Secrets of a People-Centric Creative Ops Leader w Bethany Thornton

[00:00:00] Nish Patel: I know a secret. Actually, this episode is full of them. Welcome to the creative ops podcast. And thank you for joining me yet again, as I continue my never ending journey of curiosity into all things, creative operations in this episode, I'm joined by Bethany Thornton, the former head of creative operations at Atlassian. And she generously shares her smart and simple secrets to being a people centric creative ops leader. From fostering a culture of open communication and collaboration to designing an onboarding process. That empowers new team members. Bethany's insights demonstrate how putting people first can help your creative organization thrive, even through periods of rapid growth. We're going to discover how regular listening tours can help you identify pain points and drive continuous improvement and learn why cultivating a mindset of curiosity is crucial for encouraging you. Innovation within your team. Bethany also shares her experience partnering with other operations groups to create a more integrated and efficient operational ecosystem. Proving that collaboration across teams is a game changer. And don't forget to tune into the companion questions and actions episode, where I share tactics on how you can act on some of her secrets. So for now, if you're looking for more, the secret sauce of a successful creative ops leader, a people centric creative ops leader, one that not only optimizes processes, but also energizes and empowers your team, then this episode is a must listen. Bethany, welcome to the Creative Ops Podcast. Like we always start, what is your definition of creative operations? [00:01:48] Bethany Thornton: Yeah, so this is something that I've been thinking about and I have kind of this like generic definition in my head about how creative ops is this super highway. We drive results, we set the rhythm for the team, and we're really making sure that the team is operating efficiently and we're essentially doing everything else and allowing the creative team to really focus on ideation to delivery. We're doing everything but the pixels, but then, I was thinking about this some more, how we're really going to be talking about, you know, this people centric approach that I take and I thought, hey, you know, why not relate this to human anatomy? the definition that I've, been thinking about that resonates with me is how creative operations is the backbone of the team. We're providing that structural integrity for the greater team, which is the whole body. And that allows us all to thrive. So every part of the body plays an important role. And so too, does every part of the team creative ops as part of that. [00:02:50] Nish Patel: I love that definition and that you're relating it to anatomy because, I could totally see the backbone there. And I've heard others on the podcast that have, talked about connective tissue or The hub that connects all the spokes, I'd like to dig into that a little bit, like creative operations being the backbone, what are the other pieces of the anatomy? Who are the arms and legs, of this body? [00:03:14] Bethany Thornton: I was thinking about this so much when I was coming up with this analogy. I feel like it isn't like one, any individual person or team that is like an arm. together we kind of create that arm or maybe like the bone structure that extends off of this backbone or maybe project managers or creative producers. again, uh, extending off of that stability, creating that structure for everything else that's happening around it. So we have, our creatives that are maybe like some of the muscle of an arm. and maybe we have like our, creative leaders who are also operating in there as maybe they're like veins that are providing like some nourishment and coaching to the team. so I just kind of see every part of the body are these different units of the team working together. [00:04:01] Nish Patel: You and I first spoke pre COVID. And even back then, two things stood out for me. One was the way you thought about, different streams of work. And today it's sort of become like standard. but back then, when you were the head of creative operations at, at Lashen, it wasn't something that was prevalent. So that stood out for me. And you have one stream of work for sort of blank canvas creative, if I can call it that, and another stream of work for, scale production work, creative, both valuable for different reasons and need different creative talent. And you brought a lot of nuance thinking to that. And the second thing that stood out for me is a lot of our conversation from years ago, Was really rooted in, you know, humanity in a people first approach. you can't project manage management your way out of problems and to delivering great work, you've got to communicate and almost human your way to doing great work. and you've been on a year long sabbatical, from, creative operations. you went through this incredible growth spurt. during your time there, so I was looking forward to this conversation because you've been on that sabbatical. you've had time to reflect, can you share like some examples of how you've empowered team members during that rapid growth phase? [00:05:21] Bethany Thornton: first thing that comes to mind for me is. Team onboarding, it was that was like, the biggest thing for me was making sure that we had a solid foundation for people coming in. and that really empowered not just those individuals coming in, but the whole team, because. People were able to operate that much faster as this cohesive unit, because everybody knew where to go for things, how we worked, and people were also connected together through that onboarding experience. we'd created this really nice framework between myself and our creative leaders on the team, with these templates that