Over a year ago I spent too much time thinking about AI pricing models. I was surrounded by folks who weren’t interested in doing math and preferred “we’ll just figure it out” methodologies, which failed, in my opinion.

So, in this read, I wanted to recast my own journey figuring out AI pricing and the journey I’m still on with dozens of other founders.

…

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Good morning, and welcome to a special edition of Growth Stack Mafia.

Today’s post is co-written with my colleague Brett Browman. Over the last few weeks the two of us went down the rabbit hole with one of our companies that is, to use the technical term, crushing it.

They’re a B2B business 3x’ing ARR with net revenue retention around 180%, and they’ve m…

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This edition of Growth Stack Mafia is brought to you by Bright Data.

Bright Data Scraper Studio turns a plain-English description of the data you want into a running scraper API, with proxies, browser rendering, and CAPTCHA solving already handled.

Anyone who has run their own scrapers knows the hard part comes after you write them, when a site changes it…

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• How Anthropic’s marketing ops team really uses AI (and what I’d do differently)

• Cutting through the “AI brain” hype

• What to actually build, and where to put it

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• We are so so back!

• Joining Khosla Ventures

• Lessons learned from 90 days and 100 founder convos

• Attention Maxxing

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In this week’s edition…

1. 🔥 New Paid Courses on how to dominate marketing with AI at ClaudeMarketers.com

2. Some more Claude tips for the week

3. Services are Sexy again

4. Good reads, good tools, and good jobs

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I’m still working on Attribution Part 3.

If you haven’t read Part 1 or Part 1.5 on Web Attribution or Attribution Part 2 yet, go check those out. I think you …

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Mentally and physically, February was exhausting. But this last week, it all turned a corner. More sleep, a stable sc…

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You know, I had spent the last three weeks looking forward to beautiful 60-degree days, sunshine, and runs along the Marina and Presidio.

I’ll still be getting those runs in, but damn, they are going to be cold and damp. Less sunshine than needed after three weeks of brutal ice-escapades in DC.

My mind ha…

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I’ve been on an attribution bender lately, and today we are continuing it.

Why am I focusing on attribution? Well, first of all, it’s like one of the seven Horcruxes of marke…

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I’m veering from technology a bit this month because fresh perspective and renewal are the themes of January. Countless friends are in the midst of rethinking their careers, so I thought I’d share something I’ve thrown around to a dozen of them.

Below is a structured document you can use to evaluate any opportunity - whether it's full-time…

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If you’re one of the 13,000 readers that joined me last year, I want to thank you. I received so many messages from folks engaging with what I’ve written, asking questions, and supporting my work. It meant the world.

I debated sending this earlier in December, but every t…

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1. Casey Winters SuperMe and what it means for the future of the expertise economy

2. Hightouch Agents and the move towards the omnipotent marketing platform

3. Reforge Build laying down an epic ad unit and strategy

4. Cursor 2.0 and how we are finally (probably) arriving at the real prospect of a $MM 1 person s…

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1. Nobody gives a shit what you call yourself

2. Lessons from my observations serving 12 founders across 10 years

3. A detailed therapy case from a series C founder building marketing

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1. Forks vs Spoons: how loss changes you.

2. Change is the only constant

3. Life is a random walk: a variant of the fundamental attribution error

4. MDP: Marketing data platforms are becoming in vogue

5. Hiring marops: focus on marketing strategy first, then tools will come.

Hi readers - I skipped the newsletter last week. To be frank, I couldn’t gather the strength to write. The thoughts were there, but when I sat down at my keyboard, my mind could only turn to other things. We had to let our beloved greyhound, Chloe, go the week before.

This wasn’t our first family member we ever lost, and it also wasn’t our first time feeling immense grief. In fact, it felt all too familiar.

In a podcast my wife and I listened to, it was said that most people’s lives resemble spoons. The smooth arc of the spoon representing the journey through life unblemished by hardship. In the beginning figuring out who we are and building lives worth living, and in the end, the slow arc of the spoon representing the inevitable decline.

