Managing complex teams: A learning experience around building smart teams

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Is my absolute pleasure, to introduce the first keynote, of DevOps Dream in today.

We are gonna be joined by the Marvelous Sophie Crossby.

So Sophie Crosby has an illustrious career and is gonna be telling us about managing complex teams.

Sophie was senior vice president of products, for marketing cloud, in the UK. So it is a pleasure to have her here and sharing her wisdom with us about managing those teams, Sophie, It is all yours. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay.

Yeah, I was I was, senior vice president for outbound product at Marketing Cloud. If I'd actually had real senior vice president of marketing at Marketing Cloud, I might have fixed a few things time zones, and some of the deployment package manager type things. Okay. Let's move on.

So this is me. I'm Sophie Crosby, founder of Paso Consulting, we create memorable and shareable content and ideas to help tech companies connect with largely marketing leaders because, you know, we need to teach them right about technology. I'm marketer. I've had to learn a lot in my life. So I love thinking about business change, which is driven by technology and data, and my personal mission is to inspire marketing particularly on the why, the what, and the how of data transformation to drive better marketing and customer experience.

So I'm very excited to be here with you today, and I'm very grateful to Rob Powell, who's sitting at the back there, hello, Rob, DevOps evangelistic gear set, for inviting me. He's probably feeling a little bit nervous now in case I completely can I swear?

Okay. In case I completely fuck this up, Okay.

And I'm very nervous because, frankly, what on earth can a marketer like me tell a room full of dev ops experts like you, so let's see, shall we? Hopefully at least I'll be a bit of light relief before you get into detailed stuff about, you know, running packages and things like that.

So I'm gonna share my, experience in managing complex teams, actually at Ticketmaster, the job before Salesforce, different kind of gig.

Where I was on the other side of the fence before we start a little bit, me, more about my favorite subject, me, but about my background in marketing and technologies because it's kind of fun. My career can be summed up largely music, data people. So that's fun, right? If it's not fun, by the way, if you're having a miserable time at work, find another got another gig, really. It's just life is too short to be miserable. Just wanted to say that.

Technology and specifically the ability to store process handle action data with increasing speed has really been the hallmark of the sort of latter half of my career.

But before that, I started in music, and, my first job was whisper it in EMI at nineteen ninety three, it wasn't my first job. That is what I'm saying, whisper, it wasn't my first job in nineteen ninety three EMI, but I was the only person with a computer on my desk on the fifth floor. And, I lied, and I said I knew WordStar. So I spent most of the most of the day with a huge book on my on my lap underneath the desk to work out how to do things.

Anyway, then I worked at chrysalis, v two, Sony, at v two, I worked with a lotus notes developer. Remember lotus notes anybody or nobody quite old enough, okay, to create a an international workflow process to manufacture and release records in different regions and markets.

I tell you what I learned. Understanding the business aim is one thing.

Building the software and the tech technology capability is another, but bringing people along with you across markets, driving adoption that's the hard part. And I think what's interesting in this room is you're all about operationalizing really interesting and transformative technology for your companies, but they only get the benefit if not only you can operate it, but operationalize means people use it. Right? So you're at that crux that interface I think of business technology and the outcomes that they seek.

Right? So very interesting. So V2 and Sony were lots fun. I was ended up being a marketing product manager for UK marketing manager and an international marketing manager for a real real mix of, artists.

Leonard, I did a Leonard Cohen album, ten songs, great album, actually Johnny Cash album David Bowie, the Headen album, system of a down, very cool toxicity, if you're into that sort of thing, great album, Mercury Rev of my favorite bands and Ricky Martin with sound loaded. Get loaded with Ricky Martin. So that was kind of fun. So I was a marketing manager.

And largely, don't want to downplay it too much, but it was kind of hat's posters stickers and knickers, you know, it was the old days. Excuse me?

Digital marketing was a bit out there.

So I then spent fifteen years of my career at Clear Channel Live Nation and Ticketmaster really moving my gaze to retail and selling tickets for Live Events and Marketing for that.

We got very excited in late two thousand and five. We built about forty websites at Clear Channel for different festival websites. We built our own festival CMS, Vido, festival information data organizer had a little dog as the logo.

And, In late two thousand and five, we got very excited. We were gonna build a video upload system for fans of the heavy metal festival download to upload their video content and do stuff and then YouTube launched. And we went, oh, oh, well, we'll just use a plug in for that, which shows you that in tech as in live timing, is everything. But it also maybe highlights this build versus buy argument, you know, because a lot of what you're doing is your company bought in technology and you're figuring out how to to make it sing within your company and on your data in in your teams.

