Note: This is an AI-generated transcript and may have transcription errors. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Robert Berkeley  0:05  

Hello, and thank you once again for joining me, Robert Berkeley for another episode of Inside Jobs, the podcast for In House Agencies about In House Agency Leaders and brought to you by the In House Agency forum or IHAF in partnership with EKCS, who help In House Agencies focus on the creative by providing Outsourced production. Now today we're going to meet Kylie Turnauer a creative leader who tells me that she is 0% Creative. That's okay. Right. Clearly, I can’t say that.

 

Kylie Turnauer  0:35  

Well, I don't know that I would say I'm a creative leader. Because Because I mean, I lead marketing operations.

 

Robert Berkeley  0:42  

Ah, okay. Well, we'll dig into that for sure. But I think there is a there is an element of creative leadership. So the final thing that I did pick up on is you are literally the very embodiment of a positive person. Now, I'm not sure if this bleeds into your private life, but it certainly came across when we spoke before. So Kylie, welcome to Inside JobsInside jobs.

 

Kylie Turnauer  1:01  

Oh, thank you so much for having me, Robert. I am super excited to be here. I have been an IHAFI have, I think it would be safe to say groupie for the past decade. I am at my third company that has had a membership with IHAFI have. And I clearly remember meeting Marta Stiglinsiglin, many, many years ago and just thinking like I need to do everything that this that this organisation offers. So I was super excited when you offered me the opportunity to participate.

 

Robert Berkeley  1:34  

Well, I didn't know that Inside Jobsinside Jobs was a bucket list item for anybody. But there you go. I'm very pleased. Where are you? And what do you actually do today?

 

Kylie Turnauer 1:44  

But yeah, so I live in Richmond, Virginia, or more specifically, Mechanicsville, Virginia, which is a suburb of Richmond, and I work for McKesson, medical surgical. And I am the director of marketing operations.

 

Robert Berkeley  2:01  

Excellent. Okay. So as you mentioned, not necessarily just the creative leader, but we're going to find out a bit more about McKesson later on, but I want to go back and step into the Wayback Machine and find out how Kylie got to this position because I know that your background is not necessarily marketing. Is it from the very beginning?

 

Kylie Turnauer 2:21  

It is it is absolutely not marketing. I mean, how far how far back in the Wayback Machine do we want to start?

 

Robert Berkeley  2:27  

Let's start with YoungYun Kylie, let's start with young Kylie so not many years ago. And then what kind of environment were you in? And you know, what, what do you feel was was most forming around you at the time?

 

Kylie Turnauer  2:39  

Yeah, so young Kylie actually grew up quite a distance away from Richmond, Virginia, I was born and raised up in a small town called Hilton New York, which is a suburb of Rochester, New York up in if you're familiar with the state of New York, Western New York, where we get a whole heck of a lot of snow. And my, my parents, my, my mom, and my dad, my dad was a landscape architect and own his own landscaping company, and my mom was a preschool teacher. And for most of my childhood actually stayed at home and raised myself and my four brothers. But really, like, in my, in my house, I would say the focus was on how to be a good person, how to how to build relationships with just about anyone. My parents were very focused on instilling leadership qualities in us. There was even a five year period of my life where I was sent to a leadership camp in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for two weeks, every every summer very intentional, and I feel like it might have been intentional on my parents part. Yes. And I think that that was kind of the entrepreneurs in them and this whole, you know, belief that, you know, don't depend on the corporate man to, you know, support you and provide for you and that sort of thing. So, yeah, so that was, that was a lot of my childhood, you know, a lot of sports a lot of, you know, running around with with the, with the brothers and trying to in trying to keep up and compete with them and, and fight like them and, and stuff. So and as a result of that my parents sent me to an all girls high school, I think, to to make sure that you know, I actually had some female influence in my life at some point, at some point in time.

 

Robert Berkeley  4:30  

Wonderful. So, so clearly, with that beautiful childhood, you wanted to do something highly creative when you got to university?.

