About the Author
Joshua Prost: Operator. Builder. MarkOps lifer.
I came into Marketing Operations before the field had a name. In 2005, as the first marketing hire at Kaspersky Lab’s U.S. launch, I walked into a job with no CRM, no automation, no website worth cloning, and no playbook — just a mandate to build the entire go‑to‑market engine from scratch. That trial‑by‑fire taught me the patterns behind what makes a marketing system actually work, and what breaks first when it doesn’t. Later, at LogMeIn, I watched a SaaS rocket ship scale fast enough that the marketing engine had to evolve in real time, and those same patterns showed up again — clearer, sharper, impossible to ignore. Over the next two decades, across companies of every size and maturity, I kept seeing the same problems repeat and the same solutions hold up. Eventually, I realized Marketing Operations wasn’t just a job — it was a discipline, one nobody had written down yet. The Marketing Operations Compendium is my attempt to change that: a field manual built from real systems, real failures, and real wins, written for the operators who keep the whole machine running.
The Work That Shaped the Book
This book comes from years spent building marketing engines in environments where nothing was pre‑assembled and every system had to earn its keep. I learned this discipline by designing trial programs that drove real adoption, creating processes that held teams together, and building data foundations that made decisions clearer instead of noisier. I’ve watched attribution turn political, scoring models drift off course, dashboards lose trust, and AI surface problems weeks before humans noticed them. Across all of that work, the same patterns kept repeating – the same bottlenecks, the same breakthroughs, the same moments where the machinery finally clicked.
Those patterns became the backbone of this book: a practical field manual shaped by real systems, real failures, and real wins, written for the operators who keep the whole machine running.