we'd created. We put together for any new person joining, and it, gave people a nice roadmap for starting from day one things that they should be doing as a part of their onboarding journey. And then I had 3 or 4 sessions that were in person with anybody new joining for that week or with. Within those 2 weeks, at a time and I sat there and I worked with them. I answered their questions and I always said to people, hey, this time, we have some specific things we're going to be covering, but this time is about you. If you have any questions for me. Ask me, this is a conversation. This is not just a presentation. So, I got to know people during that time. I was having people come to me on the team who may not have normally felt comfortable or wouldn't have normally have known me if I hadn't done this, but could come to me and say, Hey, Bethany, we used to do this thing at this other team that I was a part of, it worked really well. or, Hey, Bethany, I, noticed that we're doing this in a certain way and it's just, I don't really understand it or it doesn't seem to be working. and I had that open door with people. And so that really helped us grow, as a unit, really, really well. [00:07:10] Nish Patel: Was this for like project managers joining the team, creatives joining the team, anyone joining the team that was going to be part of this, was it for everybody [00:07:20] Bethany Thornton: Everybody. So we had, we had different things depending on the role that we're going to be included in their onboarding journey. But we had. Onboarding for people who are joining the operations team. We had people who were joining as creatives. We had people joining as creative leadership. And so we had, created essentially this document that said, these are all the things that we need to make sure these people know for them to really succeed and it worked and something else. I didn't mention. That was a part of onboarding was again, like, That team cohesion, we'd make sure that we had, some time set up for the team to meet them and people would just talk, it was just like this great, 15, 30 minute time for people just to like shoot the shit. So to speak, just get to know each other, talk about, just silly stuff. And it just, it broke down walls. and we did that as a larger team and then we would do that in smaller groups too. And so that really helped. It just fostered so much, team cohesion. It was amazing. [00:08:18] Nish Patel: So if I'm a creative or a project manager showing up, I get handed this document. And what would I see in that document? Would it be here's the tools that we use. Here's the tools that you're going to use in your role. [00:08:30] Bethany Thornton: essentially how the doc was organized was we had, a high level, context information that people needed to know. So it was like a big purple box at the top of the page. That was like, hey, these are the most important things for you just to have at the ready, bookmark these things. and they were various things, depending on the role, but it might have been like, hey, as a designer, this is where you're going to see any project that you're on for the week. This is the JIRA page and bookmark this, these are the tools that you should download right away. Here's the instructions on downloading them. and it might have also included hey, these are like key people for you to know, and then we had it broken out by at the beginning for the 1st week. It was broken out by the day. So day 1. Do these things, read these pages, day two, these pages, and so on for the first week. And then every week after that was bucketed as a week. So during week two, read through these things, set up meetings with these people. look at this document because you're going to be reviewing it with Bethany in your first onboarding day with her. and I had those meetings on their calendars already from day 1, when they started, it was already there on their calendar. and so they were able to, like, just start getting, just start acclimating right away. And it just helped people to have that context before we met of me, going through these things and it just kind of, like, seeing, like, this blank wall on their face of, oh, my gosh, too much information, fire hose. they got to take their time to kind of read through those things before. Coming in and chatting with me. [00:10:04] Nish Patel: this is such a friendly way of starting day one, it's almost like a map, you, instead of being lost in the wilderness, you get to situate yourself, it seems like such a simple, easy thing to do, but I think what I most often see in organizations, and this isn't just creative operations is now day one is sort of like you get added to like Slack or something like that. And then you have to start asking people like, where do I find this? Where do I find that? How did that translate into how quickly somebody was effective and sort of like synced into the rhythm of the team [00:10:39] Bethany Thornton: I would say that we had it to the point that it was after 2 weeks, people were getting in projects those 1st, 2 weeks. It was onboarding. It was having them sit in on. our team sprint planning meetings for, like, the specific team that they were a part of and just observing, and then getting to come back into onboarding with me to, ask me questions. Like, why did they do that? Or, you know, why did this happen? but by week 3, they were fully in our team sprint meetings and they were starting to be put on small projects. we just want you to start getting familiar with, our brand guidelines, like, start getting invested in, our visual identity system. I remember when I joined the team, actually I joined as a designer when I first started at Atlassian and it was like, For the first year, you're still like finding out things. You're like, Oh, I didn't even know that existed. Where is that? Or, Oh, you, someone already did