 

Kylie Turnauer  4:38  

When I started thinking about going to college, I told my parents I wanted to be a history major, and they laughed, and pretty much said that is not a major we will pay for. Wow. Are you shocked? And I'm sure well, I was I was a little bit shocked because like I said, we never We had a lot of discussion about, you know, like, specific careers. So why couldn't I be a history major, but it was definitely at that point in time where, you know, they were kind of like, what would you do with a history degree?. And in my mind, I was going to go be like an archaeologist and, you know, dig up bones or, you know, primitive homes or something along those lines. And they were like, yeah, that's, that's not a degree that we would pay for. And so, and so I pivoted, and kind of just picked the the easiest to me, like thing to pick, if you don't know what you want to do. And that was a, well, I'll be a business major. And with being a business major also came, well, you need to pick a minor as well, you can't just you can't just major in business. And so I looked at looked at the list, and I probably actually could have picked like marketing as, as my minor. But instead, I decided to pick computer science. This was, you know, a time when computers were coming more and more prevalent.

 

Robert Berkeley  6:12  

This isIt was around the 2000. Mark, right? So sort of .com, the internet ascendant all that.

 

Kylie Turnauer  6:17  

Yep, exactly. I was, you know, my parents IT support whenever I would come, you know, home for break and whatnot. So I thought, well, I'll go ahead and do this computer science thing, not realising that that meant that I was going to be like, the only one of the only females in, you know, a computer lab learning how to do you know, SQL coding, and that and that sort of thing for for a couple of years. But I think totally…, ultimately,

 

Robert Berkeley  6:44  

You have referred to male female quite a lot in so far. And I'm curious whether that actually is something I'm very conscious of in life and in your career?

 

Kylie Turnauer 6:53  

Well, I think I'm probably conscious of it, because of growing up as the only, you know, girl, child in my, in my house, and then also going to an all girls school for, you know, for high school. I think that it it definitely it was it was a shock when I went when I went to college after spending four years at an all girls high school, and all of a sudden, you know, there were, you know, boys that, that, that I hadn't that I hadn't sat in class next to for for the past four years. So, you know, I'm raising two daughters, well, and a son as well, but certainly, you know, raising two daughters to try to be independent, independent, strong females. So yeah, I think it's something that I'm certainly conscious conscious of,

 

Robert Berkeley  7:40  

Wwell, there's a whole there's a whole rabbit hole, we could have jumped out. I'm going to pull back on the ball of wool and go back up to the surface. And let's carry on so. So what university, you did the, as you say, a sort of businessy kind of approach with some it computery stuff in there, too. So did you at that point, sort of clap your hands together and say, right, I know what I want to do with my life.? And if so, did you go ahead and do it?

 

Kylie Turnauer  8:04  

100% not. When I left college, I thought that I wanted to go to grad school, and I wanted to be like an administrator in higher education. I was very involved in college and like the Student Activities Board and Greek life, so I had a lot of role models that were, you know, kind of in that, you know, Administrator Dean, right, like type Student Activities area, and I thought, Oh, I'll go I'll go on to grad school to to do that. And my, my husband was like, Well, why don't we pause just just a little bit and maybe do a couple other things and see if that's like, really steal your your passion. And so actually, in the first Gosh, 16 months, 18 months out of college, I had three different jobs. I worked at, well, actually at McKesson, medical surgical, and in a sales role. So we'll get back to we'll get we'll get back to McKesson in a while. Yeah. And then I worked for the American Cancer Society and kind of a fundraising role and then ultimately landed at GE financial assurance here in in Richmond in a kind of a systems administrator role for our for our claims area. And I remember one of my brothers saying to me, like is it normal to have three jobs within a year and a half out of out of college? And I just, you know, kind of rolled my eyes and. I think

 

Robert Berkeley  9:38  

I think it's a great idea. I think, you gotta kiss a lot of frogs. Right. So you're Rightgreat. Sometimes. You don't? Yeah, what's the chances of landing right first time?

 

Kylie Turnauer 9:45  

Exactly, exactly. And then I spent the next 13 years at GE financial as it became Genworth. And so

 

Robert Berkeley  9:51  

not just because of what your brother said, it wasn't. I'm damn well gonna stay here now then.

