PurePerformance - Data Driven Automation in Digital Marketing with Nina Tollefson

Episode Date: January 17, 2022

Who said that automation and data-driven decisions is only for DevOps or SREs? Scalability challenges or quality constraints are just as important to digital marketers like Nina Tollefson, Art Director at Dynatrace.The pandemic caused many events to transform to a fully virtual. That was also true for Dynatrace’s flagship annual global user conference Perform in February 2021. To successfully transform and deliver a flawless experience for Perform attendees, Nina had to embrace automation in her field of work. Just as DevOps engineers Nina updated her tool chain. Figma was a new digital marketing platform of choice to automate, improve collaboration, become more efficient and scale her digital marketing work to support Perform. Today she can cash in on the automation investment she made last year as Perform 2022 is about to start. Thanks to data-driven digital marketing automation it looks like another amazing experience for our global Dynatrace user base. Thanks, Nina, for sharing your story and allowing us to draw many parallels to the DevOps & SRE world.Show LinksNina on Linkedinhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/nina-tollefson/Dynatrace Performhttps://www.dynatrace.com/perform-2022/

It's time for Pure Performance. Get your stopwatches ready. It's time for Pure Performance with Andy Grabner and Brian Wilson. Welcome everyone to another episode of Pure Performance, even though I think this intro has probably been played now by Brian, who unfortunately today is not with us. Brian Wilson, my co-host, he's the magician behind the scenes, but also behind the microphone who couldn't make it today. I'm sure he will be back next time. But I do have a great guest with me, Nina.

And instead of incorrectly pronouncing, I'll give it a try. Nina Tollefsen. And I'm sure I got it wrong, but Nina, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm great. How are you? Very good. So how do I correctly pronounce your name and where does it come from actually?

Tollefsen and it's Norwegian. So most people will say Tollefsen, but it's actually Tollefsen. But you are very close. Hey Nina, first time on the show, hopefully not the last. Yes. But as you are the first time on the show, and I think you told me it's the first podcast for you. It is my first. The first. Do you want to tell the audience who you are, what you do, and maybe not just what you're doing right now in your job, but also what you did before? Sure. Yeah. So I have been at Dynatrace for almost 4 years now, which is crazy to say. It feels like

it's been a lot longer and shorter at the same time. But I started as a graphic designer here. It was when we only had 1 person on our brand team. Now we're up to 11. So we've had pretty tremendous growth since I've been here. And I have gone from graphic designer to senior designer and now art director at Dynatrace. And sort of as our team grew, we got to kind of sort of settle into our little niches of the brand team. And I have settled into Perform. And I am the art director of Perform, which takes a village and is certainly a full-time job year-round. So I am quite busy these days. Yeah. And talking about quite busy, I think there's a couple of things I want to quickly highlight.

First of all, you are, with your role, an unusual guest for us. But as we will then discuss the topic, I think it makes total sense because the topic today is a lot about automation. And automation is what has been driving our discussions over the last years, typically around software delivery and software operations, but you're bringing in a different angle of automation. That's the first thing I want to say. The second thing I want to say, you talk about amazing scale, right? Because Diamond Trace itself is an organization, like many organizations out there, we need to scale in different aspects. We scale our software,

but we also scale our organizations. And you said from one to 11 in four years in the team? Yep. Yes. And we are currently hiring even more. So continuing to grow pretty quickly. Yeah. And I assume, and this is one of the points

of discussion later on, obviously you can scale with adding more bodies, right? That's one way to scale, but we know that's just one kind of answer to the problem of scalability. The other coin is automation or the other side of the coin is automation

and getting more stuff done, even though you only have limited resources available. I think that's it. And the third thing, and we'll cover all three in detail, is you brought up perform. Perform is around the corner, right? Just at the time of

the recording, we have five more weeks, I think. Yep. Almost there. Almost there. And first of all, I think we want to just tell the audience that is listening in, in case you haven't yet heard, perform, even though we would have loved to do it hybrid. So in-person and virtual, we had to make the tough call to do it fully virtual. It is what it is. I think it's the best, unfortunately, for everyone. Well, I guess we don't need to explain why it is. I think everybody knows about it,

that the health and safety of everyone is more important than just being together and have fun. But Perform, last year, or actually this year, 11 months ago, triggered the reason why I'm talking to you, why I brought you on the show. Because it was Dave Anderson, who was kind of Mr. Dynatrace, Mr. Brand Ambassador. And he worked with you. And he said, he left Dimetries in the summer, but then he sent me a LinkedIn message and said,

