Every day — and often multiple times a day — Allyson Maness learns something new.
Indeed, the vice president of operations at Colorado-based AdCellerant is constantly confronted with questions she doesn’t know the answer to.
It’s not that she’s unqualified for her job, but that the boundaries of the role are always shifting. Maness is six years into her tenure at AdCellerant, advancing from campaign manager to director of operations to her current position, and she still finds herself in situations that require her to expand her technical knowledge as a member of the company’s customer success team.
“If someone asks me a question about configuring Google Tag Manager correctly or how to adjust HTML5 assets to work properly, I will research the issue to find the answer and come up with a solution,” Maness said. “After 10 years in the advertising industry, I have found that there is always more to learn.”
It’s through these daily interactions that Maness has grown to become an indispensable asset when facilitating conversations between IT and customer success teams. By being proactive in resolving issues and even anticipating problems before they come up, she said, an ability to consult with customers on the more technical aspects of a partnership allows customer success professionals to create bespoke solutions based on client requests.
Built In Colorado met with three local tech professionals to learn how they gained the knowledge required to step into a more technical role within their CS organizations and offer insight into the growth they’ve experienced along the way.
Describe your current role and the career path that brought you here.
I am the vice president of operations at AdCellerant. I have been with the company for almost six years. I was initially hired as a campaign manager, moved to a senior campaign manager, then to director of operations and now my current role. Before working at AdCellerant, I was with another company for four years that introduced me to advertising operations and taught me a lot of the skills and knowledge I still use today.
In advertising operations, you learn on the job every day.”
How did you develop the technical skills needed to step into this role?
In advertising operations, you learn on the job every day. Through set training meetings and speaking with colleagues, I was able to develop my current technical skills. I’m also a big believer in processes creating efficiencies and filling knowledge gaps, which has contributed to the success of my operations team. When I started at AdCellerant, every campaign manager was managing their own workflows their own way; there was no set process. After stepping into my current role, I was able to define and implement an official process that allowed campaign managers to better manage their campaigns. This allowed us to control costs and mitigate errors.
How have you continued to develop your technical skills in your current position?
I get asked a myriad of questions on a daily basis. These questions could come from my operations team, management, people outside of my organization or AdCellerant colleagues with whom I may not often work. It is through these questions that I can continue to develop my technical skills.
AdCellerant is a technology and digital advertising company focused on making quality digital marketing accessible to every business.
Describe your current role and the career path that brought you here.
My background is in technical support. I was part of an IT help desk team for a large corporation. Today, I’m part of technical customer support at Conga, which rolls up to our chief customer officer, Chris Bishop. As a customer success engineer at Conga, I work alongside customer success managers to ensure customers get the maximum value out of their Conga solutions. If a customer is unhappy, I do what I can to get them to a happy place. If they’re already happy, I ensure they stay that way.
Additionally, my team works to be subject matter experts for the greater customer success team so that, internally, we have go-to colleagues for technical questions and conversations. While this mostly involves being a primary resource for these topics, we also play an interconnected role with other relevant internal stakeholders.
If a customer is unhappy, I do what I can to get them to a happy place. If they’re already happy, I ensure they stay that way.”
How did you develop the technical skills needed to step into this role?
You can divide the primary skill sets for a CSE into two categories: customer service and technical skills. Customer service skills have been front of mind for me my entire career, starting with my first paying job as a seasonal cashier in a department store. Since then, I’ve honed the skills required to “champion the customer” in every role I’ve held.
Beyond that, the technical skills and know-how that allow me to thrive as a CSE began with my first role at Conga. The technical support space is an ideal area to develop them. Due to the nature of the role, you have to become intimately familiar with the products. I’ve become incredibly knowledgeable about them and the experience we want to deliver across a variety of customer use cases.
My earlier work on the technical customer support team helped me polish both skill sets, providing practical experience and opportunities to grow. Partnering with customers in the field directly required me to learn the products to the best of my ability. This ensured I was well-equipped to handle nearly anything thrown at me.
How have you continued to develop your technical skills in your current position?
I’ve been blessed to work at a company that strongly values enablement and professional development. My manager encourages my team to take the time needed to complete internal training and certifications. She also supports us when it comes to shadowing and call reviews to learn more about use cases and best practices.
We also make sure to work together as a unit to discover and uncover new features and functionality as they’re released. This is so we remain trusted advisors and bring value both internally and to our customer base.
Finally, Conga makes a variety of instructor-led training and online resources available to support colleague learning. This extends beyond technical learning to include management and leadership training, as well as special seminars on topics like emotional intelligence and growth mindset.
Conga helps businesses increase revenue generation and optimize commercial relationships.
Describe your current role and the career path that brought you here.
As a technical account manager, my current role involves helping our clients integrate Duda within their own system and workflows. This includes product education, technical whiteboarding sessions, quality assurance and troubleshooting. My goal is to be the product expert our clients can turn to for guidance to get the most out of our product and succeed.
I started my career in tech after completing a coding bootcamp. During my time in the bootcamp, my passion for computer science and programming grew, though I also learned that the engineering lifestyle was not for me. My first role was on a support team as a technical support engineer. Through this role, I found my love for mixing programming and client-facing interactions and saw the knowledge gap our clients had when it came to product implementation. This led to me creating an implementation engineering role, which entailed assisting our prospects and managed accounts with product implementation and testing. My experience led me to join Duda as the first technical account manager and help develop the team under the customer success organization.
How did you develop the technical skills needed to step into this role?
Attending a coding bootcamp really helped create the programming foundation I needed to get started in the tech field by developing skills in different areas of a tech stack. After completing the program, I continued my education learning React and Node.js on my own. This led me to find great online resources, including various forums and communities, which forced me to learn more about services like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Deploying my own projects helped me gain an implementation perspective on the obstacles companies face when integrating a new product into their platform.
Improving my expertise in both of these areas allowed my team to own certain projects that would normally require assistance from our R&D organization. We have been able to improve our migration process to help clients move their websites over from other web hosts to Duda. Additionally, having this visibility into how R&D and customer success organizations function independently helps me visualize how to best assist our clients when having discussions about their implementation. This vantage point also allows me to be a liaison between both sides of the organization.
I make it a priority to try to keep up with the latest news and trends so that I can be a helpful resource for our clients.”
How have you continued to develop your technical skills in your current position?
The thing that I love most about Duda’s clients is the diversity of verticals in which they work, which also adds diversity to the tech stacks I am exposed to. Tech is alway advancing. I make it a priority to try to keep up with the latest news and trends so that I can be a helpful resource for our clients, who are similarly evolving alongside market trends. I spend some time each week reading up on tech news on various blogs and news sources, as well as joining different Reddit communities and taking part in various conversations.
I also enjoy being part of larger organizations like Latinas in Tech and Women Who Code and attending their events. These organizations provide an opportunity to communicate with leaders in the field and lean on their expertise.
The great thing about my job is that I get to play around with our products a lot, with loads of flexibility to take on projects that are interesting to me. Along with continuing to develop my tech skills, I get to test out anything new that I have learned and figure out how to best apply it to our product from a client’s point of view.
Duda offers a web design platform — as well related services — to small businesses.