 

Kylie Turnauer 9:57  

Right? No, no, definitely, definitely not just because of Have but yeah, you know, so right you kiss a lot of frogs and you finally find at least the company that you want to be at for a while maybe not the specific role but at least the company that you want to be at for a while.

 

Robert Berkeley  10:10  

But what's interesting is the first two jobs were about people facing really external facing your fundraising or account managing or whatever, then the next job, the one you settled on was more internal and corporate, right?

 

Kylie Turnauer  10:21  

Yes, yes, very, very much so and very kind of using that computer science background. You know, I never, I never officially became a, you know, became a coder or became, you know, an official like IT person but definitely took the, the way of thinking about, you know, solving problems and that sort of thing that I learned in my computer science classes to kind of every role that I have had, that I've had since then. So

 

Robert Berkeley  10:49  

So in your in your 12 years at Genworth you you kind of evolved into something that started to align with marketing, but was still it and kind of process right.

 

Kylie Turnauer 10:58  

It was, yeah, at Genworth. I mean, I kind of started if you, if you think about the customer journey, most people you know, start at the beginning of the customer journey and kind of work towards the end. When I look at my career actually started literally at the end of the customer journey. When it came to having an annuity policy. I was I was in death claims like it doesn't become any more final. Okay. Yeah, it does not become any more vital than that. And so yeah, I kind of started starting to the end of the customer journey and then ultimately worked my way up to, you know, marketing, which was the very beginning of the customer journey.

 

Robert Berkeley  11:43  

That's an interesting way to look at it. So how much did you how much was your kind of computer background and use when you when you finished Genworth in 2016?

 

Kylie Turnauer  11:52  

My computer background came into a lot of use in my last couple years at Genworth because I was replacing our our marketing workflow system. So, as the director of marketing operations at Genworth, one of the things that I had recognised was that our, our workflow system, it was homegrown, it was pretty outdated, you know, certainly was not built to support a more modern kind of marketing organisation. And so I had gone through an RFP process and with lots of different software vendors, and ultimately landed on a new a new marketing workflow system. And did I mean, really had to lead the implementation for that? Because was this

 

Robert Berkeley  12:39  

W as thisa first for you, as well during this kind of thing? RFIs and implementations and so on?

 

Kylie Turnauer  12:45  

Yeah, I mean, big, big RFPs? Absolutely, absolutely, you know, a marketing workflow system is not, is not inexpensive, in any in any way, shape, or form. And there are just so many options out there, you know, you look at a magic quadrant that shows you the different marketing workflow systems that are, you know, that are good. And I mean, there's so many of them. So going, going through that process, and really kind of understanding what the business requirements were, versus, you know, what, what the sales folks at the, at the various vendors were were pitching was a process that I had not used before. And then actually, like doing the build, and really, you know, getting into the system and building out forms and workflows and gathering requirements that was, so that level of detail was definitely a new, a new thing for me.

 

Robert Berkeley  13:43  

At this point, you had a team already, so were you doing this yourself? Or were you just directing people?

 

Kylie Turnauer  13:48  

So, so it kind of it kind of varied? I had, right, I had a team at that time of, I don't know, maybe like 19 people, and who unfortunately, also had day jobs. I couldn't, I could not, you know, pull that. I know, right? Now, the the marketing teams still wanted, still wanted stuff created. So it was a kind of a combination of doing myself and haven't pull in a couple people from, from my team to focus a little bit more on that. But it definitely gave me the opportunity to kind of learn learn the nuts and bolts of, of the system that we had chosen, and, you know, have a lot of influence into, you know, what was the process going to look like in the future because not only was it about implementing the new system, but you know, I didn't think that I wasn't going to consider a successful if our processes looked exactly the same when we implemented the new system. So in addition to just doing the simple system implementation, there was a lot of just process redesign that we had to do. I mean, I've been in the role for you know, three, four. yours at that at that time, and we had changed some things. But it was definitely time for more of an overhaul of the overall kind of marketing process and the roles and stuff that we had within the team. So, you know, those two things were kind of happening in parallel, if I think about oh, go ahead.