Spoons get small chips and dents with intended use over time. But they remain smooth. Until they don’t.

Spoons eventually and inevitably become forks. Forks are made from the crucibles life demands of us.

From losing a mother or father far too soon, from seeing brothers lose their lives in the battlefield, seeing your pet slowly die in your arms wondering if you did the right thing, or losing a child to stillbirth when you were expecting a happy ever after.

Loss is loss. These are all losses I’ve heard people share recently as I grapple with my own grief.

Loss creates rough cuts in you that never go away. It changes your perspective, and how you’re able to operate. And yes, sometimes it can dull the fire in your belly, temporarily or permanently.

Loss makes you a fork. And if you’re a fork, it’s easy to spot the forks from the spoons because loss fundamentally alters the way your move through the world.

It’s not a badge of honor, it’s an understanding of life and death and a greater acceptance of our mortality and limits on this earth. It’s an understanding of what deep grief feels like, and how difficult it can be to move through life when it happens. It’s acceptance of the limited control we have over events in our lives.

Managing change

Loss can also be an opportunity to invite change — even if it feels unwelcome at first.

Since 2017, all I’ve ever known is having two greyhounds. Shortly after joining my first startup, Branch, we adopted our first boy, Balou. Then a year later, convinced he was depressed and needed a companion, we welcomed Chloe into our family. Turns out he was just a lazy greyhound, and not depressed. Our lives couldn’t have been more full with the joy they brought us.

In my mind, it feels like yesterday. I have incredibly vivid memories of those early days and the moments over the last 10 years as we transformed from young to full adults. Those ten years would be full of change: We moved apartments, moved across the country, moved jobs, bought houses, experienced loss with them. But there was the constant beat of their presence behind it all. Always something to fall back on. Normal meant coming home to them, daily dog walks, nightly routines.

You don’t realize how much of your happiness is tied to these small habits and rituals and the presence of them until they are gone.

At first the emptiness is unsettling, but over time, it allows you to imagine something new. Change is hard, but its the only constant you can count on.

Managing it? Well, there is a whole lot of rigorous intellectual work around it. My two cents: There is no silver bullet to grief, acceptance, or managing change. There is only one path: to experience it fully, embrace it, deal with it and after days or weeks of not knowing how to continue, you figure out a way to continue.

But to those who might be dealing with unexpected and perhaps unwanted change, I’ll tell you a secret: the best remedy is sharing what you’re going through with others, as terrifying a prospect that might be.

Life is a random walk

This leads me to a meta point I’ve been noodling on lately. Like the stock market, life is more of a random walk than anyone would like to admit. Consider that your life is a function of:

• Where you were born

• Who your parents were

• What genetic traits you inherited

Each of these — which are completely out of your control — controls what eventually becomes you. They are all essentially random events. Cards flipped over from the top of the pile.

The essence of you is created inadvertently by others. However, at some point in your life, you start to gain conscious control of your actions. Well, kinda.

We just established that the foundation of your life was random. Thus, the when, and how of your consciousness is also random. Did your parents read to you? Did they have the resources to put you in that sports program? Did you do your homework or not? All of these events make up what we will eventually call your conscious ability to control events.

But are these conscious choices?

Eventually, they become conscious. You bear responsibility for your actions and you have the capacity to change your life. You can read, you can exercise, you can choose your life partner, you can choose to stay or leave the job. These are not all random events, but actions.

But still, there is the undercurrent of chaos in life that rears its heads to remind you you’re only partially in control.

Did you really choose your partner? Or did you meet the right person at the right time? How much of that choice was luck?

Did you really choose to leave that job, or did you not have the skills and the outcome was inevitable?

You can read everyday, exercise every morning, wake up and be a good human, plan a brilliant life, have kids, love, laugh, be joyful, empower others, lead a great career.

Or you could die unexpectedly.

