Lateral Career Movement

I recall a time when I led a marketing operations team, I had been doing marketing ops for a few years at that point. I had a vision of developing a tool to assist various marketing functions, such as operations, analytics, strategy, and leadership. I was thinking automation, standardization, reporting, etc.., how can I make everyone's life easier. When I was working with the Direct Mail team and hearing about their pain points I had a vision of building a web app that could resolve those issues. However, this meant stepping away from my leadership role as a people manager to an individual contributor.

I had the chance to present my proposal to my supervisor, their superior, and eventually the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), all of whom approved it. I was given six months to create a prototype. Two years later, the team I previously led had doubled in size. The team members I had led before advanced in their careers, one become the Director of the same team I had left, and two others became team leads. This experience taught me that lateral career moves can benefit also others by providing them with opportunities.

For me, this shift provided the opportunity to pursue my passion. I enjoyed the process of building something tangible from an initial idea, addressing a pain point, and seeing it evolve into a practical solution—namely, a software tool. Over those six months, I learned invaluable lessons that I still apply today. From what I hear, the tool that I started is still in use.

Beyond the selfish pleasure of building and learning development, this experience allowed me to eventually develop and lead a team of software engineers and data engineers. I initiated the formation of a Marketing Engineering team—a dedicated group supporting Marketing Ops and the overall Marketing Business. I never thought I would be given the opportunity to lead a database migration or be responsible for an AWS implementation, all because I wanted to follow a dream of building a web app.