RevOps Co-op Weekly #83 - Modernizing the RevOps Team Structure and Data Stack
Richard Makara joined us to talk about how his unique team structure and intentional integration design are the secret sauce to the RevOps function at Paddle.
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Modernizing the RevOps Team Structure and Data Stack
We caught up with with Richard Makara, Principle Growth Engineer at Paddle for a Slack AMA at the Co-op. Leading the questions is fellow member Robert Gammon, Director, Revenue Operations Advisory at Cortado Group.
We'll be focused on the following topics, but feel free to bring questions on any RevOps related topic you can think of!
• Team structure: how we work together, how intertwined our work/output/goals are
• Tooling decisions: Buy ready vs Build Custom re tooling + data. To Zapier or not to Zapier.
• Integration Design: building a scalable tech stack with intent
A little more about Richard:
Richard is originally a marketer who ended up becoming a systems & integrations specialist in the B2B context. As principal growth engineer, his day job is to create growth engines: collections of tools, processes & data that allow companies to turn their strategy into tangible operations. When possible, he likes to build and open-source small but useful solutions for the community.
Robert Gammon
Whoop Whoop! Looking forward to another GREAT AMA !
GOOOOOOD MORNING / AFTERNOON RevOps Family!!! and welcome to another Ask Me Anything conversation. Today I’m joined by our guest Richard Makara.
Richard Makara
Happy (the dog) and I are ready and excited to talk about growth engineering and all things RevOps! Thanks for having us 🙂
Robert Gammon
We have a ton to talk about today, but for the folks in the group who DON'T know you, can you give us a quick intro into who you are? What do you do? Why do you LOVE what you do?
Richard Makara
Absolutely! Once again thanks for having me 🙏 I’m Richard - Principal Growth Engineer at Paddle, one of the 3 core subteams in our RevOps org. Am originally a marketer - started in events marketing and organization, and as the questions of ROI and lead lists became more prevalent I ended up tinkering with CRMs and integrations (I had no clue what Salesforce was, but i was tasked to pipe Splashthat contacts over to SFDC lol). Over time I also learned software engineering skills and moved to a full Operations role at Paddle 🙌
There my job is to build the commercial data backend of the entire company. Sales, marketing, success, analytics data flow through the ‘engine’ that my team builds and maintains. Currently moving our entire stack to the ‘modern data stack’ model 🚀 Love Ops. It’s a never ending creative problem solving exercise.
Robert Gammon
Wow, great to have you. We love when marketers make the jump, if for no other reason than they’re fantastic story tellers and can bring focus to their craft.
So today we will focus on the tech side of Revenue or Growth for sure. What do you think the driving force was behind your company's push to modernize the stack ?
Richard Makara
Honestly, the main reason to undergo this process was a central piece of kit that did way too many functions for us (ETL, database, event tracking, data manipulation, Reverse ETL) got acquired and is being sunset at the end of this year.
So early in January we figured we need to cover our bases and get out sooner than later. We looked at all the functions that this tool was doing, and reverse engineered from there. We were also excited to join the hype of data warehouses, ETL’s and Reverse ETL’s 😄
So i guess the absolute driving force was necessity. The extent of our new setup however was fueled by talking to professionals around the world, consuming content from a lot of the vendors out there.
Let me get you a handy graph to make a bit more sense of this.
Robert Gammon
I think for most of us in operations necessity reigns supreme as the most common driving force for sure!
Richard Makara
So it's all split into components. Kind of like areas of responsibility. Components explained below, and then a bit of a map with actual tooling 😄
Robert Gammon
I want to come back to a quick comment you made in your intro about sub teams within RevOps org. Can you shed some light into how you all are dividing the lift?
…and wanted to make a quick shoutout to MIRO For the sweet visual architecture diagram! Great tool for anyone who needs to visualize a complex story.
Richard Makara
For sure! Currently the team is divided into 3 core areas, more by skillset/areas of expertise. In our RevOps team we have:
- Data & Insights - They work predominantly with our data warehouse, run data models in dbt and work out all of our dashboarding and forecasting needs.
- Tooling & Training - This team focuses on the human element of tooling. Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach etc. The focus is on making sure that these tools are understandably useable, and that folk get the training they need.
- Growth Engineering - The foundational data & integrations team 🙂 We focus on connecting the techstack, and providing useable go to market data
I am happy to dig into more detail in any of the 3 teams if y’all want!
Robert Gammon
I love the focus on USEABLE GTM data. Let's talk about that for a minute.
Can you give us an example of something the growth engineering team may have come across and determined NOT usable? In my experience it can be almost more valuable with the tremendous volume of data these days, to help your GTM teams understand what NOT to focus on and keep them looking at the most impactful insights. what do you think?
…There’s more! Read full AMA Transcript here 👉 Modernizing the RevOps Team Structure and Data Stack
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