So what is it: are we in control of our destinies, or not? Life is a random walk because of the very nature of this question. Like the stock markets, you can make money. You can buy low and sell high. You can make choices that enable a better outcome. But you can also fall prey to luck, to chaos, to chance.

That’s why life is as much a random walk as the markets. It doesn’t mean that you should despair, but it does mean that hard work and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is only a partial picture of what’s happening in anyone’s life. As you consider your own life and what happiness looks like, you have to consider the role that active choice plays vs luck.

Now, some people will look at this as a defeatist view. Since you can’t control luck, why bother even considering it. The answer is simple: it’s impossible to ignore. We are bombarded everyday by reminders of luck without acknowledging its impact. The story of the 18 year old prodigy who created the company, the Christmas cards with your friends big beautiful family, the promotions you see rolling out on LinkedIn daily.

Luck drives outcomes as much as choice. This can be a freeing notion because it allows you to accept that you don’t have full agency. There will be things you can’t control, and that’s okay, even if sometimes it feels like its horrible and not okay. If your life isn’t what you want it to be, you have the ability to change it. But not every life you see around you was created through active choice. A variant of this dilemma and viewpoint is called the fundamental attribution error, where people tend to inaccurately attribute someone’s actions and behaviors to their character as a pose to their circumstance.

The Marketing Data Platform

While life might be a lot like a random walk, the recent trend of building a “marketing data platform” isn’t.

In the last month, it has come up in > 50% of the calls I’ve taken with large enterprise clients. In fact, its central to one Fortune 500’s 2026 plans, and some version of it is central to a leading CDP provider’s future bets.

But… what is a marketing data platform?

If you google the term you won’t find a key vendor that pops up. That’s because it’s vendor agnostic, and currently undefined. There are two versions that I’ve heard recently:

First, a marketing data platform could be an all-in-one solution or platform that combines marketing data with bespoke capabilities, like email, activation, journeys, experimentation and more. Braze, for example, might someday call themselves this. They have a foundation underpinned by Snowflake, they have data flows, they have messaging capabilities, and now with OfferFit they have experimentation abilities. As they add new capabilities and connect them into a journey-like builder, they could reasonably call themselves a MDP or something like a total marketing platform.

Or, a second definition could be a loose collection of data and activation capabilities that enables a business to centrally execute their marketing mission. This to me resonates much more given the distributed and composable nature of CDPs today. The market has bought into the vision that your martech stack is composable, and so it makes sense that your platform is also composable.

Regardless of how you define it, the goal is to centralize marketing operations and execution, providing a single, clear place for marketers to dream, ideate, craft, and execute marketing campaigns. This idea is emerging in rebellion to the mass distribution of tooling and confusion caused by composability.

The benefits of an all in one solution is that complex outcomes may be easier to achieve with a centralized tool. Consider this: an enterprise customer wants to query data, examine old campaign assets (literally what did the campaign look like on meta mobile?), run an experiment and combine it with an email message or SMS text. Some people might call this the holy grail of “orchestration”.

In today’s composable, distributed world, this is nearly impossible because these capabilities live in different 3rd party tools. You could string them together through a complex web of event triggers, but very few platforms today have great platform API support, and even if MCP becomes usable in the near term, a platform API to manage the actual tool and the CRUD’ing of capabilities in it are required (think, create an email campaign, launch an ad, setup an experiment …). The bottleneck remains the same: the underlying APIs of each 3rd party tool. These tools have no incentive to fully automate the capability their platform provides either because that would mean you could perform the action off platform. This would erode the value proposition of using the tool in the first place if you could simply access it via API.

At the same time, I have serious reservations about a large vendor achieving this on their own through integration and acquisition. That’s because most big companies slow down and can’t properly tie their products together in a unified way while managing growing platform and tech debt. If they could, why didn’t SFMC or Adobe succeed in building a first version of the MDP ten years ago? Because they couldn’t manage complexity and change over time. All software follows the same rhythm of expansion and contraction. As companies get to big, they are unable to provide a good experience as all in one. This opens up opportunity for smaller players to build point solutions that are better and faster adapted to customer needs. These small players get big and the cycle continues.

