Hey! 👋 

I hope you’re doing well! It’s been a wildly busy fall season for me — I just got back from Japan a few days ago, it was a wonderful trip! I highly recommend it if you have the opportunity to go! 🗼🍵 

This edition’s topic is my AI learning roadmap…how I plan to educate myself on AI in GTM operations, and how you can follow along or copy and create your own roadmap.

So many people are telling you to learn AI yesterday, but not many places are telling you how. This is my solution for that!

Before we dive into the main content, please check out a quick word from our sponsors, who are kind enough to support the creation of this free-to-you MOPs content 💖:

Are you caught in the onslaught of ticket intake and prioritization? In my opinion, campaign ops is one of the harder roles within MOPs, because everything is almost always a rush order. 😅 I am a tiny team at the moment, so I created a Zapier Agent to help me automate Slack request judgement, ticket creation, and escalation…here’s the template (and many more) that you can take and copy, if you want to adjust it for your team to use! 🤖

The Knak team has been working on some really exciting AI-related innovations for email. I got a sneak peek last week and loved it — if you want to see the future of B2B email marketing innovation, join their live event today at 10am PST! You’ll hear from me, Darrell Alfonso, Dave Gerhardt, and more! Register here.

Okay, back to the AI learning! 👨‍🎓

📖 Check out my AI learning roadmap for MOPs.✨

Here are some key takeaways, if you don’t want to go through the whole guide right now and just want a summary of my approach:

1. Start With Foundations

Begin by leveling up your core understanding: how AI models work, how prompting shapes output, and how automations + agents interact. This is the base layer that makes everything else easier. Do NOT jump into the most advanced use cases first…you’ll get frustrated. 😅 

2. Learn the Tooling That Powers Modern Automations

Move through the major AI execution layers in whichever order is most relevant to you:

• Zapier MCP → How AI gets tools, runs commands, and calls APIs

• Zapier Agents → How to build autonomous workflows with guardrails + memory

• Other MCP Servers → Coding, files, browser control, SQL, documentation, and more

• ChatGPT Agents → Tool-based agents inside ChatGPT with structured plans

• Claude → Long-context reasoning, structured workflows, large-scale analysis

• Google Gemini → Multimodal understanding (video, documents, Workspace)

• Lovable → Turn prompts into real internal tools and apps

• HubSpot AI → Use AI inside your CRM for routing, scoring, email drafting

• Clay AI → Scale enrichment, scoring, reasoning, and GTM intelligence

If you’re struggling to figure out where to focus first, look at your company’s current tech stack and start there.

3. Build Real Portfolio Projects as You Learn

The roadmap includes 11 real builds that turn learning into actual results you can show off to your manager or during an interview (or even just for yourself!):

• Smart lead scoring

• Smart lead qualification

• Account sentiment bot

• Deal review bot

• UTM planner

• AI social media agent

• Email responder bot

• Form prioritization bot

Each project teaches you how to use AI in a different aspect of marketing ops or revenue ops.

4. Choose a Specialization Based on Where You Want Your Career to Go

At the end, the roadmap branches into three different professional paths:

RevOps Engineer

AI-driven GTM systems (routing, scoring, forecasting, alerts, hygiene).
You focus on CRM logic, process automation, and pipeline health.

GTM Engineer

Multi-agent orchestration across your whole stack (MCP servers, Agents, APIs).
You automate end-to-end workflows that normally require human teams.

AI Product Builder

You build real tools and internal apps (Lovable, React, APIs, databases).
You focus on reusable products powered by AI + modern frameworks.

Each path ends with a description of what “mastery” looks like so you can self-assess and track progress. That being said, you don’t have to stick to these personas…you could just be a marketing ops manager who is now better at AI than yesterday. 🙂 

As a last note: there are tons of free resources out there, you don’t have to jump right into paid courses. Check out the links I have or search YouTube, ChatGPT, Google to see what you can find!