Andy, you'll need to talk with Nina because what she did back for Perform 2021 was amazing. It's a great automation story. So get a hold of her and do a podcast with her. Thank you, Dave. And now, Tina, can you explain us a little bit actually what happened back then and why you're on the show? Yeah, so Perform, while I've worked at Dine and Trace, has always been a massive effort. And I was kind of the only art director. I had some production team support, but we really just, it was an all hands effort

and it was just, it's a massive effort putting on Perform. And each year, you know, we are scaling Perform, we're making it bigger and better, but not adding more bodies. So it got kind of harder each year that we did perform, but we always pulled it off. And then 2021 was our first time ever doing a virtual perform. So there was certainly a learning curve and lots of trial and error, lots of pivoting,

lots of working really quickly in one direction and having to suddenly change to another direction and so in addition to just like the standard sort of massive effort that you would have to put around a perform you're constantly having to redo it redo it redo it and like try sort of new software and programs and strategies and things like that. So it got to the point where it just felt impossible. It was overwhelming. I was not getting very much sleep at all. And of course, we pulled off an amazing perform. But I was not doing so well. I was very exhausted, very overwhelmed, and never wanting to do anything like that again.

So because of this difficult experience where we couldn't throw new bodies at the problem, I had to think of how to get myself out of this problem in different ways. And of course, working at Dynatrace for so long, automation has been top of our sort of marketing message. And so I learned of this new program called Figma that we were just starting to experiment with wire framing websites with. And I learned of the automation capabilities behind Figma and just sort of took off in the direction of automating

everything after that. We want to make sure that, by the way, that we reach out to Figma. Because I think the story that you're telling here is a perfect testimonial to also the services that they provide. Oh, it's completely changed our workflow. It's changed my life, to be honest. It sounds dramatic, but it has because not only did it ultimately make my life easier and it wasn't easy sort of getting to the point where we are now, where it's a well-oiled machine. It took probably, I would say, five months of continuing to suffer and learning this

new program and trying to figure out how to automate all of our workflow. But at this point, now that we have pivoted to a fully virtual event, Figma has actually been an incredible tool. It's proven again how instrumental it has been in helping our team scale without necessarily adding more bodies. For example, you make a master component that has the date info and designates the virtual versus in-person date info. We just have to change that now in one place. And every single place that we have now used that information, it's automatically going to populate. There's no manual changing. There's no risk of making typos with all the different places you have to change the information

like has happened in the past. And it's just like that. Like, it's amazing. It's truly like hours of work that has now taken one minute. Yeah. And I think this is why this is so interesting for me, right? I come from the software engineering side. And I think we also are challenged with the same things. Because I remember when we were sitting down in Waltham,

I was there in, I think, October, November timeframe, and we had a little chat in the cafeteria. And you then told me, at Perform, I think one of the amazing things about Perform is that we're not only doing it in English, but we are providing it for different languages, for different geographies. That means we have different landing pages, different... I mean, we really make an amazing, I think we're doing an amazing job in making sure the whole global community kind of, you know, connects to perform. And that's a lot of effort. But if I draw the parallels with software engineering, there we have the same problem. You have one piece of software, but then you need to run it with different small flavors, right? And in software engineering, we call this often, you know, we do AP testing, we do in

Canary deployments, we're using software with feature flags, where we are, like what you are doing, we are externalizing certain parameters into config files, and then we can run the same instance of the same software, just with different input parameters. So the software, you know, change it once, but then all the input parameters make sure that, you know, it shows up in the right place for all the different flavors you wanted. And I think this is why I really like the, while you are marketing and I talk a lot with DevOps engineers

and side reliability engineers, it's still a very similar thing, challenges that we're facing. And automation is one piece, and externalizing data is another great concept with what Figma allows you to do. So it is really phenomenal to see these parallels. Yeah, no, I know. And it's funny because the entire time I've sort of been like crafting this whole process and transition to Figma and automating all of sort of our workflow,

I have been constantly drawing those parallels just because I'm in marketing. So I've, I've been in, you know, very hands-on with his messaging in my four years. And I'm like, wow, I feel like I'm living kind of like the Dynatrace customer experience and how it's changed my life. Hey, so I think it should also be a message for, for everyone out there, right? Not just software engineers, not only marketeers, whatever role you're in,

think about it that you can do more with less in the end, right? Automation is key. Now, can you tell me a little bit on, I mean, obviously you moved to Figma, that was one thing, but was this, and I don't know, you were told to look at Figma, I think, or did you find Figma? Did you first figure out, hey, there's a certain manual task you're doing all over again, and therefore, you decided to find something that can automate it?