 

Robert Berkeley  15:18  

No, I was going to ask. So you're coming up with new processes, which is all well and good, but they're not going to be tried and tested? How did you know that the new process, which I presume were redesigned to take advantage of certain things the system could do? Why? How did you know that they were actually going to work out given the way the team engaged with marketing and so on, I would guess, by the way, but But yeah, I think you know what I mean?

 

Kylie Turnauer 15:43  

Yeah, I mean, I would love to tell you that I was confident that they were going to Yeah, that they were going to work out. But at that point in time, I had already kind of started learning a little bit about like, agile methodology, and, you know, this whole, like, test and learn. And the one thing that I really liked about the system that we were going with, was that it was, it was easy to make changes to it. And so my kind of theory was, you know, let's gather the best requirements that we can let's, you know, put a process in place, and let's test and see if we, if we like it, and, you know, if we don't, then let's go ahead and make, you know, make changes, and that was, that was probably kind of the beginning of my, you know, dabbling into the the Agile the Agile world.

 

Robert Berkeley  16:34  

Well, we're going to come back to agile in a bit, but I have a question about your time at Genworth, you ended up director of marketing operations there was that because you clearly wanted to head towards marketing and you kind of engineered that to happen?. Or were you could literally a kind of puppet who was pulled in directions, and you found, you know, accidentally found your niche?

 

Kylie Turnauer 16:53  

100% puppet, I, I clearly remember getting getting the phone call in my, in my office, when I was leading a annuity new business team, from a former boss who said, Hey, you should come over to marketing and fill the role of traffic manager. And I remember saying to her, what is a Traffic Manager? And why would you need me in marketing, I have literally never done anything with marketing. And she said, No, no market marketing operations, kind of be a marketing operations. And I thought to myself, and probably said out loud, why does marketing need operations, I mean, that's how little that I knew about it. So I mean, I went ahead and I applied, I applied, writing on the wall, my other team actually was getting laid off. And so it was, you know, very much so a blessing in disguise that I was asked to come over and take that traffic manager role. And what I learned very quickly was marketing, more so than maybe any other group that I had worked in, really needed operations, you had a bunch of strategic folks. And you had a bunch of creative folks. And you really needed someone or multiple salons to help bridge the gap between between the two, which is where I kind of found what I believe was my was my sweet spot, with with marketing operations, being able to kind of be that, you know, liaison between the two and just kind of think differently than any of the other functions that currently existed within marketing.

 

Robert Berkeley  18:39  

So So I was going to ask you to define marketing operations. But actually, I think you just gave an extremely succinct definition of it there anyway, you, you So you weren't in charge of marketing, right? You weren't in charge of building that strategy. Neither did those people roll up to you? Right, right. But your job was to pave the way for their ideas and ambitions to happen. Right? Yeah,

 

Kylie Turnauer 19:04  

Yeah,absolutely. I mean, I had an enabler in a way. Exactly, exactly. I mean, my team ranged from having, you know, project managers on it to having compliance coordinators, production folks who were, you know, working, working with our, our print shops, and, you know, again, I I rarely hired somebody who was a marketer. I normally actually looked for people if I was hiring internally, I had looked for people who I had worked with in previous roles at Genworth who were more pure, like operations type people, which was you know, I will say I probably rocked rocked the boat a little bit when I when I came in. One thing I remember both at Genworth and then at Carmax, where I went to and a few years later was everybody He would talk about how the strategists were there were their customers. And I was like what do you what do you mean that the strategists are your customers are our customers are the people that are out there like buying our products like those, those are our customers, we're we're, you know, business partners with the strategist were, you know, colleagues with the strategist but but they're not our customer. And that was a that was a really kind of big, big shake up to stop referring to our, you know, our strategists and other like marketing managers as customers and start… you

 

Robert Berkeley  20:36  

So you stuck to your guns on that one. And you're, you're still adamant about that.

