organization. Your team has to understand also the roadmap. Why did we choose these elements? Why are they important? You are okay to say no if things are not part of the roadmap. And also, this roadmap lives. Yeah. Like if we have these uh fires, like we are all all okay to drop also something as long as we communicate to the stakeholders and the organization what's happening. Um, another interesting thing which I find more like more and more important, especially for roles that are working in very like operative level, where it is sometimes hard. Like, hey, I'm actually doing only admin work. Like my job is to ensure that you know everything goes fine and it's invisible. Um, is to plan together how can we bring this visibility to those roles. Um, is it then kind of like bringing them to the kind of like function meetings or like find the cross partners, but also technical transparency. Ensure that everything that is done is hey, this is visible to sales, yeah. This is visible to the product. We are actually connecting the dots. Um that is really, really important that it's not only about these humans and the text and their being in the meetings, it's also they're visible in the technical execution. Who did what? Everything is transparent.

Michael Hartmann: 36:09

I I love that you brought up the idea of being transparent if you're a leader, being transparent with your team. Because I think it's a mistake I made probably early in my career as a as a people leader, and I see others do, is they try to in the in the name of trying to shield their team from the politics or whatever, they they don't address the questions the team will have, like if things start shifting, you know, we've got this roadmap, but we're getting into you know, we're in getting like how like it's really important for me at least. I want a culture where I'm like I'm gonna share as much as I can, right? And I you know, be honest when I can't about stuff. Yeah, because I think it's um that if if you don't do that, people start to ask questions about why did direction go this way or that way, what's my role, right? Am I able to push back all those kinds of things? Um, because what I've had I've had to do literally at times is like do I just sort of describe those situations, right? We had a roadmap, big project stuff we're working on, and something came up and it sidetracked us for a longer time than we had hoped, and it was gonna impact that timeline for the the big project. And I've had to say, like, this is why, especially if it was me, like I made the decision that we had to do that. Like, I will be like, I'm gonna own that, right? I'm not gonna hold you accountable for change, right? As long as you were doing things as appropriate. But I think I I I would be as transparent as I could about the why.

Adele Kurki: 37:48

Absolutely. And especially if you want your team to be also a proactive problem solver, if you want them to, you know, feel comfortable on bringing like, hey, I know it is anonymous, like something off, or you want them to solve independently and grow and keep the curiosity and something. In order for them to solve the business problems, they need to understand what's happening in the business. It's uh being the transparent on what's happening, yeah, why things are happening, why things are not happening. Um, and then also building that business acumen constantly. Like this is the way the business works in our industry, in our car, like, you know, type of a business, um, so that they can work independently, especially when you're working in global companies, because then there is this time zone things and different stakeholders you want that your team is speaking the same language because nothing is more uncomfortable that everybody are a little bit confused.

Michael Hartmann: 38:49

Yes. Yeah.

Adele Kurki: 38:51

And and you are then kind of like the operational center which is supposed to tell the truth. Yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 38:55

Well, and worse, no, everyone thinks they're on the same page, but they're actually not.

Adele Kurki: 39:00

Oh, yeah. And that's that's the worst. And that's why uh these kind of like frameworks, especially in global environments, works well. Like, okay, roadmap, always up to date. Better if it's living somewhere, um, also as some kind of like living element such as Jira.

Michael Hartmann: 39:15

Yeah.

Adele Kurki: 39:15

In Epics, you can put epic, like epics for development projects. Here we go. But it actually kind of like creates some sort of transparency and living elements in a way, which helps also stakeholders then to go independently, let's say in Apex time zone to review, like, okay, hey, how was my project? Or I think I did drop a ball. What is the status of it?

Michael Hartmann: 39:39

Right, yeah, yeah.

Adele Kurki: 39:40

Type of a thing.

Michael Hartmann: 39:41

Yeah, so you hinted at agile stuff, and I feel like we have I'm trying to remember, like, this is the downside of not having talked to you in so long, but uh I think maybe we had a slightly different uh opinion or point of view about where agile fits in and where it doesn't. Because I to me it feels like it works really well, generally speaking, for like the the regular recurring repeatable stuff, tickets, if you will, and maybe on some projects stuff. Oh, there feels like there I also like personally I think there's work that doesn't really match that. Like, which how do you do you guys use agile for what you do? Is it like universal? What do you like? How do you think about it?