Can you walk us a little bit through the process again? Yeah, so it's sort of a combination. We're previously using Illustrator and Sketch mostly. And my boss had learned about this new program called Figma, which seemed to be sort of like quickly being adopted as standard for website design and website prototypes. So that was sort of the use case for us, just giving it a try.

We just downloaded the free trial and we hadn't even signed on with them yet. It was just a quick little ask of us to just see what we thought. But as soon as he said that it had automation capabilities, my mind clicked with, well, what else can we do with that? Is it just restricted to website design? Can I design ads, social templates, email banners? What else can we do here? And come to find out that there are also tons of plugins that you can even build yourself. They've made it so that it's pretty user-friendly. You don't have to be a coder to build a plugin. But there are tons of also public free plugins that you can use to even

further customize the programs for kind of whatever you need. So even print we can use. So yeah, so it was introduced to me by my boss, but just as a free trial, try it out, see what you think for wireframing a website um but yeah at that time was sort of my peak uh overwhelming time and so that's where i sort of clicked and said what else can we do like how can i how can i get out of this like sort of insane pile of work that is completely unmanageable like what can we do here? I remember a quote, but I don't know who made, where I heard the quote from or from whom, but it's kind of like, if you do the same thing manually more than, you know,

once a day or once a week, if you have a certain task, you're repeating all the time. I think even if it's just like once or twice a week, then I think it should be a task that you put on top of your list to automate. And I think hopefully this is something that our listeners can take home with them, right? If you are, if you're feeling here, why do I need to copy paste these things from one system to another, just to create a report every week, but do it every week.

If it only takes 10 minutes, but if you can eliminate those 10 minutes, 10 minutes times 52 weeks is a lot of time. Right. And also think about the other things with automation. It also means that not only you can do it, but others can... Or let's say others can trigger the automation itself or the automation can do it themselves. And therefore, it frees you up from working. So it's funny you say that actually because um so i am automated

our templates to the point that my boss yesterday asked me to just give him a template to plug his copy into and that he would do it himself which is unheard of like it was such a um sort of point of like a proud point for me that i had built the templates to a point that like he could just go in and do it himself. But another thing about the program too, is it's in the cloud. So all anybody can be in the program working together at the same time. And that's not just designers kind of working on the file itself. Like we can have all sorts of different teams in there providing feedback, reviewing in a sort of live scenario.

Whereas in the past, it would just be such a manual handoff, all kinds of tools required to communicate, provide feedback for the developers to inspect. So now with Figma, developers can actually inspect the file right within Figma to get their specs in order to implement the designs on the website or ads or however we're using it. It's so funny. Again, I always have to draw the parallels to Dynatrace, right?

Because what you just said is, first of all, you started with the free trial. Obviously, I think in most modern software companies that sell software or software services have a free trial to get you hooked on it or show you the value of it and you found the value in our customers that see our free trial with the same thing but then you said right everything is in one place but you have different stakeholders that do different things but still it's the same data set there's no copying from one tool to another but you have a break in technology where there's a chance of error it's like in data trades you have all the data technology where there's a chance of error. It's like in Dynatrace.

You have all the data for your developers, for your SRE, your DevOps, for your business, for your infrastructure people. But then we give them the individual view that they need. So the infrastructure people will get the information from the Kubernetes clusters, from the host. The developers look at the code base. They can all share that data very easily and then collaborate. And I think it's just phenomenal that you are talking about

a completely different software product, but there's so many things that they have in parallel. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And also even just the gaps of communication that can happen between like email and JIRA and, you know, like the different teams sort of working in silos in their own tools to all be communicating in one place has been incredible. So it's like,

this hasn't even just changed my workflow and my sort of life and my job. It's kind of changed everyone's. Hey. And so we have five weeks out to perform. I think by the time this airs, maybe we're like three to four weeks out to perform. I think we're all looking forward to it, right? Even though it's just virtual, but thanks to the work that you are doing,

it's going to be a smooth experience for everyone. Is there, like, I want to take this as a chance to also inform people what they will hear at perform, what they see at perform, right? I know you've been working a lot on the content for performance. Do you have anything that even you as a marketer who said this strikes out to me?