 

Kylie Turnauer 20:39  

I am. I am super adamant about it. Even even today at McKesson, if you look at our if you look at our system, there, there is a role that is called business partner. It's not you know, requester it's not marketing manager, there was a role in our system called called business partner. I just found that it made people I mean, I think that this happens that a lot of organisations, one of the complaints when I when I moved into marketing operations was from the team was we're just order takers. Right? We want to be we want to feel more like trusted advisors. But we're, but we're right. What but we're just order takers. And yeah, I thought, well, of course, you're just order takers. You're calling them your customer.

 

Robert Berkeley  21:25  

Vvery interesting.

 

Kylie Turnauer  21:27  

Like, that makes that made total sense to me that that was that that was the the feeling but you know, to really be vested in, you know, what, what they're doing, like they need to be they need to be your business partners, they need to look at you that way. And you need to look at them that way.

 

Robert Berkeley  21:45  

Yes eyeball to eyeball right now on the level. Exactly. So how come after, what almost 13 years or Genworth, you went to come X? How did that happen?

 

Kylie Turnauer 21:54  

Um, you know, I had been, it had been like five years that I had been in marketing operations, which was the longest period of time that I had been in any, like, role in my, in my career. And I was really just kind of looking for a change, I was excited that I was at a point where, like, I knew that I wanted to stay with marketing operations, I also knew that I wanted to stay in Richmond, you know, just for family and life kind of reasons. And so, you know, marketing operations roles in Richmond were kind of few and far between. And when this role popped up at Carmax, I wasn't necessarily like actively looking. But LinkedIn does a great job of, you know, sending you emails with the right thing at the right time. And, you know, this role came across and I thought, hey, like, I'll, I'll give it a, I'll give it a try.

 

Robert Berkeley  22:46  

Okay, so that worked out, you were, as you said, head of marketing operations there, you were, clearly not marketing's my thing. And that's what you're going to be doing. So you inherited a team there, and, you know, kind of, can you give us a very short version of what happened in your four year term?

 

Kylie Turnauer 23:00  

Yeah, so I inherited a team there, and my team the hair, when I asked them all, what their role was, they all had a different a different title, a lot of them also using the word client or customer in that that was, that was not that was not going to work. So you know, it task, task number one, wipe away the word customer or, you know, or client and, you know, turn them all into kind of marketing, marketing project managers is what is what they all became. But really, I would say that my time at Carmax was, was focused on introducing Carmax to agile marketing, which A word again, the, the, the a word again, and you know, when I when I look back at those, I think I was there for about about four years, and you know, three, three and a half of them were really focused on on agile marketing and introducing it at Carmax. And then I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say perfecting it, because I don't think that is ever perfected, but just continuing continuing to roll it out. And that's something that I became just really, really kind of passionate about. I presented at an IHAFAI half conference, I've presented at some other conferences on the topic. It just seems so new and different, and took kind of my pre marketing skill sets of being a project manager and operations and just kind of brought it all brought it all together.

 

Robert Berkeley  24:35  

So what do you like most? Let's talk a little bit about that in terms of agile and I'd like you to actually define it. For those listeners who are not that familiar or maybe not familiar with the way you use the term. But then also I have a three part question for you. Can you define what you mean by by agile, perhaps indicating why you like it and whether you think it's here to stay KylieKiley?

 

Kylie Turnauer 24:57  

so when I think about agile marketingMarc Getting, there's probably a lot of definitions out on, you know, out on out on the web, if you went if you went and Google that. But in my mind, agile marketing is all about a really iterative way to get work done, but not only iterative, also, like, very collaborative. And that goes a little bit to that whole, like, you know, marketing operations, not wanting to be order takers, if you're being more collaborative, you're getting, you're getting rid of that. And also, if done the right way, agile marketing should be very customer centric, thinking about the actual customer that's buying your product and making sure that you know, you're doing the right level of, you know, customer interviews, user interviews, that's the, the customer do pay the bills, customers, of course, the real customers that pay the bills, yes, yes. Yeah. So that so. So in my mind, that's how that's, that's what I think about as agile marketing, Aand you like it, because? I like it, because it, it focuses people, or at least the way that we designed it at Carmax focused people. And one of the things that we were that we were finding it Carmax was that, you know, everybody, everybody could kind of work on anything, especially from a marketing operations and creative perspective. But when we put in agile marketing, what we built was, we call them collaborative teams, instead of using the term agile teams, and, you know, you were you were dedicated to a collaborative team, or, you know, one or two collaborative teams. And so you really got focused on a specific topic or a specific campaign. And so you became just very vested in the, in the success of, of that area of, of the business, which I think we were, we were missing kind of before we put agile into into place, because it was just a little bit more of a little bit more of a free for all.