Adele Kurki: 40:24

Well, I think we don't like use the official agile uh framework that's it. But we have like agile elements. Right. Um, I do like frameworks. I think it's kind of like for every operational person at some moment of time, you have to certain level of control freakness. Um, but we, for instance, work on on targets and uh roadmaps and Jiraports to ensure that we have a certain level of execution and technical um transparency, meaning now technical with not in the systems, but in this kind of like ticketing system to have um documented communications and stakeholder management and then this global visibility. Um we loop that back to our kind of like living roadmap. So we have you know the classic um document that you can showcase in different environments and share, but then we also try to keep it livable and actionable in Jira uh in visual manner so that we can also track hey, are our sprints actually supporting us to finish our goals? Do we see blockers? Should we re-adjust? Were we too ambitious or too like less ambitious that we wanted? Um so for that, the agile works. Maybe the other, like that's maybe the less agile part as such. Um, but it is a tool that helps us to monitor and understand in two weeks' prints if we're going to the right direction, and that we are like all controlling our deliveries. Yeah. Um, I said it is really easy to go to the firefighting mode. Uh, the other thing that we already touch based is this um percentage like, okay, in moments of crisis, you might have 50-50 development firefighting, 70-30. You know, have this percentage conversation, like, hey, this week, where are you focusing today? What are your key priorities in these swim lanes? Okay, we have a special week coming ahead. Yeah, we might need to change a little bit. Yeah, yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 42:26

Well, and that gets, I mean, I I think that's a really good, like I want I want people listening or watching to miss this, right? This idea, like the goal is 80-20, 70-30, split between run the business, change the business, or whatever that number is. But that's a goal, like any given week, right? You may have to adjust because you've got a time-sensitive campaign or event, or someone's gonna be on vacation, right? And so that you have to be something breaks adaptable to shift, right? Yeah, something breaks. Um, so it's interesting because as I was thinking about you talking about agile, um, because I like so total transparency. I'm I'm I've used lots of different methodologies, I've built methodologies, and I understand conceptually, I like the idea of agile. Um, but I find with almost all methodologies is that people are super hard at core advocates. Generally, there's a lot of them who use it as a very rigid structure as opposed to a tool to help them, right? And taking advantage of the things that make sense and don't make sense for a given thing. That's probably my biggest, but also I just I was it just hit me as you were just talking about because you brought up Jira. And I think I what I try in the really hard to separate the tool that you're using for it from the methodology. And I think I've used Jira, I've used several other project management tools, and I am a believer in having that, right? Because I think to your point, like one of the things it helps you uncover if you don't already have a way of doing is the the two important things to understand what you can actually deliver, which is how much work is coming at you or you have on your team's plate, and how much capacity do you actually have that still allows for maybe a little bit of development time, time off, whether it's sick, vacation, holiday, whatever. Um, and if you if you don't have a way of doing that, you're gonna be you're gonna get yourself in a lot of trouble because you just take especially if you're not comfortable pushing back, go like you're just gonna say keep saying yes, because I think a lot of people in ops um want to want to help. You know, absolutely, and it's hard to say no.

Adele Kurki: 44:45

And something that you want to be mindful, like I think there are two additional elements why I like keeping this kind of ticketing system, whatever it is, like asana van de blah blah. Um first is actually you get really good data on enablement needs. There are a ton of tickets that come like actually these guys that just don't know how to do their work. Like, this is not a bob's task. Or hey, we actually see a pattern that we for some reason none of the team or we didn't have a flagging system, there is a buck somewhere. This is actually something that shows that there is a buck.