Okay.

Think enough about that. In a little while, I'm gonna talk about my time at Ticketmaster, but most recently as SVP for outbound product for Marketing Cloud at Salesforce, I met hundreds of leaders in business who were really struggling.

They were struggling to get the very best out of the investments that they had made in their technology. Not just Salesforce, but in all sorts of things. And I think again, this is where, you know, you sit in the in the crucible of that kind of crossroads are getting the best out of our tech investments.

So and I think I've learned that whilst silos of teams and divisions and regions are a really important way for or big organizations to kind of box up and control their organization and measure and manage them. The very best organizations have really great ways for teams to collaborate and work cross functionally. People in Linchpin leadership roles who can do that, to work non partisan, to deliver the big ticket vision items. And again, I think that speaks to DevOps in many ways.

Okay. That's that bit. That's me. I did go bang on a bit. It was kind of fun, right?

There's a little bit of rock and roll in there. I didn't talk about any of the really bad stuff. Ask me later. What's going on?

What's going on right now?

If I can make the clicker work, something will. So dev ops.

I was thinking about this all week. I was like, oh my god, there were dev ops. They're all super clever. They know stuff I do. They can look at rows of code and understand it. I can't.

For me, you guys sit at the heart of the business that using new technology to innovate. So I've said that And I think with Salesforce's mantra of clicks not code, a non technical person might go, well, how hard? How can that be? What you do?

So click's not code? So I But for any of us and all of us living in the real world, it's, you know, the new users, the new functionality, the fields, the markets, teams, the necessary change controls is onboarding new data sources, testing automations, deploying new features, getting use of feedback, and making shit work and getting people to use that shit. Right? It's huge.

It's huge. Simply put DevOps is incredibly important for every company who wants to thrive even I suggest to survive moving forward. So you guys are it. You're at the center of it all.

Okay.

More data all the time. Every team across the business is facing a proliferation of data, customer supply chain, manufacturing workforce, whatever it is. People have now got passes that check them in and out of the building, you know, that post COVID tell them what toilet they're allowed to use, you know, things like that. Like, there's crazy shit going on. The amounts of data are mad.

A business has become more technical every year. And I think that teams want to use tools that they can use without relying on tech teams to help them literally every day do their work.

I met with some huge companies when I was at Salesforce who were complaining to me that Mark marketing card doesn't do what it's meant to, and then I would find out that they were going to their tech team and asking them, giving them the parameters to segment an audience and then waiting for two weeks for that audience to come back. And then they were loading that in as a singular file. And I was like, oh my god. You know, you're driving the Ferrari with a you're putting turnips in the can, and you're you're you're pulling it with a donkey. Right? Like, you can't you're not using the car, right, the way it should.

And I think that's really difficult. And what we see is that especially marketing leaders buy into the vision of doing things, you know, amazing things, and they have increasingly over the last ten years been buying a lot of tech technology tools but maybe not really able to orchestrate them.

I think meanwhile, CTOs and CIOs are looking to control. Right? They want to retake the reins of all of these technology components. They want to orchestrate these technology top technology components that really drive the business, you know, cloud ops, cloud, cloud tech, Martech, process automation, real time data, and I think that this will only work when those technology and IT functions are really able to work cross functionally with the with the business and with teams in the business that they serve. And again, I think DevOps sits at the heart of that. I'm a really strong believer, basically in collaboration, shared KPIs, shared roadmap, alignment, shared resourcing, and priorities.

I think, unfortunately, the way big companies are set up is that, teams and divisions are almost warring with each other for budget and so that makes that quite difficult. We're not used to that. It's quite a competitive sort of landscape.

Anyway, the pressure is on.

But the most, a few song titles hidden in my, yeah, in my thing. So if you if you recognize them, come and tell me, some of them are more obvious than others.

So the pressure is on, everybody's being asked to do more with less, including you.

And I think there are three reasons companies invest in technology sell more, do it more efficiently, and mitigate risk. I'm trying to see how I'm doing for time. Okay.

There's no way of avoiding the economic downturn that's coming. I mean, it's coming. Right? Like, I'm not gonna go into that because, like, it's a downer.