 

Robert Berkeley  27:07  

And, I mean, it seems to me that it's a technique that for our times, really, in the sense that, you know, we have all this technology around us all the time, that enables us to kind of make decisions on the spur of the moment based on the latest information, whether that's arranging where to meet in a town centre, or whether it's looking at looking at data from a campaign and adjusting things, right?.

 

Kylie Turnauer  27:27  

Yeah, absolutely. So why not use all of that, that information in real time to write to make changes in the IT world, they, they use it to make changes to a system and so in the marketing world, why not use it to make a change to to a marketing tactic, whether it's where you place that tactic or, you know, the the image on it, or or the words on it, that the possibilities are just endless.?

 

Robert Berkeley  27:55  

Well, in some beautiful divine symmetry from Carmax. You went back to your first employer?

 

Kylie Turnauer  28:01  

I did that. That is That is very true.

 

Robert Berkeley  28:04  

Did you meet people that you'd started out with? No, Surely not. You're in a different different part of the company when you…?

 

Kylie Turnauer  28:09  

I did not meet people that I that I started out with, but I do work with a lot of people that I worked with actually at Genworth. And yeah, but so that was once once again, you know, LinkedIn was my friend and, and one day I got I got an email about, you know, this director of marketing operations role open at McKesson. And I immediately reached out to an old co worker from from John Werth who had been at McKesson for a while in marketing. And I just said, like, hey, you know, what do you what do you know about this about this role? And her response was, you would be perfect. And I said, that wasn't? I said, that wasn't the question. The question was, tell me, tell me about the role. And, you know, just there's having some conversations, what I learned was that they actually didn't have marketing operations. And they were looking for somebody to write to come in and, you know, stand up the marketing operations organisation and,,

 

Robert Berkeley  29:12  

Wasand was that the first that was the first time you'd been asked to do that, right?. Yeah, other times, yeah, heritage something and had to try and change it. But here exactly, you can build in your own image.

 

Kylie Turnauer  29:21  

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So that was you know, as you just think about your, your personal career path, like how, how exciting to get to build something. And so yeah, I went I Wwas it daunting?, was it daunting? Well, so the really daunting part about it is that I moved, I left Carmax and I went to McKesson in May of 2020. So good time, right. So going on in the world thenand Notnot much not much going on in the world. And you know, I had already gone remote with with Carmax right.

 

Robert Berkeley  30:00  

To build a team, but here's the thing, I don't have an office for you or anything like that we have no no infrastructure to offer you whatsoever.

 

Kylie Turnauer 30:06  

Exactly, exactly. And then after I accepted, accepted the role and signed on the dotted line. Now, McKesson like many other companies wasn't wasn't interested in hiring a whole bunch for for the foreseeable future. So thank you. So thank you for coming and build, build the concept of a team. And you know, but right now you're just a party of one, four.

 

Robert Berkeley  30:37  

So they were still committed to the project. But they knew that but it had been it had to be the budget had to be, shall we say, shelter a bit. So exactly out there. And that's kind of interesting situation for you. It's only a couple of years ago, you took the job. So how's that played up?