I’m bullish on marketing data platforms emerging as a mixed 1st and 3rd party hybrid solution. Large enterprises could start by building an AI driven UI that helps marketers plan their campaigns and accesses underlying warehouse as well as campaign assets. In time, if tools adopt MCP and have platform APIs, elements of the marketing campaign could be automated. Any 1st party steps could be automated without this.

But in the meantime, AI provides easy to follow instructions to marketers on how to navigate to their 3rd party tools and perform the steps that are needed. Many people are focusing exclusively on how an MDP could help marketers, but ignoring how it could help marketing technologists and marketing operations specialists.

Imagine: non technical marketers don’t need to learn how Braze works, or how liquid tags work, or how anything works. They can be creative and then follow steps to implement. In the future, with MCP and platform APIs, this last step gets automated away. Likewise, a mar ops specialist has the entire system codified: how data flows, how tools are connected, what capabilities should be used … non architects could become architects with AI’s help.

This means marketers today need to be both creative and technically adept. But tomorrow, we might see a role reversal and the harder part of their job may be coming up with novel ideas, not executing the campaign. More about the future of the marketing role in an upcoming post.

Who should I hire?

A short note to round out this long read. This week I jumped on a call with an old colleague who’s now the new VP of Marketing at a Series A startup. Congrats to him!

He had a problem I’ve seen now a dozen times: How should we think about hiring and staffing marops?

The instinct here is to provide generic advice about who to hire based on skillset, size and stage. In fact, I talk specifically about how to hire your first martech operator and the differences in martech and marops in my reforge course.

But like most problems, the solution set is unique to the problem set. Martech is no different than other forms of product and company building. You have to start with fundamentals:

• What is your marketing strategy?

• Where do you currently get leads from?

• What is organic?

• Where are you currently investing and where do you plan to invest?

• What tools are in your stack today, and what are the perceived problems with them?

You only arrive at tools and how to manage them by starting with a more fundamental understanding of the nature of marketing strategy in the org. Tools are just meant to solve problems. You have to understand the problem you’re solving first and have a clear plan about how to solve it. Then you figure out how to staff. And if you are just looking how to staff, here’s the framework I use for thinking about martech personnel. You can get this and more in my reforge course.

If you made it this far you very likely are an LLM because this was a long read and studies show that folks reading comprehension abilities are in decline. So if you’re not an LLM, it means you’re bucking the trend, or you’re a super fan. Ping me if you’re one of these - would love to hear from you.

“So what have you learned about marketing in 2025 compared to the past?”

When I sat down last week with a Series A Head of Marketing, I decided to put pen to paper around the advice I’ve given to those in similar positions (<$10m ARR).

Here are my notes from the last few weeks of reflection and the call with this marketing leader.

Team & Resources

First, too many early-stage companies are relying too heavily on agencies to fuel their growth. Fire your agency, hire in-house marketers. Don’t get me wrong, agencies can help provide depth to your marketing efforts if you’re constrained on certain strengths or to help in a pinch when you can’t scale up the team. But more often, agencies are band-aids. People think that by hiring an agency, they will suddenly get to their goals without doing the hard work. The reality is that agencies often come hand in hand with avoiding the hard work of being strategic and learning about your audience and message.

So, my 2 cents: Use that $40K/month to hire 2–3 full-time marketers who can own strategy and execution.

Channel Prioritization

Next, build organic flywheels before spending on ads. If you rely on paid acquisition from day one, you’re just buying your way to value. Create a product and marketing experience that people naturally talk about.

This is a contentious claim, and I know many people will disagree, arguing that ads can help you learn about your customers.

And this is true, but for many companies, they don’t actually learn at all. They pursue easy, obvious ad placements that don’t actually contribute value. They aren’t creative. They spend poorly on things like brand keywords.