It's a total downer. But the four horsemen of the apocalypse are racing over the horizon. The skies are dark with the wings of pigeons coming home to roost, Brexit, and lots of other things beside. Right?

So you are gonna have to do more with less. But again, the promise of technology and the technologies that you work is for companies be able to do just that.

So as I said, I keep saying it, what you do is very important.

It's to get more out of what you've already invested in tech to get the return on investment. We seek. What marketers want. It's all about me.

I told you this presentation was all about me. It okay so far? You're enjoying it. Is it okay?

Yeah. Kind of engaging. Because there's more technical stuff later on for you to get your chops into. I'm just I'm the warmer pack.

Not the flapper, the warmer pang.

Okay. What marketers want? I've got a completely blank sheet here. So let's move on.

This is the Salesforce Marketing lady. I don't know if they're using her anymore, but I thought I'd use her just for a bit of nostalgia. She was on everything, wasn't she? She's so nice as I really want meet her and hang out with her because I feel I know her. I've done so many presentations with the Salesbosmart. I'm happy lady in a stripy shirt.

Marketers are thinking about a lot of things. I know you think it's all, like dilbert says it's all liquor and guessing, and There there is a lot of guessing in marketing. There is because, you know, a market has got data in, you know, think about attribution. You know, you know, which was the drink that got me that gave me the hangover this morning.

Right? Which was the drink last night that gave me the the hangover this morning. That's attribution. It the champagne at the start?

Was it the port at the end? Was it the beer and wine in the middle? I don't know all of them. Right?

But that's the thing in marketing, you want to be able to attribute, but everybody over attributes, right? Because, on on digital advertising, it's, you'll attribute, a purchase within three weeks of having seen the advert, you know, but I might have also opened the email. So everybody's saying, oh, you know, that sale is conversion comes from this email or that ad virtual this thing like the other thing. Really hard for marketers to do much more than guess work, actually, especially when they tend not to have technical teams to help them manage and figure out this stuff. And they've got a lot on their mind, right? It's their job to to make sure to see how your company shows up in the world. It's their it's their job to make sure that the right messages gets the right people at the right time.

It's their job in an increasingly difficult world to manage costs and return on investment. Customer acquisition costs are utterly spiraling. I mean, for digital marketing is like two point two times what it was about five years ago. It's insane, and they're losing third party cookie information.

Right? So it's all going off. There's a lot going on. I haven't put affiliates down here.

I haven't put and and what's keeping her up at night now is I meant to be using AI to be a better person and do everything better. You know, like I'm doing all of this and I've gotta do that too.

But I think mostly they're concerned about data and how they can get actionable data in their hands so that they can do the marketing that they want and need to do.

My bad cookie, I just, talked about this. Google have been kicking it into the long grass for ages.

They keep kicking it down the road because about eighty percent, of course, if their revenues come from advertising, so you know, it's a big one. Flocks didn't fly, ledges didn't fly.

So we're still waiting. I can't remember. Does anybody know what the date is when they're definitively meant to go according to has been changed four times already. Is it next year sometime?

Third party cookies. Many marketers are using third party cookie data if they still have it on their DMP, and it is disappearing. It's leaving, but they're using that to help them stitch together and understand audiences and particularly to make better sense online advertising spend. You know, once we saw, I took on crux at Ticketmaster and the the com the companies that used trucks, the DMP that then became Salesforce.

What was it called? What's called when they on sales. I'll remember. Before the end, I'll remember I've had a senior moment there. But companies that use third party cookies are telling to see about a thirty percent improvement on their digital advertising spend, right? So what they're gonna lose? And when you spend thirty billion, if you're diageo on advertising, that's a big hit.

In terms of your advertising effectiveness, which is why over the last three to five years, you've seen lots of companies saying twenty percent off if you give us your email, right, they are to build their first party datasets.

Okay.

So, there's, you know, marked they've got lots of different datasets. Often, they've gone off and got hootsuite or sprout or little bits and pieces, and they've kind of deployed them themselves. Some of them, they've had help from their technology team. Some of it, they've done it themselves, and they've got customer data across all of this.

This is just a marketing stack. I literally picked it off the stackies. Right? I mean, I was it just had a couple of Salesforce.

Clouds in.

So apologies to whoever that was. Bottom line is Salesforce Marketing Cloud themselves. The Salesforce state of marketing report predicted that by twenty twenty five marketers would be using up to forty five data sources on average, which is kind of insane. Right? I mean, that's not their gig, right? Marketers really, but it is increasingly thinking about complex teams.