This is why I think Performance is going to be a great event for our community, for our customers, partners, and people that want to become Dynatrace customers in the future. Yeah, I'm personally quite excited to see Simone Biles. I think that even though she isn't quite in the tech world, it's sort of like me, I guess, even though I work for Dynatrace, I am in the tech world. It's sort of like me, I guess, even though I work for Dynatrace, I am in the creative sort of aspect, the brand, I'm not quite so into the

technology side of Dynatrace. But yeah, she's obviously a game changer. She, I think, is going to have some really interesting perspectives on sort of how to look at standards differently and to sort of ignore the norms of how you're supposed to do things and how you're supposed to see things. And yeah, I'm pretty excited to see her. And I guess thinking outside the box as well, and then, you know, the theme is game changers, right?

So like she has been a game changer in the way in her sport and in her role, you have been a game changer in her sport and in her role. You have been a game changer for Dynatrace to make sure that we can actually deliver these events to our customers. You're supporting the whole end-to-end user experience when it comes to reading about the event, signing up for it. And I think that's why I think game change is perfect. And you are you're part of the team of the game changing team oh i'm happy to hear that i have i'm happy to fall underneath that um umbrella i'm really much looking forward to um to having kelsey hightower uh on stage even

though i would have obviously loved to see him live on stage because i am co-hosting the keynote with him i um i'm sure just seeing him virtually virtually will also just be amazing because he has a lot of things to say. He's Mr. Kubernetes and pretty sure many people have different names for him, but the Kubernetes is kind of the world that he lives in, that he educated, and it's great to have him on the show and educate our community about the power of Kubernetes, but also the challenges, the complexity, but also how we can tame this complexity with bandwidth trace and how Kubernetes can become a game changer for organizations in the future.

Yeah. Yeah. So what is next for you? I mean, I know Perform 2022 is coming up now. Obviously there's still a lot of work to do, I guess, even though with all the automation. But what's next? So what's next? So now that I've freed up so much of my time, I get to take on even more. So Dynatrace Go will be next. But I think just continuing to now look into

automating. Honestly, I've gotten such a passion for it. And I've really only touched the surface with Figma, especially just because of the whole massive library of plugins that you can use to automate your workflow in all kinds of new and unexpected ways. You can build your own. I think there's just so much more I can do. I might be automating myself out of my job. Who knows? We'll see. But yeah, just sort of seeing how far I can push this thing. That's a good comment.

I wanted to bring this up because automation, it's a blessing. And for some, it's a curse, right? Because some people fear automation, that it takes their job away. And you just brought up a statement that I first heard from Nestor, one of our back then customers, not colleague, Nestor Zapato. He was working for Citrix and he was on stage and he was saying every year he's trying to automate himself of his current role, but into his next role.

And I thought that was a pretty cool comment. And I just want to... So from your perspective, you don't see automation as a threat to your job. No. Actually, I would say I really like Nestor's perspective there. I would say that's exactly my perspective as well. Yeah. Automating myself into my next role,

getting these current responsibilities off of my plate so I can get on to sort of something bigger and better yeah like that yeah but it also means i mean i want i understand some people's fear obviously because it also means constant change right it also means constant change for you because you're automating stuff that you do now well but you automate it and then you are moving into a new thing where you need to learn new things. Yes, absolutely. I would say I'm personally excited by that. I know change is scary to a lot of people, but for me, I find it exciting.

Yeah, it's cute. I think that's the right attitude because the only constant thing in life is change. I'm sure this was also a quote from somebody famous before, but I think that's just the way it is. And I'm sure there are certain maybe ways to get through life. This was also a quote from somebody famous before. But I think that's just the way it is, right? And I'm sure there are certain maybe ways to get through life without ever changing. But I consider this also a little bit boring, I would say. Yeah, exactly. A little change is good.

Yeah, change is exciting. As long as you stick with the observability platform, it should be done at least. Yes. Very nice. Nina, is there anything else we've missed? the platform that should be done in place. Yes. Very nice. Nina, is there anything else we've missed? Is there anything, part of the story, things that you were excited about that we've missed and we want to make sure we need to cover?