illustrations for this. Like, Oh, where are those? we had all of that information distilled for them within two weeks. [00:11:38] Nish Patel: So that job shadowing that somebody would do in the first couple of weeks, was it somebody in the same role as them or so if I'm a project manager or creative coming in and my job shadowing, like another PM or another creative, or could it be like cross functional? So I'm starting to see how like other people are working in this greater whole. So I understand the whole body. [00:11:59] Bethany Thornton: Yeah. So sometimes we, we varied it. on every page. we had, pictures, we put a picture and then we'd put a little description of the person. So we would say, hey, this is your manager. this is Bethany. She's the creative operations leader. You're gonna be working with her. And then this is your team buddy. they're going to be your right hand, basically, like, you can go to them for anything. and we'd give that person money to get lunch ordered for both of them, even in like, a remote context, they'd like, order lunch for that person and have it sent to their house. and just get to know each other as people, but also like, hey, you're going to be shadowing this person, like, asking them questions. So sometimes it would be. Hey, we have this, person in ops joining, but we want to pair them up with a designer, or maybe we want to pair them up with another ops person as well. And we'll give them two buddies. Or maybe we just want them to be paired up with this ops person because that person's strategic strategically is going to be the most important person for that person to get to know because they're assuming their role, basically, and so, it really depended on the person and how quickly we needed to get them up to speed on something. [00:13:04] Nish Patel: going back to something you said earlier, you're probably getting a ton of ideas from people going like, Oh, why are we doing it this way? Because very often, when we're in it, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. But somebody new coming in going may go. Why are you doing it that way? What if we did this? [00:13:21] Bethany Thornton: Yeah, [00:13:22] Nish Patel: and job shadowing, that is something that I've heard you talk about previously as well, and you've got a background in doing visual design work, so you've probably, got an appreciation for What a creative goes through, can you tell us a little bit about why you would keep job shadowing other people on the team? And what is the value that came out of that? [00:13:44] Bethany Thornton: at Atlassian, especially because that company is scaled so quickly. there was just always things going on that you couldn't possibly know about unless you were. The person doing it, or you were involved in that particular project, or that particular part of the team. and so the best way for me to do my job was, to just get into the weeds, understand things because I, I was building operations from the ground up. very little was documented when I started in the role. so I wanted to make sure that I wasn't just creating things out of thin air and just saying, oh, well, this makes sense to me. Um, I want to make sure that, like, I really understood it and that I was doing right by the people that I was doing it for. 1 of the biggest things when I 1st started was our motion graphics process. so I met with our stakeholders, we had a retro, we talked about, like, past project. We talked about our video process in general and, just learned about, you know, what their pain points were, what were they experiencing, from their side? Because we obviously had our view of how things were going. But we had no idea what their perspective was. So hearing from them was super important. We met as a group and then I met with each of them individually, just to kind of go into things more in detail, from with specific things that I had pulled out of that meeting. and then I met with our motion designers. I met with our, creative director. Just chatted through, like, what were our goals? what were we trying to achieve with the things that we did that, that they perceived in a certain way? and that gave me a whole new perspective on the complexities of it all. there's so much involved. that can get lost in the cracks, and not baked into this, process that you're creating if you're not having those kinds of conversations. So yeah, that, that proved to be an important part of everything that I did at Atlassian was just always making sure I was making time for my stakeholder listening tours, and that I was making time for shadowing creatives, like not just being in, this. Leadership role that can start to kind of get you out of the weeds and the day to day of things that you're not directly involved in. But, I put myself right back into those areas. So that as I was bringing in operation folks to the team, I knew what I was bringing them in for. I knew what kinds of challenges that we were trying to. resolve and that, that made the team that much more successful. And I think that was a huge part of, of all the work that I was doing. [00:16:16] Nish Patel: What are like some of the things that do get lost in the cracks? for example, when, I was working on overhauling, our entire intake process. 