How Marketing Teams Can Build Better AI Operations

Breanna Lawlor: Most of us are using AI every day, but using it and knowing how it works are two very different things. The gap between these two is showing up in your pipeline, your content strategy, and your team’s ability to keep up. If you’re a senior marketer trying to figure out how to build real AI infrastructure, setting your organization up to operate in a sustainable way with AI, this conversation is going to reframe how you’re thinking about it.

My guest is Andrea Saez. She’s the head of product marketing and AI go-to-market at Turtl. She’s also the co-author of The Product Momentum Gap. She’s the person who became her company’s de facto AI operations lead, mainly because she started tinkering before anyone else did. In this episode, we get into a wide range of topics.

We start with what it takes to build shared AI context across a team, why your content strategy may need a full rethink now that LLMs are the new front door for buyers, what neurodivergent-friendly leadership looks like in practice and why it produces better results, and the critical thinking gap that opens up when we hand too much to the machine without checking what comes back.

I’m Breanna Lawlor, this is The CMO Club podcast. Andrea, welcome!

Thank you so much, Andrea Saez, for joining me here on The CMO Club podcast. I’m Breanna Lawlor, host of the podcast, and I’m very excited to sit down and talk with you today because you’ve got a few topics that are extremely relevant right now for marketers, product marketers, and really anyone working in any kind of digital facet of their work.

And I wanted to invite you to share a little bit about who you are, what you do, and some of the work that you’re focused on right now.

Andrea Saez: Sure. Thanks for inviting me. My name is Andrea. I’m head of product marketing at Turtle, and I’m also co-author of the book, The Product Momentum Gap. And I like to tinker with stuff a lot, which is great because I’m tinkering with AI recently.

It’s been interesting, fun, weird, spectacular, scary. There’s so many words you can attach to that.

Breanna Lawlor: I feel like there would be an endless stream of words depending on the day, and some days you have wins, and other days you’re a little bit frustrated with the whole thing. Now, your work, your role in particular, is head of product marketing, but I have a sense that this has grown in the last little while.

It’s evolved. You’re kind of in charge of things that maybe arguably are outside the scope of your role. Would you like to speak to that a little bit?

Andrea Saez: So product marketing is a really interesting role because we are generalists, but we also specialize in what we do, if that makes any sense. But what I’ve noticed is that product marketing tends to kind of take the fall for a lot of things that go wrong.

Oh, the pipeline isn’t working? Oh, it must be product marketing. The messaging isn’t working? Oh, it must be product marketing. We’re not getting picked up by the AEO stuff? Oh, it must be product marketing. It has nothing to do with us, but we’ll fix it. Because we’re strategists, we’re really good at kind of diagnosing problems, but it doesn’t mean that we should be doing everything.

I just want to make that very clear.

Breanna Lawlor: I mean, of course not. Who wants to be responsible for all the trouble and none of the glory, really?

Andrea Saez: Me, apparently.

Breanna Lawlor: Obviously, you’re in such a position where you have the skill set and the knowledge to work to solve those issues, but you’re also working in lockstep with a few other heads of within your team.

Can you speak to the relationship and the dynamic?

Andrea Saez: I work in a very unique company because as head of product marketing, I sit with marketing, so I work very closely with brand and lead gen. Those are the two heads on the marketing side. But I also sit with product, so we have a product leadership team, and I am part of it.

My VP of marketing is part of it, the CPO, the CEO, and obviously the head of product. And what that gives us is just a very unique commercial lens. When it comes to anything that they’re building, that they’re gonna work on, and we have kind of steps that we go through to evaluate possible solutions, and discovery, and any work that’s getting done.

So, I actually, I really appreciate that ’cause obviously my background is in product. It’s really great to be able to kinda see things through from the discovery end all the way into going to market.

Breanna Lawlor: I imagine. And can I ask just as a quick sorta segue, how did you make the leap, and maybe this isn’t a big leap, it might just be a little sashay from product into product marketing, and why did you choose that path?

Andrea Saez: I usually say that I just like to talk a lot, and that’s kinda what happened. I actually, I like to write a lot, but I like creative stuff, and I think with product marketing you do have a little bit more leeway when it comes to narratives and creativity and storytelling, and I kinda just decided to pivot that way because who likes to write PRDs or user stories?

