Episode #51: Preventing MarTech Stack Failures with Automated Testing and Monitoring - M.H. Lines
How to find problems before your CEO does
There’s no worse feeling as a revenue operator than getting an email from your boss / VP / CEO asking why something is broken.
“Hey, I got an email from an investor saying our demo form isn’t working.”
“Our SDR manager just said leads haven’t been coming through for the past day, what’s up?”
“Why aren’t there any MQLs in my report from the past week?”
“Is the website down?”
Aside from the business impact of the broken system or process, these issues are also devastating for your credibility within an organization.
Don’t get me wrong, occasional mistakes happen to us all, and we shouldn’t blow them out proportion.
But at the same time, we’re professionals with a responsibility for making sure this critical infrastructure is up and operational. If it fails on anything approaching a consistent basis, and we don’t solve for that, it’s an “us” problem.
I’ve gotten my share of those emails, and so my philosophy around managing critical infrastructure and downtime is is simple:
An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. Use automation, safety net reports, and human monitoring to proactively check for issues.
If something is broken, I want to know about it before anyone else does.
If the business has been impacted, I want to tell the business—not the other way around.
Always take ownership—communicate clearly what happened, the root cause, the impact, and what you’re going to do about it.
It’s the “prevention” piece that has historically been challenging for RevOps teams, who are generally chronically-overworked and don’t have QA engineers or tools to automate testing.
It’s this problem that M.H. Lines wanted to fix when she founded Stack Moxie, a platform that automates testing and monitoring for the revenue stack. I’ve used it extensively, and it’s awesome.
From doing a simple daily check on your demo form to creating full end-to-end regression testing for complex operational programs, Stack Moxie enables you to detect issues before they become major incidents.
In this chat we dive into M.H.’s previous experience as a marketer and MOPS leader, Stack Moxie’s origin story and her decision to become a founder, and how she navigates leading a venture-backed startup without compromising on her core principles.
Thanks to Our Sponsor
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About Today's Guest
M.H. Lines founded Stack Moxie in 2018 to bridge the gap between engineering and no-code technology for the SaaS economy. She has helped teams in marketing and technology both in-house and as a consultant at companies like Terex, Cohn & Wolfe, Microsoft, Lowes, The Tile Doctor and IBM Watson Health. MH received an undergraduate degree from The Florida State University in Finance, and her MBA from the Foster School of Business, University of Washington with a focus on Technology Management.
Key Topics
[00:00] - Introduction
[01:49] - Secrets to Gap Folding
[03:55] - From marketing to MOPS
[07:54] - MOPS as strategic vs. service provider
[14:28] - Being wired as a founder
[17:55] - Working in mega-enterprise
[22:59] - Observability for MOPS
[34:35] - Observability and AI
[39:12] - Being a VC-backed founder
Thanks to Our Sponsor
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