1 of the things that I was noticing when people were coming to us with projects is they were coming to us with ideas. [00:16:32] Bethany Thornton: They were just kind of throwing things out there. Like, we think this might be a really cool thing that we were wanting to work on. but when it was coming to us, it was almost being perceived as. This is what we're going to be doing, this is the project, but what it really was, was, hey, we have this idea. We want to talk to you guys about it. and so I made sure when we were coming up with our intake process that we were allowing for that pre conversation to happen. So our intake process started with, hey, is this a new, is this a net new project? Is this a revision to something we've worked on with you before, or is this just an idea that you want to chat about? and so they entered into our portal with those 3 options. And from there, it went into a form for them to to fill in with. as as little information as was needed for us to get the conversation going. we didn't really want to create this barrier to entry, but we also want to make sure that we had the information that we needed in order for it to be a productive conversation. So that is an example of something that could have fallen through the cracks of. Of, intake process, [00:17:45] Nish Patel: I think where we, where many often get tripped up is not the like end all and be all, uh, and you can't just simply point to the process as well, we've already got like the steps in place. You have to constantly reexamine it and treat it like a, a living, breathing thing. And if you've just got your generic intake process, then. A lot of those things are a lot of those opportunities are falling through the crack and it's just creating frustration with people. [00:18:15] Bethany Thornton: Absolutely. and I think 1 of the biggest things is that both sides want is. A partnership, a collaboration. And if it's just seen as, Hey, throw in, uh, just drop in this thing, this project, and we'll work on it, that's kind of defeating the purpose of what we both want, which is, Hey, how can we make this thing better? let's talk about this thing. Um, and we'd even do that with Hey, okay, this is the project that we're going to be working on. We've mapped it out. We're a PMM, a product marketing manager. we've done all of the due diligence on this thing. And we know that these, this is our goal and this is what we need to do to achieve that goal. We'd still have those conversations like, how do we want to approach this creatively? especially for those tier 1, tier 2 projects that are going to have some more, creative concepting and thought behind them. but for. You know, the, the smaller projects that are like, hey, yeah, this is another this is another white paper. That's just like the bread and butter of the business. We just need to make sure that we're just getting this information out. We've done it before a million other times and we want to make sure that we're getting it out to these audiences because we've got some more information. We want to put out there about it. You know, those things would flow through in a different way and we wouldn't need to have, these bigger conversations, but, we always want to make sure that we're a partnership and that. Even in that intake portal, like, Hey, let's talk. Um, that's making it that much more clear. [00:19:33] Nish Patel: I do think that creative operations is like bifurcating into two meta streams. Like one is a scale one, which is more about, I need to do something. We've done this before. Just give me the template or let me do it myself in a tool like Canva or something like that. and then two is more that storytelling where we need. We're taking a new product market. We need. We've got new positioning. There's a new audience. We're going after. It's just a blank canvas. and you need different types of creatives for each one of those streams. Like it's not that one is better than the other or more talented than the other. It's just different skillsets [00:20:10] Bethany Thornton: Exactly. Different needs. [00:20:12] Nish Patel: and different motivations, so you mentioned listening tour. it's probably a term that others have heard in different contexts. was there something specific that prompted you to start these listening tours? and how often would you do them and how did you structure them? [00:20:27] Bethany Thornton: I don't know how it got started. It may have had to do with my manager at the time might've suggested it. She was great. She was the creative director of the team. and. When I was starting in my role, she'd say, hey, you might want to meet with these people. These would be really great people to get their perspective on. And I loved that. I loved that. she wasn't saying, hey, this is the problem. This is what I've heard take this information to do something with. It was like, hey, go and talk to these people. They're probably going to offer some great insights to us. and that really got me going on that journey. and I took it to heart for everything that I did. It was like, okay, I'm going to be working on this thing. Who are some people that I should hear about this from outside of the creative team, within the creative team? You know, who can I get some good insights on, on this from? and so I really made that a part of my, every part of my work that I did. It was like a part of my design thinking. [00:21:25] Nish Patel: was there a way you would identify the people that you thought you should reach out to? Was it the people that perhaps were like complaining the most? [00:21:33] Bethany Thornton: It was always pretty obvious who I should be talking to, depending on, you know, what it was about. It's like, oh, hey, we're having some challenges with, our events work stream. We have tons of events going on. Very few designers working on these things. Burnout. all right, who am I going to talk to here? Okay, well, I'm going to talk with the. program manager for this thing, they're this connected tissue between our team and the events team. They are going to have a lot of insights on this. I'm going to talk with. heads of those events on the events marketing team. is there anyone else that I miss? Cause these are the people that I'm chatting with. And they would often tell me, okay, you should chat with this other person. they're going to tell you some other things that I don't know about, but these are things that we've experienced that we'd like for you to be