And I was like, “Oh, let’s go this way.” No, to be fair, now with AI it writes your PRDs and your user stories, which is great, but I still kind of, I really enjoy the writing and the creative storytelling and the narrative and that’s what attracted me to product marketing originally. And I still get a lot of the strategic and the problem-solving, which is great.

Breanna Lawlor: I imagine. And thank you for sharing that too, and also you probably have a, a good chunk of face time still with your user base to get a read on what they need or what they’re coming up against friction-wise.

Andrea Saez: Yeah, I mean, that’s- Kind of what you have to do both in product and product marketing, right, is make sure that you’re constantly talking to people.

On the product marketing side, you get a little bit more exposed to the buyers, so kind of before, you know, at the top of the funnel, a little bit before they actually become users. But that’s all market research, and I, I really like the research part of things. And so luckily product marketing still has a lot of that.

Breanna Lawlor: I have spent a tiny bit of time in market research, and I find that it’s really great for challenging any kind of biases or preconceived ideas you have. It can be great for validating them, too, but it’s really nice because it takes you outside of yourself and your own perspective, and it gives you a wider view, a more accurate view of what’s going on, and then your opportunities for making that better, for improving things.

In that same vein, you had mentioned AI is writing your PRDs. Now, AI can’t do that on its own. It needs someone to inform what a good PRD looks like, and you had shared previously a little bit about the finessing that went on behind the scenes in order to get all of your departments working cross-functionally with the same AI brain, for lack of better terms, the same context that they’re working within.

How did that come to be, and how would you describe sort of what AI operations needs to be for a product marketing team but also a larger organization?

Andrea Saez: This is like a 30-minute chat right there. I’ll try to keep it brief. What most people fail to understand when they talk to ChatGPT or to Claude or to Perplexity, Gemini, whatever it is, is that you ask a question, and then an output comes out.

And then you ask another question, another output comes out. And then you ask another question, and you keep going. But all the outputs are not connected to each other. So what ends up happening is you waste a lot of time having to repeat yourself over and over and over and over again. In order to fix that, Claude actually has a solution, which is, as part of Cowork, you can actually create a folder.

And in that folder, you can include something called Claude MD, which has the project knowledge base And then you can add things like a memory file. I have something called Task Observer, which actually observes how I work, and then it updates all of my skills. So it’s like a self-learning skill that updates all of my skills.

So inevitably, as you’re working, you can… might make mistakes or it might deviate. It just go, “Hey, actually, make sure that in all the relevant skills, you’re not making this mistake,” and then it adds that in. So it’s like a self-learning tool that it has. So everybody has access to the same knowledge base, the memory files, and as you’re working and as it learns about how you work, what you like, what you dislike, any other context, then it adds that context as part of this co-work folder, so the next time you go and do the same thing, it already understands the outputs that you’ve had.

It understands the context. It understands everything. And so you can get to what you want a lot faster, and that’s part of just smart prompt engineering, right? Not having to repeat yourself, making sure that your prompts are accurate. I was talking to Yi Lin Peh. She was saying, “Oh, you know, it just kind of feels like a lot of people are struggling with Claude.”

And I’m like, “Yes, because you don’t have all of these things.” And then the prom- on top of that, needs to be very precise in order to not waste any time. She was like, “Wow, that’s… I didn’t know that you could have all this stuff.” A lot of people don’t, right? And that’s just part of creating this operations where any skills that you have, you don’t want them existing in isolation because it’s fine as a one-off, but if you’re constantly working out of the same set of skills that are shared with other people, you wanna make sure that it has the same set of context, otherwise, that’s how it starts hallucinating.

Breanna Lawlor: It almost seems silly that this wouldn’t just be the norm, but it’s that lack of knowledge and taking it to the next level and having a dedicated person, it seems, to put this into place and to make it accessible to everyone, to constantly have it be informed to evolve and be useful. There’s so many different factors, and we still all have our day jobs and need to do what needs to get done.

So this almost seems like a step outside of the scope of your role. How have you kind of just deemed that this is something you need to take on ’cause no one else is doing it? Are you the de facto AI operations person just because you have that inherent knowledge? Like, how did this come to be that you have this- and you’re making it so for your organization?