 

Kylie Turnauer 30:50  

Yeah, it actually, you know, in retrospect, I am really glad that I was not able to hire right away. Because I think the roles that I would have hired for, right out of the gate were very different than the roles that I hired for a year later. The one thing that I've learned about marketing operations just from being in my own rolls, and then through being in groups, like IHAFI have, is that marketing operations means different things at every company. And so it was important to figure out like, Well, what was marketing operations going to be at McKesson before just filling just filling roles because it. problem

 

Robert Berkeley  31:33  

What's the problem that needs solving that's unique to McKesson? Not the boilerplate solution to every marketing operation. Okay.

 

Kylie Turnauer 31:40  

Exactly, exactly. So I had, you know, a year to kind of figure that out, right. I did a lot of interviews with different stakeholders, I sent out surveys to the team, probably to this day, the best response rate I've ever had on a survey is like, tell me about your thoughts on marketing operations and what and what it should do. I think I have like a 95% response rate on that, on that survey.

 

Robert Berkeley  32:06  

I'm sure all the answers were the same. I'm sure. that right. Yes, yes.

 

Kylie Turnauer 32:11  

That right. Yes, yes. Just confirmed what you thought. Exactly. They just wanted like one or two things, or marketing or operations to work on. And it was, you know, it was all good from there. So you know, I think the hardest part was, you know, like I said, being at being a party of one, but similarly to Genworth and then also at Carmax, we didn't really talk about this. But at Carmax, we also replaced the marketing workflow system, one of one of the biggest pain points that was identified to us, like right out of the gate was that we had an old marketing workflow system, and we needed, we needed something new, and you want to talk about being the only person available to work on it? Well, when you're a team of one, you are literally the only person. Ddid you get that all set up before you had anyone using it then? Well, they were used, they were using the old system. Oh, right. But the new system?, Bbut the new the new system, right, like I had I set up? Gosh, I guess I'd been there for nine months, and we rolled out the new system and you know, shut down and shut down. Shut down the old one.

 

Robert Berkeley  33:14  

Oh, this was the system the marketing we're using. You're talking about then I Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

 

Kylie Turnauer 33:20  

Yep. Yep, this system in marketing. So and again, using kind of that, like, agile approach of, you know, it's a very flexible system. Let's gather the requirements that we have right now. But commit to making, you know, kind of iterative changes, as you know, as needed. So yeah, so that was that that was a lot to take on, you know, kind of by myself.

 

Robert Berkeley  33:46  

And so, where, where are you now then? We're two years in, obviously, it's very fresh, and you can still smell the paint, I'm sure. So where are you now with respect to your your marketing operations team? What have you got there?

 

Kylie Turnauer 33:58  

Yeah, so I have, I've hired two people. And one of them is focused on process improvement and agency agency management, also running some kind of big, big programme management for projects that kind of span across across marketing. And the other has really taken on this kind of system administration for our marketing workflow system, and she also does some process improvement. One of the things I would say I'm most proud of at McKesson is from a marketing operations perspective, we've really honed in on the planning process, and how we decide like what work is going to get done every month within within marketing, and looking at capacity models for both our designers and our copy writer., you mentioned

 

Robert Berkeley  35:01  

You mentioned twoto people that there's a lot more than two there, right? You've got you've got all these other folks as well. Right?

 

Kylie Turnauer   35:05  

Well, right now I, we, it's just two again, it's, it's, it's a different setup than I had at either Carmax or at or at Genworth.

 

Robert Berkeley  35:17  

So who's doing all this copywriting and all this production and so on? Well, we

 

Kylie Turnauer  35:21  

Well, we have well, we have copywriters and we have, and we have designers, they're just not part of marketing operations. They're they're part of our marketing communications team. And so I mean, I work super closely with with them and their and their leaders on on a daily on a daily basis, but I don't manage their work.,

 

Robert Berkeley  35:44  

Rright. But you can you can you don't how much capacity they've got. And as you say, you can start planning that and planning what's going to come down?. Yup. Okay, and what's going to feed into the funnel and how much it's going to be done. And presumably, you can start to talk to people about budgets and capacity and meeting meeting requirements. And so?,

 

Kylie Turnauer 35:59  

Yyeah, we don't get so much into budget conversation. So again, one of those one of those things that does not fall into marketing operations here, but certainly right, like, what does the what is the pipe look like? Especially as we're going into, you know, a new fiscal year, you know, what kind of big campaigns are we are we planning? How do we kind of calendar those out and ensure that we're not overwhelming the design or the the copy team? And if we are, then I do you have on my team, the resource to work with our agency partners, our external agency partners to figure out how we how we kind of fill the gaps either from a capacity or a skill set perspective.