So with so many different data sources and dozens of tools, are facing an identity crisis, not their own, but just keeping up with the customer across all these different channels.

Tech and marketing, I think, have never been more intertwined. So although some of you may be doing stuff for sales teams or operations teams or workforce teams deploying and working with other teams, some of you will be working with marketing teams. And, you know, actually this story is probably not too much different for lots of other types of division in the company. Right? I'm just using this as the example because it's my background.

So I think that modern CMOs have to act a bit more like functional CTOs. They've got to understand emerging technology. They've got to understand the data that drives their business and that's used in their tools. So I'm going to talk now a little bit about Ticketmaster, and I'm hoping I'm kind of on time.

Have to race through a bit, just about teams there. So, in twenty twelve my team was kinda looking more or less like this, and it was already, I suppose, a relatively complex team, for marketing team. You know, we had a data scientist is Zoltan Faraci, fantastic guy, double PhD from Hungary, you know, not the sort of person you would have thought ten years before that that would be in a marketing team. BI analyst CRM managers front end front end designers, content campaigns, people who knew about video editing, you know, programmatic trader, technical SEO manager, quite complex.

This was a centralized HQ marketing team, and I had dotted lines into eighteen markets, marketing teams as well. But this was the kind of core team where we were really developing the brand's tools, the advice, the technology, the support, and the tools for all of those countries to do their marketing.

And then what happened in the end of twenty twelve was a bit crazy because the head of IT left, and I had been a very difficult and very demanding customer internally of the technology team because I wanted my customer data, and I wanted it in good order, and I wanted to take action on it, and I couldn't.

And a friend of mine on the executive team, a fantastic project manager, he's amazing called Jerry McDonald. I think he's actually maybe, you know, if you need a great PMO guy, Jerry's Yguy.

He was on the exec team, and he said to the president of the company of of Ticketmaster International, why don't you give Sophie that data team? Because she is never gonna stop fetching and moaning and bitching, and she's gonna be a real pain.

She can become her own supplier and you she'll go quiet.

And, he didn't quite say like that. Maybe he did. But it was an extraordinary opportunity for me. A terrifying scenario for all these people. Can you imagine me?

They were like, Jesus.

So I had to, so we had architects, we had, actually, when I started in twenty twelve, we didn't cloud engineers. It was all DB. It was a kind of, you know, earthbound infrastructure. I mean, I think in the first week, one of these guys came to me and said, you know, that the SSD discs were wearing out.

I was like, what? What are you talking about? They told me about the hardware refresh we were gonna have to do in a year and a half. I was like, what?

How much?

So, you know, I learned a lot. You know, and I had to spend that first week. I had first off a half hour meeting with every single person and just said, you know, tell me what you're doing tell me what we should keep doing. Tell me what we should stop doing.

Tell me what we should start doing. Tell me what you do. And I had to explain to them one thing about me. First of all, I had to keep zipped and listened, really hard for me.

But I had to tell them I'm an extrovert, and we think how loud And I say, all sorts of crazy shit. I spitball out loud, and I will say things. That doesn't mean I think you should go off and do it. If you think it's a shit idea, just tell me you know, I know you're maybe not all of them, but some of them were very introverted, thought very deeply. When they said things, it was like drops of gold. Right?

And, I had to listen hard.

So I think, to me, there's always been a friction and attention at, in many companies, particularly between the engineering technology and marketing departments because, you know, culturally and personality wise, and I I'm making it kind of fun. I'm talking about that division in a in a a very broad way. Of course, there are extrovert engineers, of course, there are introvert marxists. But you know what I mean? Right? I think historically there's been a tension there. And I think it's really important for both sides to try and figure out and have skin in the game on each other's outcomes.

And then what's on this slide? Let's see. Oh, yeah. Loads of companies, all the companies you're working in and working for have shit tons of data.

And more and more like every second. Right? I mean, it's just growing exponentially. And most of us are able to do quite a lot of analysis on that data and from that analysis most of us are able to get insights now for me in marketing that would be what content is working the best, which customers are most likely to churn, what what kind of thing are you most likely to buy from me next?

You know, operate or football, you know, whatever. And the problem was I couldn't do anything with it. I wanted to be able to take action on those sites. And I think it's not just marketing.

That's the same for every division.