Andrea Saez: For me, in particular, it just happens because, like I said, I like to tinker a lot with stuff. Last year in October, I started experimenting with AI and building my own tools and my own skills and my own everything and different tools and just testing different things.

And I think that kind of inherently put me in a position where I can do this. I’m someone that likes to learn a lot by themselves and break stuff apart, figure out how it works. So it just kind of fell on me by accident. So I’m kind of taking care of the operations side, but also the, what we’re calling AI go-to-market.

So how do we go to market with AI? What a lot of people are seeing, especially as I understand it in Q2, it’s not just at Torabl, but everybody, everybody that I’ve spoken to, they’re seeing a big dip in, you know, people coming to their websites, and it’s because people just aren’t going to websites anymore.

They’re querying an LLM, and they’re getting a list of vendors that might fit whatever prompt that they’ve put in. And it’s really tricky because people think that you can rank in an LLM, but you can’t rank in an LLM. There’s no ranking. The best you can do is try to get picked up as much as possible.

You could ask the same prompt 15 times. If you appear 12 of those, great. You’re doing really well, but it takes a lot of work of ensuring that the content that you have is answering the question that you think people are asking as close as possible, and there’s no way of actually knowing what question they’re asking.

Breanna Lawlor: That’s probably the most frustrating part. There’s no way of knowing. You just need to try and position yourself as strategically as possible so that you may get picked up, and you structure it in a way that you maybe have learned works for these LLMs and the various, the forms that they take. Exactly.

Andrea Saez: Content is actually becoming longer and longer and longer and longer because you have to try and put all of this stuff in, but no one’s actually reading it. The content we’re creating is really just for the LLM to be able to extract it and then spit it out in some prompt somewhere.

Breanna Lawlor: Exactly. It’s like, give it something to digest.

We’re not sure what’s gonna be… It’s like a buffet, and there’s gonna be a few things that appeal to some LLMs and some that don’t appeal at all, and they’ll never show up no matter how good it is.

Andrea Saez: And it also depends on how the person structured the question. And then on top of that, the, the layer on top of that is if the LLM gets to know the user in a very specific way, then it’s going to give the output that it thinks Better serves the user, not necessarily the query.

So a good example that I think I gave you is I was going on vacation, and I went to Claude and I said, “Hey, help me figure out, like, where I can go to dinner when I go to Amsterdam.” And it recommended something that actually I really liked. It was great for me. It was fantastic. But my partner had queried that same thing, I don’t think they would’ve gotten the same results because it would’ve recommended what they know about that particular user versus what it knows about another particular user.

But it doesn’t know that they’re necessarily going together or the likes and dislikes of, you know, multiple people in a group unless you actually put it in and go, “Hey, I’m going on vacation with 20 other people,” right? Or three other people. In this group we have people that have this, this, this, and like this, this, and like, how much time have you now wasted?

Breanna Lawlor: No kidding. And what I’m hearing is context is everything.

Andrea Saez: Absolutely. Now, if you set that onto a B2B context-

Breanna Lawlor: It’s guesswork at best.

Andrea Saez: Exactly. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m trying to figure it out.

Breanna Lawlor: Yeah. That experimental lens that you referenced, you know, starting back in October and building tools and tinkering with AI, I think it really serves you well in your role as head of product marketing, but also just in the nature that we’re living in right now.

To be experimental, to try things out, to see what might stick. We don’t have all the answers. That’s fine, but we’ll get information, we’ll get data back, and then be able to use that to inform our next decision.

Andrea Saez: Absolutely.

Breanna Lawlor: You had also shared a little bit about the difference between neurotypical and neurospicy, having been fortunate enough yourself to align with one of those, and also work with folks who you also consider to be neurospicy.

Can you break that down for me in sort of the way you like to work, how it serves you well, and what you’d recommend for others working with neurodivergent folks in a way to get to a really… You’re all striving towards the same goal. Doesn’t matter how you work, but let’s figure out a way to collaborate.

What would you recommend?

Andrea Saez: So I’m in the neurospicy camp, and I wasn’t diagnosed like many, many women until about six or seven years ago. So I was about… Well, I’m not gonna tell you my age, but I was an adult. I was diagnosed late. I had no idea. It was a bit of a surprise, but it really helped me to understand how I work best, how to get the most out of my time, how to focus better, how to be a lot more efficient with my work why I need certain settings.