Michael Hartmann: 45:22

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adele Kurki: 45:24

Um the other thing that helps is that yeah, the other thing is that if you have a global team, you and also like the bigger the team, um at some moment of time when you have all these stakeholders all around the world, it might be really hard to understand what is actually. Actually, the workloads that come to the team. And especially if you have a lot of ambitious junior roles, as you mentioned about this kind of like people pleasing, if I translate it that way. Yeah. It you don't want to burn them out. You want to ensure that the curiosity is there, the coachability is there, the mind is sharp. And you're providing the growth by walking through, for instance, time to time, these conversations on like, not only on the sprints, but for instance, in your one-to-one, like, hey, actually, like we saw these tickets coming, like, ignore. We'll solve them. Or we kind of like, or hey, your workload has increased uh 25%. Let's open it up. What is kind of like making it busy? Okay, is it hindering your development targets? Um you know, or there's the hidden cue.

Michael Hartmann: 46:44

Yeah.

Adele Kurki: 46:47

Yeah, exactly. So it it it works kind of like it works really well as a tool um also for these kind of purposes.

Michael Hartmann: 46:56

Yeah, so like you're hinting at maybe this is where we can wrap up, is you're hinting at using that as a tool to help with um development and growth for teams, right? Absolutely. So do you like how do you think about that? Like, how important is that to you?

Adele Kurki: 47:15

Um well, the the growth in general, if we if we jump to that direction, um all operational roles are quite high demanding. Like it's not that easy any like anymore to enter to the roles because it's not like I'm afraid, right? Exactly. Uh and it can be very overwhelming because all like you have a bunch of stakeholders, especially when coming into these international companies, like you have all the stakeholders, they're demanding hundreds of millions of stuff, they don't even know what they're demanding. And uh you then try to figure out, first of all, like run and understand what are the new ways of doing things, what is the smartest way of doing things? Okay, there are no benchmarks. How can I be smart at solving this problem in scale? And for that reason, you need to be able to keep that curiosity, that kind of like space for thinking straight, um, and actually solve the problem the stakeholder couldn't even ask. And better if you are able to solve it before. So, for that reason, I really, really, really want to invest in growing, mentoring, supporting uh the team members, both expanding their, you know, technical ability and keeps the space to learn, but especially keep their you know headspace healthy. Yeah, and it's so easy. Whenever it is in my powers, of course.

Michael Hartmann: 48:45

Yeah, right, right. Well, and also, I mean, the the one thing I would add if I was in your sh to your statement is at some point that's the person's responsibility to take advantage of it. Like you can create you can create the space and time, but you can't make them do it, and if they choose not to, that's on them.

Adele Kurki: 49:06

Yeah, absolutely. But I think it's it's really important to be able to build that space and protect the space. Is it then transparency, the systems, the roadmaps, yeah, especially in moments of change when it is overwhelming in multiple fronts, um and especially if you're in in more junior roles?

Michael Hartmann: 49:28

Yeah. I mean, I I I've had people on teams who I remember one who was pursuing an MBA, and I just we just we we were very honest and direct with each other, you know, about how that would look, you know, and what commitments we still had to make um on the occasion when that person needed to leave early or you know, do a tr, you know, some sort of project or whatever. We just we worked it out. And but I think it ultimately um it benefited that person and it benefited the organization for that person. Like so giving them the ability, they became more loyal, they were like willing to put in extra work and um all these things, so and did was good at what uh at the work. So anyway, um we've covered a lot of ground here, Adele.

Adele Kurki: 50:22

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for a great conversation.

Michael Hartmann: 50:25

That's great. Um, so if people want to continue maybe one of these threads or something, or follow what you're you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that?

Adele Kurki: 50:34

Well, I'm in LinkedIn. Uh, so you can find with me, you can find me with my name, so Adele Kurki. Um, feel free to reach out. I'm super, super happy to continue the conversation on any of these topics we cover it today, these calls.

Michael Hartmann: 50:49

Yeah, we've we we did cover a lot of ground. We hoped hopscotched a bit. Well, Adele, thank you so much for joining, especially late. I do know I it's not easy. I appreciate that. So thank you. Uh thanks to our uh listeners and supporters and audience out there. We always appreciate that. Um, if you have ideas for topics or guests, or want to be a guest, do like Adele did and reach out, and we'd be happy to get the ball rolling. Till next time. Bye, everybody. Bye.