I took some extra time this year before writing my recap of MOps-Apalooza 2025. Once again, it was an incredibly valuable and exhausting. I am an extrovert, but still, being “on” for 3 days straight just turns my brain into mush. It probably also didn’t help that my flight was delayed so I messed my connection and got in late and missed the opening keynote (yay for air travel during the government shutdown!) and then took the red eye home on Wednesday, but I’ve loved attending this conference every year. While Mopza may not be returning in this same format next year, I hope that the spirit will survive and we may see it again in the future.
Takeaways from MOps-Apalooza 2025
Once again, the place where your internet friends become your real life friends (looking at you, Sara McNamara, Alysha Khan and Michele Chopin!) was still the best opportunity for networking and nerding out with fellow practitioners. This year, it felt a little bit like there was a sense of sadness that this might be the last time we all got to do this again for a while. That said, here are some of my takeaways from this year’s event.
The AI Hype Cycle Continues
Consider me still firmly in the trough of disillusionment or perhaps on the edge of the slope of enlightenment as it relates to the AI hype cycle. There are some things that AI is REALLY good at (getting you 70% of the way there on an idea, categorizing and summarizing unstructured data), and others that it just fails spectacularly at (surprisingly, counting?).
I believe the real winners will be those that use AI to accelerate and empower their human operators, rather than replace them. If you’ve ever mashed the 0 button on your phone trying to exit a terrible automated phone tree, you know that sometimes, a human is just better suited to a given problem.
As AI gets more and more sophisticated, perhaps this gap will shrink, but today, at least, I still want to have the option to eject from an automated experience and talk to a human. Maybe I’m just becoming an old man yelling at a cloud (the cloud?), but I’m not ready to turn everything over to our robot overlords just yet…
The old way is “dead”
MQLs are dead (buying groups are in), Paid Search is dead (GEO is in), traditional MAPs are dead (composable stacks are in), blah blah blah and so on… There’s a lot of this type talk going around, some from tech bros on LinkedIn that you can safely ignore, but some of it I think is real. I don’t think we can get away the all the same tactics we used 10 years ago for generating demand and pipeline, but at the end of the day the businesses and teams that succeed are the ones that help people solve real business challenges efficiently. If you’re stuck in any one particular mindset and are unwilling or unable to adapt, you’ll get left behind.
It’s the little things that count
Throughout my career, I’ve approached conferences with the mindset that if I can learn one thing to take back and apply to my professional life, it’s worth it. When I’ve been a speaker, I’ve always tried to present topics that I personally would find valuable as an attendee, but this year I found those nuggets of wisdom everywhere. Whether it was in one of the many, many incredible sessions, or talking with a speaker afterwards, or chatting with friends old and new over coffee or an old fashioned, being surrounded by hundreds of people who have been there, done that just can’t be beat.
>>Related: My Top 5 MOPs Opinions I will Die on This Hill to Defend<<
My Session Resources
This year, I presented a sort of lightning round of tips and tricks I’ve picked up over the course of my career. I pitched the idea to Mike Rizzo at last year’s conference while eating pizza and waiting for my ride to the airport, and thankfully the attendees voted for it to make the cut. I imagine most people already know most of these things, but my goal was that everyone would walk away with at least one thing they learned. You can find my slides here.