I mean, being neurospicy, things like lights. Yeah, when I first walked in and my lights were off, right? If the lights are on too bright, it can really bother some people. I need complete silence. Other people need music. It’s very, very different for everybody. There is no one box fits everyone. But I’m very fortunate that the direct team that I work with in marketing, we both, the three of us actually, come from a mental health background.

We’ve all worked together previously, and so we understand our differences, we understand how we communicate with each other, and I think that gave us the strength and the empathy and the baseline to be able to create a culture with other people on our team where they also feel supported.

Breanna Lawlor: All of our one-to-one center team meetings always start with, “Hey, how are you feeling?”

Andrea Saez: Wow. Right? As a person, how are you doing? And I remember when I was training one of my young PMMs, my first question to him was always, “Hey, how are you feeling? Is there anything I can help you with? Is your life going okay? Are you stressed out?” And I remember him telling me, “No one’s ever asked me that. No one has ever asked me how I feel and how I’m doing.”

And I’m like, “Well, I care about you as a person, right? If you’re stressed out or if there’s something going on in your life, you’re not going to perform well at work, so I need to know how are you, right, as a person. How are you as a person? Then, okay, what can I help you with? What’s on your plate? What… You know, let’s talk about what’s going on.”

And I think that’s just a very human way of approaching relationships and, like I said, on our team, that enables us to treat each other as a team, not as people going up against each other. So we are in a situation right now where we’re having to redo the website, and there’s all this AEO stuff that’s happening.

And luckily, in terms of my PMM work, I got ahead of work. So the positioning, the messaging, the copywriting, it’s all done. So I turned around and I said, “Okay, what can I help with?” What a gift to your team. So now I’m gonna be on website building duties for the next week or two, and that’s just gonna be my job, and I’m gonna help because we’re a small team.

We’re quite a lean team. And despite that we get really, really great results. So it’s all because we’re open to helping and working with each other. Otherwise, it’s… it would never work.

Breanna Lawlor: Completely. And that’s the beauty of a small team, is that you can be nimble. You can look and see, “You know what?

I’ve got capacity. I’m gonna help you out here. And then maybe in the future, when I have reduced capacity, I could need support, I can then leverage that.”

Andrea Saez: And we don’t even have to ask. We just go, “Hey, you know, I need this. Can you help me?” And we just bounce off each other that way. But I, like I was saying yesterday, I don’t think I’ve been in the office in about three or four months, but it’s because I have so much work that going into the office…

for me, being a UDHD, just the trip into the office is overstimulating. Sitting in the office with people is overstimulating. I have to come back, and then the next day I’m really tired, and so I’m just like, “Listen, I need to work from home.” And my manager’s like, “Fine. No one needs to come in.” And I don’t think we’ve really been in that much because we just have so much work.

That it’s the way to support each other is to go, “We’ll work remotely.”

Breanna Lawlor: Yeah.

Andrea Saez: And it’s great. And we actually saw each other yesterday, and it was fantastic to come back together for a day.

Breanna Lawlor: It’s so nice. And there is a difference between going to an office and sitting with 10, 15 people, and going one-on-one and having lunch with someone or having a deep dive co-working session.

Completely different, especially if you are sensitive and you find that you’re spending so much time processing your environment, you’re not able to use your- Yeah … brain and your functions the way you need to to get a boatload of work done.

Andrea Saez: Yeah.

Breanna Lawlor: It’s actually really interesting ’cause I’m not as familiar with sort of the culture in the UK.

I’ve visited, but as far as work, is it an anomaly to have a remote work opportunity given the role that you’re in right now? Or do you find this is the norm, whether it’s industry or just location specific?

Andrea Saez: In my experience, I’ve seen quite a few teams that require people to go in two to three times a week, especially into London.

So I, I live in another city. A lot of us live in different cities around London or the South Coast. It’s about an hour or two away. And most companies will say, “Well, as long as you come in two or three times a week, that’s fine.” But two or three times a week can be costly because trains here cost an arm and a leg.

It’s a lot of time back and forth. So I’m very, very lucky that I work in a culture where they understand that the best talent sometimes lives a little bit further away, but they can still do their best work working remotely. And that also shows trust, right? So our engineering team is actually in Slovenia.