Let's see. Yeah, I would say one thing we haven't touched on as thoroughly quite, that's sort of also changed my life in this job. Via Figma is just the sort of the room for error with making manual changes and having to implement them in a ton of places when one little thing has to change.

That's been a massive perk of Figma is just changing something in one place and it automates everywhere. You don't have to worry about sort of like becoming numb to reading that same little bit of copy and a ton of different assets, a ton of different places and missing one little character, misspelling or whatever. It's there.

It's automated. You don't have to worry about it. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. And as you said, I think there's two things you brought up here it's it's a um the the the chains of error right because obviously if you do things manually yes you get good in it but there's a chance that you are just you know at some points not dozing off but you're kind of like losing focus because yeah i'm doing this and then you type the wrong thing and then i think it's also the the fear

that you are just getting so used to just doing the same thing all over again and kind of getting into this wheel of, yeah, I'm just, I think this is where people, hopefully I'm not offending anybody, but this is where people may also then start getting lazy and just like accepting the status quo and just say, okay, I'm doing this well and I'm doing this all over again

and this is all I want to do. And, but the error aspect is really important, yeah. Yeah, and there's also, I mean, I'm doing this well and I'm doing this all over again and this is all I want to do. But the error aspect is really important. Yeah. And there's also, I mean, nobody wants to do that type of work, you know? So where's the passion? There's no passion in doing that type of work. So it is so easy to get lazy, I think, in those types of tasks.

So yeah, another sort of side effect of that, of not having to do those things anymore, is you get to do the type of work that you are passionate about and like sort of the reason you did get into the role you got into and the field you got into. Yeah. And then the other thing maybe to add to this, obviously if you have automation and if with a click of a button, let's say many different things get updated. If you make a mistake in the input, it obviously gets updated in all different places in the wrong way.

But thanks to automation, you fail fast and then you can recover fast. I think that's also a nice thing about automation. Yep, absolutely. Perfect. Hey, Nina, I wish you all the best for the remaining time to perform. I know you still have a lot of work to do and I know it's going to be an awesome event. And thanks to you, it's going to be a game changer event.

Oh, thank you. And hope this was not the last time we have you on the show. I'm sure there's more coming out of the... I hope so. From your end, yeah. Yeah, I think we'll have even more automation to talk about next time around. Yeah.

I want to hear the next topic, maybe just a suggestion, right? Don't have to comment on it, but I want to hear how you in your job, as you're designing all these web properties, how you're using Dynatrace to also get feedback from how our customers are interacting with these web properties. I want to know. LUCIA MANTELLA- Interacting with the what? Interacting with the websites

that you're building, interacting with the registration pages, interacting with perform. I want to see if there is a, yeah? LUCIA MANTELLA- Yeah, actually. So in the past, when we were working in these kind of offline style of products, programs, it was very difficult to produce assets. So it took a long time to produce them. We couldn't produce a lot of them. But now with these automated templates, we have been able to get a ton of ads out into the world. And we've been able to A-B test

and really get important data and feedback back on those ads really quickly and be able to pivot really quickly. And it's definitely been a game changer for the advertisements, for sure. That's great. Yeah, I think that's also

another nice aspect. Whether the automation allows you to react fast to the impact that you have with these changes. Yeah, and even just getting the quantity of ads out that we were able to do with the number of people we had working on Perform would have been impossible in the past before Figma. Yeah, data-driven marketing automation.

Yes. That's basically what it is because you use the data that you get from the automation to drive the automation. Yep. Yeah. Cycle. Yep. Perfect.

Okay. Hey, with this, Nina, thank you so much. And it was a pleasure having you. And hopefully, you know, there will be time where we can travel again or we can see each other in person yes and i want to say uh sorry again that brian couldn't be here i'm sure he would have enjoyed it and uh additional questions but uh there will be another podcast with you and we'll have him okay thank you so much for having me this has been great thank you for everybody that is listening in,

if you're still interested in Perform, just go to our Dynatrace website or go to perform.dynatrace.com. But I'm pretty sure it's probably impossible to misperform if you find any, if you go to the Dynatrace website. Join us for the keynotes. Join us for the breakouts.

We also have hands-on training days, the first two days. So make sure if you want to learn something, if you want to do some hands-on with Anitrace, to join us at that event. It's first week of February. With this, all the best and stay healthy. Bye-bye. Bye.