 

Robert Berkeley  36:43  

Okay, all right. Well, it sounds like you have a pretty critical role there small but mighty team, because your load balancing the work as it comes in and making sure that it actually gets executed properly, right?

 

Kylie Turnauer 36:54  

Oh, yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And constantly kind of just like looking at looking at processes. And when you add other organisations because there had been marketing operations in the past, while, you know, perhaps processes weren't being, you know, refined as frequently as I would have hoped. There was some, you know, process refinement happening. But because marketing operations hadn't existed at McKesson, you know, process improvement was kind of a side of the desk thing for a lot of different people. And so now putting it on to onto my team, we have, we've really taken some some processes that had been either very manual before or had very, like unclear roles and responsibilities, and refine those automated automated them and seeing some really good improvements across across the department.

 

Robert Berkeley  37:51  

Right, right. Okay. So where do you go from here, then, KylieKaley, two years in, you've had this lovely kind of opportunity to stand back and plan a department and then start to build it. Where are we headed in the in the next in the next sort of 234 years? Oh,

 

Kylie Turnauer  38:05  

Oh gosh, well, I would I would love to bring more agile type processes to to McKesson, it's something that is that is certainly on the radar, I also am interested in continuing to expand our our, our workflow system, our market marketing workflow system, when we launched it, the intention was, you know, just kind of replace the current system. But there are so many more things that that it can do. That we absolutely need to you know, continue to expand upon that.

 

Robert Berkeley  38:40  

You need to get uptake on it, you need to get it deployed and people you wanting to use it and getting value from it, I suppose.

 

Kylie Turnauer   38:46  

Exactly. And I would say I've done a survey and people seem to like it better than the better than the old system. So, you know, that's an that's an initial bar that, that that was set, right? Get them to like it more than the old one. But But certainly, and get them thinking that it can be used for things outside of kind of just their normal, you know, create me a brochure or create me a banner ad type type processes. Right. So yeah, I mean, I think the great news at McKesson is that everybody really respects the marketing operations group. And they have seen the value that we have provided Justin just sent a couple in a couple years. And so they're they're wanting to work with us and asking us to look at look at processes and you know, help lead kind of big projects across the across the organisation. So yeah, I think that there's really great things to come for, you know, for marketing operations.

 

Robert Berkeley  39:50  

Well, excellent. Well, I wish you well with it. I have to say that you seem to enjoy what you're doing very much, but it's it's a start of an Other journey you've got there at McKesson. So lots to do. Well, Kylie, I do want to thank you so much for for sharing your journey with us all. And the application of agile and kind of process in and around marketing operations is absolutely fascinating. And the the approach you've taken I think is actually pretty unique. So thank you so much for joining us on the Inside Jobsinside jobs podcast.

 

Kylie Turnauer 40:23  

Thank you for having me.

 

Robert Berkeley  40:24  

I also want to thank Emily Foster and IHAFI have and Amy MacNamara our producer, as well as BrandBrenda and Divya who get the editing done so, so gracefully and put up with all our bloopers and what have you, which there won't be any on this one of course. If you've not heard Inside Jobsinside jobs before then a very warm welcome to you now we have loads in the back catalogue. All sorts of different people all of whom working in In House Agenciesin house agencies and striving to help them perform at their very best go to ijpodcast.comij podcast.com See the growing back catalogue there. And of course LinkedInLincoln with me and Kylie, I guess you okay, if people reach out to you on LinkedIn if they want to know more about agile or your approach with workflow systems or whatever. Absolutely. And yeah, so why not recommend the Inside Jobsinside jobs podcast to a friend if you like it and even leave a review as well. So thank you very much and see you next time.