Would love to hear any feedback or additions I should make! 🫶

I used to go a little nuts having to manage LeanData — it’s bad enough that it allows you to create the most massive, over-complex routing spaghetti workflows…but then I remember having to daisy-chain them together because each workflow could only work on an object at a time. Not to mention, you could only route records once they were created in CRM, which is too late. 🫠 Want to learn more about the similarities and differences between Default and LeanData? Check out how Default and LeanData stack up here.

What I’m up to/what I’m studying 💭

Is it already December? I am rushing to place Christmas orders, to be honest. 😅 

I am actually working through my AI learnings btw.

I am also working on some content for my YouTube channel that I’m hoping to launch early next year…some folks have been requesting walk-throughs of tactical items like how to set up a lead lifecycle in HubSpot, so I’ll be focusing on content like that first! I’m also planning on some Zapier and Clay advanced AI use case content. If that excites you, you can subscribe early here! ▶️ 

Dear Sara ✍️

New to marketing operations? On a team of one at your company? Shy/introverted? Wish you could ask a question to an experienced marketing operations professional, without them knowing who you are? Here’s your chance! Submit an anonymous question to me here and I’ll answer a new question in every issue.

Here’s my answer to a question from last week:

You definitely are not alone! Ops is a notoriously stressful role, and many orgs simply are not supportive of us.

A few words of advice as you look for a new role:

1. Whether the CMO/CRO/CEO understands ops makes a big difference This has honestly become my #1 criteria for any role. If whoever funds your org “doesn’t believe in” ops, you are unwillingly assigned a second full time role: convincing leadership to properly fund or care about your team. If you let the lack of belief fester, you’re destined to end up laid off or having budgets frozen in perpetuity.

2. If you can find a role with good funding and support, you can buy your way out of a lot of causes of burnout. You can invest in campaign ops – whether it be purchasing agency support, or buying a tool like Knak to help you manage all of the email and landing page requests…you finally have a release valve. You can also take the time to set up systems, like new-request systems, so you can better manage spikes in requests and prioritization (lack of prioritization is a HUGE determinator of burnout IME).

3. Make sure the leadership at your new org has the ability to make a decision relatively quickly…as well as being willing to cut projects or initiatives that don’t make sense anymore. One of the worst situations you can get into within ops is working for a leader who can’t prioritize effectively or who doesn’t know how to say no. You’ll just end up feeling the pressure of trying to take on everything, and the worst part...eventually you’ll hit a limit, and when you can’t deliver for every request, that type of leader typically throws YOU under the bus. 😬

4. Figure out what sparks joy for you. Sounds cheesy, I know…but this is important. I did my own sparking-joy-audit and found that I really do NOT like campaign operations, so I looked to avoid it in my next role. This makes a difference in my day to day, as I get to focus on tasks that energize me, not drain me. 🙂

Btw, it’s okay to decide you want to do something else! I know folks who have moved away from tech roles because of the chaos of the tech market, and they are happier in a more stable job, even if it makes less money. Same goes for ops – if it doesn’t make you happy, it’s important to be willing to try new things. Sometimes it takes a few weeks of a career break to figure out what you really want.

I hope this helps, and good luck!

Meme of the week 🖼️

Interesting martech of the week ⚙️

Goldcast - webinar + video content platform

I had really hoped that Zoom would steal a lot of the webinar market from ON24 (my arch nemesis 🤣), but that….didn’t really work out. 🫠

Now, I see Goldcast as the winner in the virtual events/video marketing space…their events tool is easy to use from both a host and attendee point of view, and they continue to innovate with better editors and ways to repurpose your live event content. We’re currently onboarding Goldcast at Vector. 😍 

To be honest, I’m probably downplaying them, they have so much cool functionality that I just don’t see in the other platforms. If you’re tired of ON24, I’d give them a look to see if it could be a match.

( reminder: this section is not sponsored — I mean, I only endorse tools I love anyways, I would never steer y’all wrong, BUT just want to be transparent on the relationship I have with the vendors in this section regardless 🙂 )

If you have a moment, will you let me know if you enjoyed this edition of the newsletter? Thank you!

Thanks for reading,

❤️ Sara