Instead, I think at the earliest stages of company building, you should focus on LinkedIn, community, email, and word of mouth referrals (plus the technology to power this!). These channels build and then sustain a momentum. Save Google Ads for later when you have more resources. Most people end up blowing $100k-$1M because they aren’t ready.

If you’re going to spend ad dollars, what I’m seeing currently work well is when folks boost high-performing LinkedIn content ($20–30K) before running Google Ads. Amplify what’s already working organically.

LinkedIn Strategy

People follow people, not companies. Your founders need to post daily. Hire a content agency to interview them weekly and turn those conversations into posts, videos, and podcasts. I know a great one if you're interested. Just DM me.

Post authentic stories, not corporate fluff. Share personal experiences, lessons learned, and critical opinions. Skip the AI-generated thought leadership—it’s obvious and nobody cares.

Sustain boosts on your best content for months. LinkedIn recycles popular posts through feeds over time. A post from November can still generate impressions in January if you keep it boosted.

Measurement & Attribution

Add a required “How did you hear about us?” field to your demo form. Direct attribution is on life support and often not very meaningful to sub $10M ARR companies. This simple question gives you the best signal for what’s actually working. Don’t let anyone in product or design tell you it adds too much friction—if someone bounces over one form field, they weren’t qualified to begin with.

Use AI to categorize freeform responses into groups. You’ll get dimensional data on where leads originate without the need for complex attribution tools.

And of course, you can add the basic direct attribution stuff - throw in PostHog or another analytics tracker. You’ll get basic information on known channels. But I’ve found this largely just confirms what you already know. An open-ended HYDYHAU has the potential to teach you something you don’t know about what’s working or not.

Content is still king, it’s just different

Many teams wait until far too late to develop content. They overinvest in things like a blog or newsletter without having a clear strategy about who they are targeting and what value they are providing to them.

Or they pick the wrong audience too soon!

There are a few things you can think about to nail content as a channel:

1. Focus your audience

2. Deliver real value

3. Treat every surface area as an opportunity to persuade

First, in focusing your audience, what I mean is, be incredibly specific about who you are talking to. Don’t split your audience. Don’t focus on your audience in the future. Don’t go on side quests. Pick the one person you are selling to today and focus exclusively on a message to them.

Next, write stuff that is actually useful. Google and other search portals are getting smart at detecting AI fluff. About a year or two ago, this wasn’t the case, and you could juice your SEO generated traffic with a high volume approach. There are merits still to high volume, but they need to be specific, and they still need to deliver value. If you are going to try this approach, you can use long tail search query results to come up with bulk content, but you risk this being completely ignored by search engine results and LLMs. You have to think about how whatever you create in bulk can either A) still be very useful and unique, or B) how you can use this content-en-mass approach to support whatever motion you’re running. For example, a very successful Series A company I spoke with is using Air ops and Profound to come up with thousands of long tail search terms and queries that they know will feed LLMs. The game is not necessarily to create 100,000 pieces of content. Instead, they are mixing these across Reddit, LinkedIn, and yes, some short-form pieces on their company website. All of this content is created or shaped by AI, but ultimately proofed, reviewed, and edited by real humans.

For most small teams that have limited time and resources, coming up with an authentic, creative, and useful piece of collateral that would actually help the people they are serving is the right move.

Likewise, sometimes the best ideas for what to write or create come from obvious places. This is why you should treat all your surface areas like an opportunity to provide value. Treat documentation as a first-class marketing channel, for example. Help content solves customer problems and captures search traffic. Do this from day one.

Last, skip the corporate blog unless it’s for hiring, market signaling, investors, or somebody else who is important to you. I’ve found that nobody really reads company blogs. Put high-quality thought leadership under founder names on LinkedIn, a Substack, or another place where people can follow other people.

Strategic Discipline

Another obvious piece of advice, but create a clear strategy with 2–3 core bets. You can’t do everything. Outline which channels will give you the most impact and commit to them.