They all work remotely from home, although there is a little office. A few of our PMs, CS people, VPs, like C-levels, we work remotely. But we still do a really, really good job because we have a lot of communication. So working remotely doesn’t mean you don’t get to talk to anyone. Not at all, but it does mean that I have a lot more sort of focus time that I do have is really intense because I have the environment that I need to do my work.

Breanna Lawlor: That makes a ton of sense. And thank you for sharing that too. I think it’s an important note because a lot of folks in North America are being called back into the office, and there’s a certain purpose that serves, but it kind of forgets about the other components of work. Yeah. So it’s like it serves one thing, get bums in seats, but then it’s not serving the get work done in the way that people need to work.

So it’s just… It’s always kind of a trade-off, right? And it’s nice to hear your organization is not just sympathetic, but really thoughtful and proactive about how it’s supporting its team in working.

Andrea Saez: Yeah. And like I said, we still have team days. We had a team day yesterday. It was great to see the sales team, and, and the product team was also in, so it was really great to see everybody.

And now it’s like, okay, back to work , right? We’ve got this deadline we’ve got to hit, and I need quiet time to focus. A lot of other folks also need quiet time to focus. Like I said earlier, some folks, I was in the office yesterday, they put on music and it’s really loud ’cause that’s what motivates them, right?

And I’m just like, “Nope.” Nope.

Breanna Lawlor: Nope. Canceled all the way.

Andrea Saez: But I can’t… But because they need that motivation, I can’t be like, “Hey, turn it off because I need silence.”

Breanna Lawlor: Exactly.

Andrea Saez: So that’s why I just put in my loops and go quiet time.

Breanna Lawlor: Way to go. Yeah. Yeah, just being considerate of your fellow person. There was something that we touched on a little bit earlier, and I just wanted to ask you kind of blue sky thinking-wise related to the AI operations role, and this is a loose tie to the remote work component.

Because obviously if you have async communication like Slack or another platform, doesn’t matter where you are as long as you can communicate with your team when you need to. Now, when you’re all trying to work off of this same contextual AI markdown file or contextual project, if you were to hire an AI operations person to take this role, this wasn’t yours anymore, you were looking for someone to do this work, what traits would you look for, and what role within your team already do you feel is well-suited to migrate into an AI operations dedicated role?

Andrea Saez: I don’t know how to answer that because it all feels so new. But I would say as long as you can be organized , and that could be anyone, and you like to tinker with stuff, which are generally maybe engineers or product people or product marketing people, if you’re a problem solver It’s the right direction, but you need to be really, really curious and just really have this notion that AI is going to be wrong, right?

Not trusted. And I was having this conversation with someone earlier about kind of like the ethics of AI and how it’s impacting work in general, and just saying that I notice a lot of younger people just outright trusting everything that it’s saying and not using some critical thinking skills, and just going, “Oh, copy, paste, send email, copy, paste, send email.”

And I’m like, “But are you reading what it’s saying?” All these people that are like, “Oh, I just have the AI write the emails for me.” And I’m like, “But why? Why are you trusting it? How do you know that the information is actually accurate?” Because I use AI to update some blog posts, right, for AEO. I updated about 15 today, and I can assure you that of those 15, at least 12 of them had incorrect information.

And so I’ve gotten, as part of my skill, I now say, “Once you’re done writing, check yourself and tell me what you’ve done wrong before you give me the output.” And it goes, “Oh, actually, I didn’t follow this rule, this rule, this rule. I overstated this metric.” And I’m like, “Great, now write it properly.” But you have to have that inherent knowledge of what you want that end goal to be, and also have the wherewithal to get it to check itself, because- Exactly, and even when it checks itself, I still find stuff that I’m like, “Oh my God, this sentence structure again,” “Why are you doing this?

I asked you not to do it.” You cannot outright trust it. It’s still a machine, right? What people don’t understand is it’s not actually thinking. It’s looking at patterns and then spitting something else out, but it’s not thinking, and that thinking process is where we come in as people. And somehow this whole conversation ended up in part of it or a lot of it, I think, has to do with this eight-second memory that we now have where we just like to scroll and we’re not absorbing information.

