Empowering Web Teams with WebOps

Christy Marble has had quite the adventure in her 25-year career as a marketing executive. Now in her third CMO role, as head of marketing with Pantheon, she understands the power that comes from changing the way organizations deliver value through their most important digital assets – their websites.

“Your website is the ultimate example of how customers and prospects access you on the internet,” says Marble. “The irony is that it’s actually slower for most companies to update their websites than it is for them to produce their products.”

Marble joined ITWC CMO Fawn Annan for a January 2023 installment of CMO Talks, a podcast series designed by ITWC to showcase strategies for gaining a competitive edge through the intersection of marketing and technology. Their discussion centered around Pantheon’s leadership growing the WebOps (website operations) category in a way that allows cross-functional clients and departments to collaborate quickly and efficiently.

A Front Row Seat to Improved Productivity

“I’m incredibly lucky to have a front row seat into how organizations are using Pantheon’s software to create websites that really drive impact,” says Marble. “We build technology that reimagines the way web teams work, makes life better for digital
creators, and frees them to deliver experiences they are proud of. Our goal is to simplify the complexity of all the elements that go into highly performant, highly successful website strategies in a way that brings value to the company.”

Marble describes the Pantheon team as champions for the open web and says they don’t believe businesses need to acquire a slew of different software. The point she makes is that there are fantastic tools and systems that people can put on top of their web op stack and that Pantheon provides the backbone for that.

An Emerging Category

In reply to a question from Annan about what makes Pantheon different from other platforms involved in creating websites, Marble points to its ability to build best-in-class WordPress and Drupal sites with scalable infrastructure and an impressively fast content delivery network. She also stresses the company’s commitment to testing, developing, making changes, and innovating while websites are still live. “One of the differentiators for us is that we have multiple developer website experiences and workflows, which allows people to continue working,” she says.

On the subject of creating WebOps as a new category, Marble is enthusiastic about the potential in bringing together everyone from developers and designers to content editor and marketing system engineers into one dynamic team of players who may not even consider themselves website experts. “It really is a way of thinking about constant improvement, agility, collaboration, testing, and learning,” she says, “and then challenging what’s working to see what could even work better.”

As the podcast concludes, Marble shares her desire to be one of the many people inside the company who are more attuned to the customer than the product itself. To this end, she advises CMOs to focus on the user experience, to strive for a product that people love, and to recognize and empower their customers. Her final suggestion is to pay close attention to business metrics, and to use them to stop doing the things that are not driving the business forward and double down on the things that are.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada
Suzanne Robicheau
Suzanne Robicheau
Suzanne Robicheau is a communications specialist based in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where working remotely continues to fuel her passion for new mobile technologies -- especially on snowy days.

CMO Talks is a bi-monthly podcast that is focused on conversations with marketing leaders from around the world. 

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