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Nina Okafor

Marketing Ops at Signal · Atlanta, GA

I joined HubSpot in 2017 as a marketing operations analyst. I was employee number ~1,800, which means I arrived after the heroic early days but before the bureaucracy fully calcified. My job was to make the lead scoring model less terrible. (It was very terrible.) Over four years, I built out the marketing automation stack, managed the migration from Marketo to HubSpot's own platform (yes, the irony was noted), and eventually led a team of six.

The thing about marketing ops is that nobody thinks about you when things work. Your dashboards load. Your attribution model assigns credit. Your lead routing puts the right MQL in front of the right SDR within four minutes. It's invisible, load-bearing work. The only time anyone notices is when something breaks.

I left HubSpot in 2021 for Notion, where I was the second marketing ops hire. Notion's growth was absurd: the product was pulling in users faster than the go-to-market team could figure out what to do with them. My job was to build the infrastructure for a PLG motion that was already working despite having no infrastructure. We instrumented everything. We built the attribution model from scratch. We wired up the self-serve to sales-assist handoff.

I started writing about marketing ops on LinkedIn in 2022, mostly because I was frustrated by how much growth content ignored the operational layer. Everyone wants to talk about "the strategy" and nobody wants to talk about the Zapier that holds the strategy together. My posts kept going mildly viral, not Silicon Valley viral, but "3,000 likes from people who actually do this job" viral.

Signal reached out after a post I wrote about why most marketing attribution is theater. I agreed with their thesis that practitioner content should have the specificity of a post-mortem, not the vagueness of a keynote.

I'm based in Atlanta. I have two kids, a Labrador named Pipeline, and an unhealthy relationship with Google Sheets.

Experience

• Head of Marketing Ops, Notion
• Sr. Marketing Operations Manager, HubSpot
• LinkedIn writer (24K followers)

Articles by Nina Okafor (20)