You know, huge amounts of data, lots of analysis, quite a lot of insight, and then this difficulty of taking action. And again, the technology teams that a lot of you are deploying about the ability to take action on data, I think.

So actionable insights key.

A ticketmaster, when I started this work, we had been very acquisitive across Europe with acquired lots of different ticketing companies that were on different platforms that stored data in different ways that had obviously been off of minimum for quite a long time. Multi market, multi platform, multi client, questions around data ownership consent. There was lots of, like, just heavy digging to do to kind of even start to get things in the right order before we had data warehousing, but the vision really, you know, vision is a having a vision, communicating it, agreeing it aligning on it, thinking about a strategy and the tactics, and then really aligning and getting your road maps of both technology and business teams aligned. So there's sort of high level vision. There was an even higher level vision about people going to an event and having a great time. I won't show you that because it was really marketing, you know, but they kind of boiled down to, okay, let's do three things.

On the marketing side, we also did quite a lot of stuff on B2B and client stuff, but on this on B2C. So capture and leverage found data data warehousing across eighteen markets, propensity scores, profiling, give actionable insight across the business, give it back. Right? Automate things, journeys one to one real time on open at scale, emails, coordinate all of these different channels, and then kind of acquisition and and fan products.

So for the time that I was there, really, there was quite a lot going on because it wasn't Salesforce that I studied with. It was exact target, and in fact, anyone, any anyone do Salesforce Mark cloud in the room. Gotta might be speaking. Yeah.

Okay. So it still says this still says exact target in the URL. Yeah. Yeah. Timezone?

No.

So there was a lot going on. And, there was some kind of, you know, I put in the Olympics and various things because there was a lot of other big stuff that we dealing with as well.

And along the top was the markets that we were still acquiring and having to onboard into our systems. There was a lot going on and I just show this not because I'm super proud, of everything on here, all I am, but it's just to say, I don't know what stage you're at or what stage your company is that if you're dealing with a data team or you're looking at this sort of thing, I like to think if I'd started this work now, with some of the tooling that's out there, you know, maybe snowflakes, zero copy data, all sorts, you know, new ways of doing things we could have done this a bit quicker.

Because, you know, we were doing ETLs on lots of different platforms and lots different data and checking compliance and doing stuff and kind of building it in. And then at the same time, actually, in the background, moving to the cloud as well.

So you can sort of see, you know, by year two, we don't we're only nine percent of our emails were going out via exact target. You know, it took across eighteen markets, but it's it took a really long time. And I want to be really honest about that. You know, we got to seventy seven percent after a couple of years and a hundred percent Then, and by that point, we were doing triggers and journey builders and SMS testing, and then we were doing welcome programs and push tests, and we were putting in affinities we were using audience builder to the max to the max.

So really interesting, really fun. And I think you know, below the vision, you've got to be thinking about people first people. It's it's culture and people, you know, being supported in doing what they're doing, given the resources, to do what they're expected to do, but also thinking about how they're gonna collaborate and help operationalize and get drive adoption across the company.

Tools, you know, really some very expensive decisions there. So that was really, really important, and of course underpinning all of it data.

We had very detailed roadmaps, agreed across all of the teams. So we kind of had every year we did about it stretched across about eight weeks and eight weeks sort of I know it sounds crazy strategy playing. We didn't use, you know, elapsed, not total.

But it's across eight weeks, we would kind of start off our strategy process every year and do a and redo a three year strap plan. And then we would create a one year strap plan. So for the CRM team, so in head office, I had, you know, four people in the CRM team who were helping drive and support CRM across all of our markets, these were the four things they wanted to do, get more data, send more stuff, develop scores to do it better, and then share their insight across the organization, and then it broke down into tactics. Okay. What does get more data look like? Okay. We're gonna do these things.

What does automate more send more look like? Okay. We're gonna migrate the alerts. We're gonna launch Van and Basket.

We're gonna do journey build. We're gonna do sales cycle. We're gonna do life cycle. We're gonna app CRM, we're going to do browse, which this is what automate more send more looks like, and we're going to roll it out cross eighteen markets.

What this kind of list of tactics allowed us to do and this sort of detailed list. Oh, yeah, a lot more detailed than this, but allowed all of the teams to work together and look at their dependencies. So the CRM team could go and sit with all of the guys in the technology teams and even in the design teams because you had to design email templates and all sorts of things and roll them out, get the front end dev to make sure that they put in the Salesforce instance that it all worked to really make sure everybody understood when they were expecting to do things, break it down into quarters, see who they had a dependency on. Go and negotiate.