aware of. and so that always kind of helped me navigate who I should be chatting with. So I wasn't just doing it blindly making these decisions myself. I was asking people. Hey. In your opinion, who else should I talk to now that I've chatted with you? [00:22:26] Nish Patel: I hope for anyone listening that they don't simply gloss over this cause it seems like what you're saying is so obvious and so simple to do. but the reality, and I see this, and it's just not creative operations, it's any function in any organization, the reality is that most people don't internalize and, and act on what you're talking about, which is the answers aren't in the project management system. The signals might be there, like you're saying, Oh, like, This events work stream, there seems to be, you know, a lot more work there's seeing more delays and things like that signals are there, but the answers aren't there. The answers are with the people and to get to the answers, you need to go and talk to everyone involved in that. ultimately, a real creative operations leader that operates at, you know, the a hundred thousand foot level versus at the thousand foot level, they are finding signals and details in the weeds of the project management system, the current process, things like that. But they're elevating themselves then to go and talk to people. and That's where you're going to find the answers and the path forward and getting people to buy into that. [00:23:48] Bethany Thornton: Absolutely. And I think also, you know, as a leader, it's instilling that in your team also, igniting, that curiosity piece of yourself. don't let that thing, go to waste. Use it. It's so important in, in this role that we're in is to remain curious. just as my manager instilled in me that desire to, Oh yeah, let me talk to someone about this. do that for your team. It's so critical. [00:24:15] Nish Patel: How do you think about fostering that people centric approach in a, increasingly remote world? [00:24:21] Bethany Thornton: Yeah. I mean, I, I think we all experienced this, in a remote world, you have to be. So much more, diligent in the things that you're doing things, things don't just happen, you really have to help those things happen as leaders. For example, when we all worked in person, in an office, it was so easy for someone to just lean over and be like, oh, what are you working on? Oh, what is this? people to be sitting around at lunch and chatting about some project that they're working on and just hearing about things that way when we were remote, that just didn't happen as much, especially for people who weren't. as outgoing who weren't joining the different social, experiences that we were creating, um, or weren't, keeping connections with other people on the team, they just weren't hearing about these things. So, making sure that you're instilling that within the team, project sharing while projects are happening, talking about them, bringing those into our. bi weekly all team meetings that we did, making sure people were chatting about, Hey, I'm working on this project. This is what's going on with it. it's a project that everyone should know about because it, because it is a big project and it's going to end up rolling out into other parts of the team. Other people need to know about this thing. or it's just, it's a fascinating project. It's a really cool thing that we're working on and people might be really inspired by it. it doesn't, the type of work doesn't necessarily impact them, but the way that it's being approached is cool. And that's going to be inspiring to people. So we want people to be aware of it while it's being worked on, or maybe it's after the project has wrapped up and we want to talk about the learnings that we had about it. We want people to know, Hey, you know, we did this thing during this project didn't work as well, but this is something that we learned from it, or this project, because we approached it in this way, we were able to achieve these outcomes for the product marketing managers. we were trying to reach these specific goals, and we succeeded them by these things that we. Had conversations with them about and, we're able to up level the project because of these creative decisions that we did. This is what we did. and so it was, you know, it really helped benefit the team. So, as a leader, making sure that you're aware of the dynamics of the team, what you're missing. If you are still working in the context of a remote, a remote first or hybrid. that you're making sure that, you know, the team is connected in ways that they normally would have been connected before without ever having to think about it. [00:27:07] Nish Patel: How did your approach change? Like, how did you remain connected? Were you doing more listening tours? what changes, if any, did you make? [00:27:16] Bethany Thornton: for the most part, we were already, doing a pretty good job of being remote first, because we had team members in other countries and we operated as 1 team. So, I already was thinking about the team in this kind of, remote. Setting and making sure that we were inclusive to people who weren't in the office. So I would say that my general approach didn't change too much. It was mostly. about, those opportunities for the team that my approach. or how I invested myself in the team, the things that I was making sure that the team was doing, with different meetings and rituals that I basically facilitated. I was making sure that we were creating those opportunities for the team. [00:28:03] Nish Patel: Yeah, if I remember correctly, you also worked with like third parties that plugged into your team, right? especially for that, high volume production type of work and that's interesting to me, because I think a lot of in house teams now are increasingly doing that have been for the last few years, but I'm also seeing