mOperator is a Slack agent built by Vercel's marketing ops team that automates email campaign creation, SFDC campaign setup, landing page builds, and list management. It enables marketers to self-serve campaigns without waiting for MOPs builds.

How much time does mOperator save?

mOperator saved over 200 hours in 8 weeks for Vercel's marketing team by automating common tasks like creating SFDC campaigns, building landing pages, and importing/cleaning lists.

How does the new email workflow work?

The new workflow starts with a Slack request that creates a Linear ticket. mOperator builds the email in Knak, then syncs it directly to Customer.io with proper branding and components. This eliminates the MOPs build queue and approval bottlenecks.

Vercel MOPs Offsite in NYC: Building mOperator Agent

This week my team met up in New York City for a hackathon. Serendipitously, I also had the opportunity to speak at a "Marketing Engineer Meetup" hosted by Knock.

The Offsite

It was a long, rad week. The main thrust of our offsite was to devise a method to largely place campaign operations in the hands of the marketing stakeholder and use our Slack agent, mOperator, to do all the heavy-lifting with respect to email builds.

That's largely what we were able to achieve.

Under the current process, our team manually builds every requested email, and content review only happens once the build is complete. Because feedback arrives late, edits kick off a rewrite-and-rebuild loop — the same email cycles through MOPs and the approval chain multiple times before it ships. The result is queue time, duplicated work, and a hard dependency on MOPs for every send. This doesn't scale well, even at a small-ish company like Vercel.

With mOperator, the requester generates a fully rendered, on-brand email immediately in Knak — no MOPs build step required. MOPs sets the approval chain, content is reviewed, stakeholders approve, and the email syncs automatically to Customer.io before QA and shipping.

There are a few key benefits to this approach:

Faster time to market — Requesters self-serve a finished, review-ready email in minutes instead of waiting in the MOPs build queue.
Capacity unlocked — MOPs no longer hand-builds every email, freeing the MOPs team for higher-leverage work.
Bottleneck removed — With content approved upstream, the post-build approval chain disappears; emails go straight to QA and shipping.
Less rework — Front-loading content review eliminates the duplicative rewrite-and-rebuild loop in today's process.
Lower risk, consistently on brand — Automatic Knak-to-Customer.io sync and reusable components produce error-free, on-brand emails every time.

We still have some refinement and bulletproofing to do, as well as internal socialization and selling, but largely this flow works end-to-end. The best part was we didn't have to totally gut the current process: it still starts with a basic request workflow in Slack.

From there, a linear ticket is automatically created and mOperator builds the email in Knak.

From there, we can sync the email directly into Customer.io, where it's reconstructed with the latest components block-by-block. This ensures emails are always on-brand and error-free, which is especially important with how detail-oriented we are about design elements like margins, padding, and light/dark mode considerations. It even comes in with the correct naming convention to help us stay organized as our database of emails continues to grow.

I strongly believe that Agents are going to change the way Operations work is done, and many things we've accepted as "the cost of doing business," such as massive campaign operations teams and functions, are largely going to be decentralized using agents like mOperator.

The Marketing Engineer Meetup

Our friends at Knock had me at free pizza, but I was delighted when they asked if we wanted to present mOperator. I did a short demo, ~5 mins, just showing the most common use cases that have helped us save over 200 hours in the last 8 weeks of Q1 (when we started tracking usage LOL). Far and away, the most common use cases are creating SFDC campaigns, standing up event landing pages, and importing/cleaning lists.

None of those things are deeply complex by themselves, however they do each carry implications for analytics. Set the wrong campaign type and your campaign may not get the attribution visibility it deserves. Misconfigure the landing page form and we may not be able to opt-in registrants to receive emails from us. Make a mistake on the list import, and the "dirty data" perception in any CRM only gets worse. These are all things an agent like mOperator not only makes easier to execute, but raises guardrails around. It's both a force multiplier and overwatch.

Like Amazon is fond of saying, "it's still day one." The more tools and capabilities we add on to mOperator, the more the value compounds for the business. The vision of making 10 people feel like 100 is very real: at Vercel, we have 3 of us on the MOPs team and ~50 people in the marketing org. I'm not recommending that balance as the north star, but the ratio of operator:marketer is definitely evolving.

And I'm extremely excited to be on the bleeding edge of this change at Vercel.