If you saw that four teams had a dependency on one thing here, we'd maybe promote that up the queue. Right? So it really helped us collaborate across marketing and technology.

And, you know, you have to test and learn and drive live. This was, you know, I just like this live because did quite a lot of stuff and it's got a lot of green ticks. That's not the only reason I share it.

My brother has been staying with me recently. He said he should show this line and I was like, really boring and it's really tiny. So I don't really know where I'm showing it, but, this quarter by quarter, is on the tech technology side. We I also did reporting as well as marketing. So, so so customer b b to b reports handling tickets if I sold in the last ten seconds on the front road type of thing for writer.

So, moving those to mobile reports and stuff, I had a team out in Belgrade for that. But it just sort of shows you this, you know, how we would be, you know, blue was the engineers we had, pink with the was the engineers we didn't have, right, and how we were kind of, you know, driving through. By this point, we've been going for four years, five years on on the on the data project. And so we were really start starting to motor. But, you know, you know, we have to deprecate a big piece of SAP, and there's always, I think once marketing or or the business starts to work more with technology and understands what the technology road reps are, you can start to be alive to some of the things that were invisible to you before and start to give up some of your roadmap time and start to be more understanding about what has to happen in order to get good results in order to get durable resilient results.

Okay.

So I think also another thing was just about I I I did a lot of communicating visually like this, you know, so that the CRM team knew what they were doing, but I wanted to be able to share this with everybody in the the organization so they knew what things we'd done what things we were working on and what was coming next. You know, here's our sales cycle cycle life cycle communications. Here's what we're doing. So I think communicating visually and really kind of working on that is is really important.

I know it's kind of death by decks kind of thing, but it's worth it. How am I doing on time? I've gotta move on. Okay.

We delivered powerful insight on demand. We delivered supercharged segmentation through audience builder, probably gonna be taken over by data cloud, but we put all of this data into the hands of marketers in eighteen markets. It was it was great, and they're still using it. It's fantastic.

Now I did a thing called kind of, wasn't Freedom Fridays. I can't remember what it was called. Probably I fuck around Fridays or something, but Friday afternoons, I said, right. Everybody knows what we're doing. Everybody knows what the vision is. Everybody knows where we're going.

Friday afternoons, we're gonna have four hours. I'm gonna do beer and pizza at the end of it. And you can keep doing your day job, or you can work with anybody else across marketing and technology, pair up with them. You know what we're doing, you know what the goal is, think something up. Surprise me. So the first week of Friday's everybody got very excited and buzzed around and chatted and thought up crazy ideas. I know we could, you know, whatever.

Jumping a swimming pool and do this. And, but in the end, it boiled down to about five people. So a data scientist, a designer, a data engineer, a BI analyst, and they started working weekends on it. I mean, I didn't ask them to, but they loved it so much.

And they just came up with stuff that I didn't know I wanted and needed the company loved. So this was great. Very highly engaging interactive. I haven't got a live version of it, but you would click on something, put in a target artist.

It was across sixteen markets. You could see what the affinity artists were. The size of the ball was how many customers we had contactable customers who were in that affinity ball and the closeness was how closely they were finna they were they had an affinity to the target. It's lots of fun.

Really useful motors who were booking festivals. Really useful for sponsorship to talk about and understand things. Right? So, we put this behind our our company opted a single sign on and made it available to everyone because it's aggregated in an unamised data with lots of phone.

Same with mapping. We did a similar thing.

Distance venue, bit of a killer app in selling retail tickets for events.

So that's the end of the Ticketmaster story. So lots of changes.

All of you in this room are involved with helping change your business, whether that's to reshape your customer value proposition, whether it's to transform operations, whether it's to streamline and automate processes, do things better. Right?

You're using technology and SaaS technology to drive that meaningful engagement and interaction across your business. So I just wanna talk about the changes. I think old marketing, this is the, you know, back in my hat stickers and knickers days. You know, you'd put out a campaign and wait to see how it did.

Now you're multivariant testing in the campaign and doing things all the time. Right? Silos, you've got to be collaborative, and the talent has really moved from very old fashioned traditional talent to quite modern mixed teams of people who are analysts, who are videographers, who know about SEO technical stuff and more. And I think but I'd love to hear in the coffee break that also IT and technology teams have changed as well from sort of fixed jobs maybe more to sort of tasks, which are more fluid, from functions to projects and from a hierarchical way of working, maybe to a matrix way of working.