like, lots of issues with that in that Their need is to like plug a team in pretty quickly. and they often find the right skills, but skills is like one part of the equation, like really making it work is ensuring that team truly feels like they're plugging into the team. what are some of the things that you did to ensure that they were properly plugging in? [00:28:46] Bethany Thornton: if you want to make sure that they are operating as part of the team, you give them the team treatment and that's what we did. They went through team onboarding, they were in the meetings that the rest of the team were in. they were in the social meetings. They were in the, strategy conversation meetings. and that gave them the relationship, aspect. that to me is an important part of making sure that, that, uh, those two players, the, the, the third parties and the actual team are operating together cohesively. [00:29:22] Nish Patel: I think very often, creative operations leaders are in too much of a rush to say we just need to scale up, plug. 10 people, 50 people, 100 people in with the right skill sets. And that's it. That's really just where it starts. even in the selection process is I think way too many things get glossed over because, I think what you're saying is you should almost treat it like you're hiring them. They're going to be part of the team. [00:29:51] Bethany Thornton: there are going to probably going to be some exceptions to this. when we did this with the content production work stream that, was their 9 to 5 job. Basically, it was full time. They were with us. They were doing everything. They were part of the team. There are some vendors that we worked with that were project by project basis. they weren't, operating with us in the same context. but always onboarding, always onboarding, um, that was a important piece for us. [00:30:19] Nish Patel: so I'd like to turn our attention a bit to your taking advantage of your sabbatical. you're, stepping back out into the market now, but. I'd love to hear your, your thoughts on, as you've had time away from like being in the creative operations trenches and you still stayed connected to the community and you're seeing how the community has been evolving, the things that's talking about, the topics coming up at creative operations conferences, After a year away, like, how's your thinking on creative operations evolved or, what are you seeing in the creative operations world? That is, perhaps surprising to you, [00:31:02] Bethany Thornton: I think the obvious thing is, is all of the conversation around AI. I know you've been having a lot of those conversations on this podcast, but I feel like all of this stuff really started coming out. During my sabbatical, which has been really interesting, and I'm actually going to be in a meeting tomorrow with other folks in creative operations around AI and what people are, what tools people are using, what things are people playing with because I find it so fascinating that, it's something that, Really wasn't a part of my work as much when I was doing this and in this one year, just seeing how much is coming out of it. So that's an interesting thing for me. And I'm really excited to, talk with other leaders that are working with these things in their team. So I can see, what other people are coming up with. And so I can stay abreast of all of this. the other thing, that I think is. An interesting thing to be watching, all the ops roles that are coming out there. it seems like there's an ops, person for almost every team that I worked with. So email, web design, creative, the sales team, like all of these teams have an ops component to them. And, um, I think that one of the things that we really should be taking advantage of is. Working together with those people, just the collaboration that can happen, with this partnership, that's going to scale all of our teams so much, in such a more efficient way. And in a way that really energizes the teams, because we're not just creating efficiencies within our team, making things, a smoother process for our team, removing pain points within our team doing it across teams. That is like a huge game changer. And I think that's something that, as ops leaders, that's where we need to be focused. I had a, a great, partnership with, the marketing ops team at Atlassian that I was, I, a partnership that I had been working on for a while, in this, tool that we're bringing in a dam simple, right? We, we needed to bring in a dam to our creative team, but recognizing the bigger picture of this, recognizing that, you know, other teams were reaching out to us for, Hey, where's this? This asset, we're on the email team. We need to be sending out all these emails. Where can we get these illustrations? creating this central repository across the organization, especially within marketing, how huge that would be for the organization. So meeting with them regularly to be talking about the work that we were doing, the interest that we were getting from other teams. wanting to be in on this dam. it was really exciting to see what we were able to do just by having these conversations. [00:33:48] Nish Patel: I'm very pleased that more creative operations folks are talking about this. in my experience, I'm not seeing a lot of doing yet, but it's not surprising. Still very early days. I do think it echoes or reinforces the need for maybe an AI listening tour, like what I'm seeing right now in a lot of organizations is that the individual PMs and creatives and folks in other roles are, there's this Interesting mix of fascination and fear. I think mostly fear of is AI going to take my job away? And I think creative operations leaders would serve themselves in their organizations and, People well to do an AI listening tour. What are people fascinated by? What are they fearful of? and really start to, embrace a culture