How are people going to learn anything if we’re trusting it, we’re not paying attention to what it’s saying, and we’re just spitting out whatever is on the other end? And how are we learning then from it? How are we learning from this whole process? So if you’re going to be in AI ops, you have to be curious.

You have to have those critical thinking skills of going, what this machine does is context comes in and an output comes out. And you can set the guardrails in the middle, right? To make ensure that there’s a workflow and ensure that it’s learning from itself, but you still need to check the output.

Breanna Lawlor: I think that’s really important.

Andrea Saez: You cannot maybe you can trust it up to 92.5%, but the rest, not so much.

Breanna Lawlor: Yeah. And there’s a risk there if you just, you know, pump stuff out without, without checking it, without trusting it, without having a second set of eyes, whether it’s yours or someone else’s with a different lens.

Andrea Saez: Yeah. And you can’t trust it indefinitely either.

Just because the output is great nine out of 10 times, it’s still gonna start failing, and there’s all these experiments. I don’t know if you’ve heard of, of like people creating a society with ChatGPT and Claude and whatever, and then letting it run over time, and it has certain rules. You know, you can’t kill the citizens in your village or whatever, and every AI has a different output.

And I think one of them, I can’t tell which was which, but one of them ended up killing all the citizens, wiped them out. And another one, they started fighting each other. And then I think Claude was the one that said, “Well, I’m going to eliminate myself because I can’t harm my citizens,” and like self-harmed itself instead of harming its citizens.

And then it put them all together, and then ChatGPT started attacking Claude. They started fighting with each other. Like it was a whole thing, right? Even though it had guardrails to not do certain things, it still did it. Right? It’ll work to a certain extent. And I think it timed it to okay, after seven days, ChatGPT failed.

After two weeks, the other one failed. And then after, you know, however many weeks, Claude exed itself because it just couldn’t handle. You’re laughing now, but it honestly, it is a warning, right? For the fact- It’s a warning. It’s a warning. Now, put that into a B2B context. If you just set your guardrails and let all these agents work unchecked, what’s going to happen?

That’s why we need AI operations, to make sure that those checks are in place. And when I worked at this mental health company, yes, we had an AI for mental health, but it couldn’t just go unchecked. You had to have a team of psychologists, of reviewers, of everything just ensuring that it wasn’t hallucinating.

It would read through scripts anonymously and just ensuring that it is giving the right advice, the safe advice. And there’s a lot of work that goes into that. There’s a compliance component that’s probably a whole other- Oh, that’s a whole other thing. Of course. And so it takes a lot to ensure that this is happening.

So from a B2B business, if you’re going to be in AI ops, you have to take that into consideration. On top of that, there’s the ethics, right? Of is the output still within- The bounds of what you want it to say, and how do you control that? And so there’s a lot, there’s a lot that goes into that.

It’s not just, “Oh, I’m in ops, I’m a project manager.” No, no. There’s ethics, there’s project management, there’s, you know… You j- you have to keep an eye on it.

Breanna Lawlor: You do. And in the absence of a dedicated AI ops person, the onus is on everyone in that organization touching AI to do that work so that everyone remains safe. And that requires that logical thinking, that critical thinking from the person, and not just going, “Oh, well, great.

I’ll just copy paste this into an email.” Totally. This is probably a little bit off tangent, but do you have any suggestions for newer generations or people who are relying on AI, you know, without checking themselves, to improve upon their critical thinking, their judgment skills, and also their, their know-how?

Does it really just come down to reading and interacting with others, or is there something else that can be done to not just have that baseline trust when it’s not warranted?

Andrea Saez: I read a book. Read a lot of books. So I’m on Goodreads, and I set myself a challenge to read X many books per year. My current goal is 66 books for this year.

I’m already lagging behind a little bit. But I think that’s a good challenge to have, right? Whether it’s an audiobook, whether it’s like you’re actually sitting down and reading, whatever it is. I think disconnecting from constant scrolling, TV, whatever, and just having a moment to focus is really good.

The other thing that helps me a lot is doing something crafty. I like painting or color by numbers or coloring books for adults. Those are great, love ’em. There’s, that’s a whole industry. I think having that or as a lot of people like knitting or something that’s crafty, right? That just kinda disconnects you.

I think it puts your brain in this zen mode that we need to be able to take a pause sometimes. And taking a pause is what we seem to not be able to do. We don’t pause. Everything is boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I’ve had a headache for the last three, four days, and I’m like, “Why do I have a constant headache?”

