Tech stacks are overrated: It’s the operating model that wins

The MarTech industry has a dirty secret: most of the platforms you bought this year will underdeliver. Not because the tech is bad, but because your people, strategy and data are likely not mature enough to use it. This is NOT a technology problem. It's a people and process problem. And it starts at the top.

C-suites are under enormous pressure to modernise. Buying a platform feels like action: it signals to the business that marketing is serious about data and transformation. But a CDP without a mature personalisation or customer data strategy is just an expensive database, and an AI tool bolted onto a broken operating model is just automated chaos.

The tool is rarely the problem; the lack of defined high impact use cases, objectives, journeys, data requirements and teams to operate it, is. Too often, tools are purchased in silos for a single team’s requirements and aren’t linked to a wider customer transformation strategy. This has to change.

Marketing needs a seat at the transformation table. Before anyone talks about data, tools or tech, you need to define your customer growth ambition, high impact journeys and target operating model to support it. Not the abstract vision in a PowerPoint deck, but a tangible strategy that breaks down: which customers drive growth; across which products, journeys and experiences; led by which teams; against which objectives; and with which processes and ways of working to support it. Locking this down across the organisation will help create a clear definition of the customers, behaviours and outcomes that drive business value, and give teams a shared language against which to execute. It also helps you partner with data and tech teams around the capabilities your organisation actually needs to deliver the vision, and at a pace the business and teams can absorb.

Once you’re clear on that north star, you need to look hard at what you have today. Your people, your processes, your data and your existing technology, how do they support your target state, and how do they work together? Where are the gaps between where you are now and where you need to be?

Only once you can answer those questions honestly can you design the right team structures, training, ways of working, governance, prioritisation and resourcing to unlock your customer growth plans. And only then does the technology conversation become useful, because you know what you’re actually asking it to do, and you can assess whether your current stack can execute appropriately.

This sounds obvious. Yet it isn't how most organisations work, and there's a structural reason for that, one that doesn't get talked about enough.

Nobody owns the end-to-end question, so nobody can own the end-to-end answer.

Today, the division of labour in the C-suite means the CMO owns the customer ambition but not the data infrastructure. The CDO owns the data but not the commercial outcome. The CTO owns the technology but not the use case. The result is separate conversations, separate roadmaps and separate operating models quietly taking shape in parallel.

The result? Marketing teams inherit a tech stack that’s either siloed or too advanced for their current maturity. Data sits disconnected from use cases and channels, roadmaps become bloated, and it takes years to drive value. Meanwhile operating models keep reinforcing silos, not growth.

Technology is not the problem. The problem is the absence of a unified customer growth strategy, and a target operating model, to support the transformation agenda that the CMO, CDO and CTO should be building together.

So, before your next vendor demo, get the CMO, CDO and CTO in a room. Agree on the north star and target-state capabilities, audit what you have, design the operating model you actually need, and then, and only then, go shopping.