of open and transparent experimentation, because it's here and roles are going to evolve. even a project management role, AI agents are coming that are going to be able to like, do a lot of the things that a project manager might do today in terms of tracking down information, putting it into a report, even writing the report. and then what are the opportunities for that project manager to evolve into? something more where their time is really focused on more of that human work, that people focused work. so I think an AI listening tour, um, would be good. And then to start to think through, you know, what are the impacts on our process as we start to leverage some of these AI capabilities, and really how we need to think differently about. updating process. I think we're about to enter in a period where process is going to become much more of a living, breathing, continuously, even self updating, tool. We don't know how this is going to unfold, but, I do think we are in store for a very like volatile time in terms of the pace of change, on the operations piece, I think it's such a brilliant thing you did. Cause especially with your marketing operations counterpart, like creative operations and marketing operations. Now, in my opinion, there's a lot of Peanut butter and jelly or peanut butter and chocolate there. They should be talking to each other and collaborating on processes on technology being used and things like that. what creative operations delivers in terms of creative output and content is going to be consumed by the marketing machine and marketing operations is the execution arm of campaigns and things like that. And I think there's so many opportunities to, build more like organizational, like cohesion and collaboration and efficiency by, Different operations leaders working together. [00:36:25] Bethany Thornton: one thing that I, felt inspired by in all of this was I actually have this little, Illustrated graphic that I kept on my desktop that said, work as if you live in the early days of a better nation. And that quote gave me so much energy and everything that I did, because it was like, we're creating everything from scratch here that nothing exists. what a daunting task as the company continues to grow and grow and grow. but if you approach it with excitement of, Hey, We're all working together to create this better nation. Like, how exciting is that? and I think that in operations, that's what we have the opportunity to do is we're making things better. We're creating this, this nation. and it's, Not something to be taken lightly, because, what we're doing impacts so many people, but, I think that it's also something that we can be energized by because, what an opportunity we have in operations to, get to do this and the more that we're working together, as a community to do this, the better off we're going to be. It's such a huge opportunity to define a people centric way of working and really having our cake and eating it too. People enjoy working, within the process. and they're also achieving scale, speed and cost efficiency. It's almost like a by product of this is an awesome place to work because I like the way that we're working. Exactly, and that's really what it was all about for me was, you know, how, how can we make this? This is a place we spend so much of our hours of our day. How will you make this into something that, people are energized by? I don't want to create a system that people are like, oh, my gosh. what a nightmare that we have to trudge through all these processes and whatnot. And like, how disconnected we all are across our teams. what if we thought about it differently? [00:38:14] Nish Patel: Yeah, well, disconnected is, bringing back to my mind, the idea of this body that is working in unison and you could have your creative operations body where creative operations is the backbone connecting creative project management, brand, so on and so forth. and then by working with the other operations groups, it's the, even Larger body that is being like created and working in unison. we've learned a lot from you today. and the way we wrap up every episode is, we ask you, who would you like to hear from and learn from on a future episode of the Creative Ops Podcast? [00:38:51] Bethany Thornton: I was, playing off of what we just talked about. I'd love to hear from. A dynamic duo or a trio, ops from different teams who, have worked together and have achieved something greater between and because of the way that their teams have worked together. so, this true community building great nation. [00:39:15] Nish Patel: I think that's a fantastic idea. Maybe we'll have a creative operations and marketing operations, duo show up on a, uh, upcoming episode. [00:39:23] Bethany Thornton: I love that. [00:39:24] Nish Patel: Well, Bethany, thank you very much for doing this with us today. Uh, there's so much more we could dig into in terms of your people centric approach to creative operations. And, I'm sure we're going to have you back on a future episode, to do that. [00:39:36] Bethany Thornton: Thanks. [00:39:37] Speaker 20: That's a wrap for today's episode. Remember to please do three things. Number one, head over to creativeops. fm and sign up for that companion newsletter. Number two, whatever your favorite podcast player is, please hit subscribe, search for a creative ops, all one word, creative ops, podcasts, make sure you don't miss the next episode. And remember number three, this isn't just my trade curiosity. This is our journey of curiosity about all things Creative Ops. So if you've got a question or maybe a different perspective about what you heard today, or maybe you just want to share something that you're curious about, drop me a line at nish at creativeops. fm. Thanks so much and I look forward to catching you at Creative Ops Water Cooler for next week's episode.