With Kimi Corrigan, Director of Marketing Operations & Strategy at Wiz
One of the fastest ways to grow your career in Marketing Ops is to join a startup like Kimi Corrigan before she joined Wiz. You’ll naturally consider new and disruptive technology, best practices to grow a team, and how to successfully merge outside talent in the case of acquisition.
Kimi Corrigan is the Director of Marketing Operations & Strategy at Wiz. She is a Marketo champion alumni, a certified Marketo expert and inaugural member of Marketo's fearless 50 marketing leaders.
What was your journey into Marketing Ops and becoming part of the inaugural Marketo 50?
When I started my professional career, my first role was at a small company. When I learned how to run a Salesforce report in that company at the time, they had a tool called Silverpop.
I thought, “Oh, I really like this part of my job.” It was maybe 10% of what I spent my time doing. I knew the next role I wanted to go into. I wanted it to be more of my job.
It was 50% of my next job, where I started using Marketo. I had gotten to know other users and the community was sort of coming up together. Being in on the ground floor with it like that led to growing into the inaugural Marketo 50.
When I joined Duo Security as their first Marketing Ops hire I got to build out the team and that function. If you want to get into Marketing Ops, joining a startup like I did at Duo Security is a good way to do it.
What do you do when you inherit a tech stack and various processes that are tied to that?
Needing to incorporate or learn a new tech stack can happen in many different ways. It may be like when Duo Security was bought out by Cisco.
I spent a lot of time with another Marketing Ops leader figuring out how we're moving into one Salesforce instance together. That means we have two different automation systems. You need to consider the technology in each instance.
The most important thing is to think about the people that you have. Technical debt is a real thing. It’s something you should consider when thinking about which tool to use and how painful it will be to remove things, and use your preferred tech.
The people that are using that technology should be a big part of the decision of what to keep and what to get rid of. Sure, not everyone stays everywhere forever, but the team is really important. Try to remove the emotional attachment to the technology. Think about how it affects the people who actually understand the business, the systems, and the nuance. Empathy goes a long way in this process.
How does being in a technical role in Marketing Ops prevent the transition from execution to leadership?
A lot of people get caught up in that workhorse mentality of Marketing Ops. There's a lot of work to be done. Of course we need people to get all of the manual work done.
I think women specifically have trouble letting go of that to-do list. There’s that high you get when it’s all checked off. I had to mentally realign who I was when I brought a new hire on board and started delegating more tasks to her.
One of my team was out last month for a week and we source and she's the person that does all of our day-to-day requests. We split up her work and I took some of the list processing. When I processed a few event lists I felt that high of, “I have something to do. And I did them and they're done.”
You have to push past that growth period where you're questioning what value you bring if you’re not checking off lists. You’re doing other things that have a different path to feeling that ‘completion’ feeling.