And I realized that I’ve been going from waking up, go to the gym, go to work, play video games, endless scrolling, and then going to bed, and I’m like, “I need to stop.” It’s literally my mind was just connected to something all day. I never took the time to just disconnect and go, “Okay, I’m not gonna look at a TV, I’m not gonna look at a screen, I’m not gonna play with AI.

I just need to turn myself off.” And whether that, like I said, that off is do something artsy, read a book, connect with other people, have a conversation that doesn’t involve, “Hey, I saw a Reel or I saw a meme,” or whatever, actually have that conversation, that is what I think we’re lacking more and more and more and more.

Breanna Lawlor: That’s true. I feel like there’s gonna be some kind of reckoning, and maybe it’s already happening. We’re recognizing this I don’t like the way I feel when I’m constantly on, on, on. And I need to pause ’cause I’m human, right? I’m not a machine. And as soon as you do take that pause and you come back, there’s this clarity of perspective.

You have this renewed energy. You’re able to do better work. And so really, the rest component, and I say rest lightly, the pause component, is what allows you to then move forward again. But if you just keep asking and asking and asking and not giving that, that pause, you’re not gonna get anything good.

Andrea Saez: Yeah. I actually, I put my Slack on mute as of 5:00, and I’m like, “That’s it.” I’ve done my hours. This is it. Nobody needs to reach me. And I remember talking to someone that’s a CEO, and I’m like, “Okay, but,” I’m like, “let’s be realistic for a minute,” right? I understand you’re CEO. Your job is very, very important.

But are you saving the world? You’re a B2B. Are you doing anything that warrants you having to work till 8:00, 9:00, 10:00 PM? Like, why aren’t you spending time with your kids? It’s a close friend, by the way. I’m not just saying that to anyone. And they kinda thought about it and “Actually, you’re right.”

And now they put themselves on mute at 5:00 PM. It’s like, if it’s an emergency, if anything’s on actual fire, you can call me. This is what I tell my team. If anything is actually on fire, call me. You have my WhatsApp. If not, I’ll answer you tomorrow because there is nothing that’s happening. I’m not saving the world with Turtle or with any with any B2B that I’ve ever worked at.

I’m not saving the world. There’s nothing that I can do at 6:00 or 7:00 or 8:00 or 9:00 that I can’t do the next day. And my mental health is a lot more important. My relationships are a lot more important. My me time is a lot more important because I write that blog post now or I create this landing page now, it’s not gonna change anything.

Do it the next day. Spend time with your kids. Spend time with your parents. Spend time with your loved ones.

Breanna Lawlor: Yes. Work is a facet of our lives. It is not the be-all, end-all of why we exist.

Andrea Saez: Exactly. And that feeds into critical thinking because you need that empathy. You need that to make sure that you’re keeping an eye on the output.

Now all we have to do is read. You don’t even have to do the job anymore.

Breanna Lawlor: What a gift to just be able to spend days reading, seriously.

Andrea Saez: Just read. That’s all you have to do.

Breanna Lawlor: Thank you so much for this. We’ve covered a lot of ground here, and obviously you’re very skilled at what you do and have a very thoughtful approach to existing just in general.

And thank you for sharing some of the- I try … that have worked well for you, too, because it’s not without going through or dabbling into burnout that you discover, okay, what should I do differently? And then also talking to others who have had the same experience, too, and it’s really important to share that knowledge.

Andrea Saez: Yeah. And I just wanna make it clear, when I made that comment to my friend, and even to anyone listening, I know your jobs are important. I love my job. I so love my job. I cannot imagine doing anything else. But I also understand that I’m not saving the world, so let’s, let’s just be, like, a little bit realistic about it is you can take time off, and that’s what I keep telling people is your mental health is the most important thing because your job doesn’t define you.

You spend a lot of time with it, but you are not your job.

Breanna Lawlor: No. That healthy disassociation allows you to do better at your job. Exactly my point. So good. Okay. Thank you. Let’s cap it here. Andrea, it was such a pleasure talking with you about all of these different topics that are extremely relevant to working in the age that we’re in, so very much appreciate you taking the time to connect with me.

Andrea Saez: Yeah. Thank you.