That's my thinking, anyway, I'd love to share that, hear what you think. Here we go. We're gonna race through this, right? Because everybody wants a cup of tea, coffee, drink, I don't know.

Seven point plan to manage complex teams. One, start with a clear vision and strategy. Make sure you're very clear as leaders, what the goals of the company or team are, setting the norm, so how people collaborate and communicate. In case he didn't know who he was, I put his name on his t shirt for you, sat in a dinner.

Two. Cross functional teams and shared KPIs. Guys, it's a team sport.

Transformation is not a lone endeavor with a singular here anything that's really worth doing and that hasn't been done so far is probably because it is difficult, because it is complex, and because it does cross different teams. And he may not be the SVP or the CEO, but it is your job. You are leaders in your fields to really try and drive that collaboration.

Long term pro plans and short term projects depends what kind of, you know, company you're in, where you're up to on your on your data and your transformation.

I think a long term road map for the big rocks of your data and digital strategy is key, but smaller project next pebbles. Let's call them in our jar of life, you know, the rocks pebbles and sand. We all know that one. I think pick one of those if you're, you know, and to to really do cross functional cross team project to sort of light the way and show how it can be done.

Communicate prodigiously town halls, team meetings, country visits, lunch, unknown, strategy, j's hackathons, whatever you can do, do that because you often think that everybody in the company knows what you're doing they don't.

Right? And you might be quite quiet and you might be super clever and you might be doing amazing work. Fine.

Somebody in your team who wants to go out and shout about it and try to start shouting about it yourself, you know, maybe lunch and learns is the way to start, but do. Em empower your team, they will surprise you. You know, don't micromanage them. Once they know what they're meant to do and once the governance and the rules are very clear, people are extraordinary, and they will blow your socks off. So if you're leading a team, really think about that, make sure, of course, they have the means and the, you know, that they need to to succeed.

Lots of different ways. You know, RAG report, project management. I think, you know, great project managers are often in short supply. They're not here to tell people what to do.

They really are here to kind of hold the project to account in a blame freeway. Right? Okay. So why did we what is happening?

Let's let's be honest about what's going on here.

So I did it by sharing often in in weekly, fortnightly, and monthly, and quarterly ports got it never ended at Ticketmaster, but I think you have to be flexible and adaptable. Things don't always go to plan.

Celebrate success along the way, get some smaller milestones and have fun. If it's not fun, what is the what are we doing it for if you're not gonna have some fun? Right? You spend an enormous proportion of your day at work, you know, not seeing your dog or your kids or whatever it is that you'd really rather do.

We're doing pottery. I like pottery. It's very good for me. It's like brasket weaving for the criminally insane.

Anyway, celebrate success along the way. If you're not having fun, there's no fun. Race for the prize.

So business is typically hierarchical. Right? Execities want control and predictability, but the way things are going right now, that's not how it is.

Employees need to own a change of vision and be, you know, empowered to deliver it. Cross functional teams deliver value quicker. A really well directed and empowered organization can move mountains.

What is my next one? Yeah.

This is kind of a bit existential.

Honestly, I do. I do. I think you're at the crux of everything. Right? This is really existential, you know, actually making these moves.

And some of the most impactful leaders and people that I have come across, they're not actually leaders. They weren't SVPs or CEOs or senior directors.

They were just incredible people, maybe someone incredible in my dev ops team or in the infrastructure team who you know, they they led the charge on collaboration. They led the charge on teaching me. They led the charge on organizing lunch and learns and connecting across teams. Oh, I've been down to this team and I've spoken to them, we're gonna have a regular meeting every other week, you know, and really get this going. So, you know, and here's two people that were never voted in to be anything.

You know, they didn't have leadership positions and yet they're leaders. This is taken three years ago. Greta here is looking a bit younger. She's seventeen here and I think Milan is about one. I always cry in a presentation. This is where I cry.

So look, I think that the call is you are leaders as well. If you look, if if you're working in a terrible organization that's no fun, and there's no direction, and there's no good vision, and there's no good plan, get another job, if you're working in place that has a good plan and overall you're happy with it and you know that you can deliver, figure out how you can deliver more, figure out how you can be a leader because I think all of you in this room are exceptional and, you know, on behalf of your companies, thank you for the work you're doing, and thanks very much for having me today. Thank you.