Show notes
What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Kelsie Dube, Director of Marketing Operations and Automation at Unanet.(00:00) - Intro
(01:09) - In This Episode
(05:31) - Why New Marketing Ops Leaders Should Audit Before They Act
(10:09) - How to Run a Marketing Ops Audit When You Join a Company
(16:04) - How to Balance a Full Audit Against Your Boss's Priorities
(19:00) - How to Spot a Process Problem Disguised as a Tool Problem
(23:41) - How to Surface Shadow Processes and Duplicate Tools in an Audit
(31:08) - How to Choose a New Martech Tool With a Tiger Team of Power Users
(35:30) - How to Turn a Marketing Ops Audit Into a Prioritized Roadmap
(41:20) - How to Align Your Team on a Measurement Philosophy
(44:22) - What Happens to Junior Marketing Ops When AI Eats the Entry-Level Work
(49:26) - How to Turn Marketing Ops From Ticket-Takers Into Business Partners
(52:40) - How to Use One Interview Question to Screen for Team Fit
(56:57) - How a Marketing Ops Leader Decides What Deserves Her Energy
Summary: Kelsie Dube joined Unanet and did the one thing most new ops leaders are too nervous to do: nothing, at least at first. In this episode she breaks down the 30-day audit she runs before changing a single tool, how she sorts 30-plus problems into big rocks, quick wins, and parked FY27 headaches, and why she'd rather build a "digital twin" to argue with than buy another platform. She gets into the tiger-team playbook that makes tool replacements actually stick, the measurement fight every team should have out loud, and what happens to junior marketers when AI eats the entry-level rung. It's a full field guide to walking into a new company and earning trust before you change anything, plus the interview question she uses to know if you'll thrive on her team.Kelsie's Marketing Operations Assessment Framework: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x3IJf9tHku4-fASS9AQE_F6sJ1FLK3PN/view?usp=sharingLiza Adam's Digital Twin: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/smartest-ai-teammate-youll-ever-build-liza-adams-c7rnc/About Kelsie DubeKelsie Dube is the Director of Marketing Operations and Automation at Unanet, where she joined in 2026 to rebuild the company's measurement and reporting foundation. Before that she spent 7 years at Sophos, climbing 5 roles from Marketing Operations Specialist to Director and leading the team through much of that run. She started her career in data entry, scrubbing lead lists and learning the VLOOKUPs she still uses most days, and that ground-floor view shapes how she thinks about the craft.Outside of work she's a mom of 2, an amateur basketball player, and a snowboarder who guards the hours between 5 and 7 for her kids.Why New Marketing Ops Leaders Should Audit Before They ActThe first 90 days at a new company come with a quiet dare. Ship something. Plant a flag. Prove they were right to hire you. Most new marketing ops leaders answer that dare by ripping out a tool they never liked and installing one they used at their last job, all inside the first 2 weeks.Kelsie did the opposite when she joined Unanet. Her first move was to change nothing.The reasoning was twofold. Without a real map of how work gets done, any change you make is a guess, and you'll probably aim it at the wrong target. And Unanet had said in the job description that they wanted someone who'd slow down and understand the business first, which is part of why she took the role. For a marketer who came up through ops and now leads it, that patience is the whole point. You have to understand what's happening well enough to be dangerous, she says, before you can tell anyone what to actually fix.The harder version of this is resisting your own experience. A new CMO walks in and wants a different marketing automation platform because they used one at the last company. Kelsie feels that pull too, since she's learning a few systems here for the first time. Her answer is to make the existing stack work before spending a dollar to replace it. Right now she's rebuilding how campaigns get captured and tagged to campaign members, and she's solving it with a Salesforce workflow or Power Automate instead of a purchase. Replacing the tool would cost more and probably solve less.Then comes the part nobody warns you about, the clock. Listening mode has a shelf life, and everyone, including you, is quietly counting the days until you produce something. Kelsie gave herself a hard deadline of 30 days to finish the audit, then engineered small wins into every week so the learning never looked like stalling. New hires have one thing veterans don't, an empty calendar, and she guarded it. A recurring block every Friday at 2:00 to turn that week's discoveries into something usable. One of those blocks became a 30-minute campaign taxonomy diagram she walked the leadership team through, a quick and visible proof that better structure meant better reporting down the line.The instinct to ship in week one is the most expensive habit in operations, because a fast fix aimed at the wrong problem still has to be undone later. The operators who compound value are the ones who can sit in not-knowing long enough to find the actual bottleneck.Key takeaway: Give yourself a fixed audit window, 30 days is a reasonable default, and block a standing hour each week to turn what you've learned into one small, visible win. Keep a running log of quick wins as you find them so you always have something to ship while the deeper work is still in progress.How to Run a Marketing Ops Audit When You Join a Company"Do an audit" is the most repeated and least defined phrase in marketing ops. Everyone nods along. Almost nobody can tell you what's actually in one, which funnel stages it covers, or where it starts on a Monday morning.Kelsie's version starts before day one. The moment she accepted the Unanet offer, she began mapping ownership lines: what marketing ops owns, what rev ops owns, what IT owns. She wrote out the questions she had and sent them to her leader ahead of her start date, partly out of genuine excitement and partly to get a head start on the RACI.From there it's a series of conversations that snowball. She interviews everyone from her own team to her peers to the level above to her business partners, and she ends every conversation the same way: who else should I talk to? The list never stops growing, but the patterns start to show. Along the way she confirms the systems in her swim lane against the job description, asks what she's missing, and books dedicated working sessions where someone walks her through a live task like a lead import. She records those sessions, then feeds the transcriptions to an LLM to pull out the patterns, a tip she picked up from a mentor that turns hours of shadowing into a usable roadmap.She also runs the work herself.Joining a much smaller team than she was used to, she asked people to hand her a lead import and a campaign creation task so she could run them personally. Part of it was capacity, since a director who can still execute is extra hands when the team is slammed. Part of it was fluency. As she says, a director isn't really a "do-rector," but being right there in the work is how you understand it well enough to change it later.Data privacy rides shotgun through all of this. Coming out of the cybersecurity world, she asks about data retention and opt-in policies early, then files them under "needs struct...