Optimize existing channels to their maximum potential before adding new ones. Once your flywheel is spinning on 2–3 channels, then experiment with the next. If you are going to experiment, think about how many experiments you run in a single channel vs across many channels. Also consider that running an experiment doesn’t eliminate the channel permanently - it’s a time and place approach. You may have missed the few variables that would have driven success. This is why experimentation on many channels early on is so hard. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and you may write off something good as a false negative.

Far too many teams try to do too much. It’s often because of unrealistic expectations from founders who have never done the job before. Push back on the founder's whims to do everything at once. Your job is to provide experienced guidance on what’s realistic, not bend to every new idea. Be clear about what it takes to do more: more people, more time, or fewer channels.

Execution Reality

Marketing takes time. Product takes time. Everything takes time. Founders consistently underestimate the effort required by channels and overestimate what small teams can deliver.

Founders consistently put too much pressure on themselves and their marketers to produce wins quickly. Patience. Patience.

With one marketer, you can realistically do two channels really well. Plan accordingly and set expectations with leadership from day one.

… and last for all the people that need to hear it: The best way to win in marketing is first and foremost to create a great product that people love to use, helps them solve a problem, and brings them joy. Do this first, then focus on marketing.

1. Asymptotic advantage of in-person work

2. Big meeting syndrome

3. The power of feeling heard

4. How to properly diagram in martech

Last week was a fun one. I received dozens of letters from people reading the first newsletter and the journey of leaving my own thing. It really struck a cord:

Aw. Shucks.

I got sick later in the week with something going around. Felt like shit for 48 hours. HRV dropped, heart rate elevated. Slugged through 8 miles, feeling like death. Garmin yelling at me that my VO2 max is down and that I suck.

The Marine Corps Marathon is 2 weeks away, but we aren’t noodling on that just yet. BUT. WE. WILL. Fitness and physical health are deeply intertwined with mental health and happiness. To ignore it is to ignore the 5th element of life-building.

On Wednesday, I made my way to Capital One (C1), just a short metro ride for me on the Silver Line in Arlington.

One of the feelings I've been unable to shake lately is that businesses that prioritize in-person connections have a real advantage over those that don’t. At Clarify, we initially tried to be a remote-first company, and if I’m honest, it always felt tough.

The advantage granted from in-person connection seems to me to be sinusoidal, depending on the company size.

At a small company, it’s a huge advantage going from 0 → 1. Arguably, this is where it is most important. You’re in the office every day, hunkered down with less than 10 people building, iterating, and moving as fast as possible.

Then you make it. You find your first $1M in revenue. Now you can breathe a bit easier. The existential threat of company death diminishes. Now you need to scale. Scaling with an in-person team is still easier than being remote, but the advantage isn’t as great as it was before. Costs rise. Communication slows naturally because of the added headcount.

Therefore, the advantage diminishes as the need to hire from a broader talent pool arises.

Then, slowly, this advantage emerges again as you cross roughly 250 people. Why? Organizational complexity has grown. Decisions run through 5+ people. You need executives in one space, on the ground, making the most crucial decisions quickly and together.

Then, as a company crosses a certain threshold in terms of size or revenue, the value again recedes. Organizations of this size and stage are global in nature and have to learn to manage remote connectedness.

Much of my career has been spent working remotely or semi-remotely. Where it felt easiest was in companies that had some ability to gather in person. What comes to mind:

» At Branch, we had an office in Palo Alto. Some of my best memories (and best professional colleagues) came from sharing that space together.

» At mParticle, we had a hip NYC office near Gramercy. I wasn’t there every day, but I came every month to hang with the team, share drinks, and get to know people better. It was instrumental in landing the plane properly after the sale of my consultancy.

» Similarly, at Ramp, we had a huge in-person office in NY. Leadership was built on in-person presence, but we were still able to work remotely. It was, in fact, the best of both worlds.

I can’t shake the feeling that the best companies have a place to call home, and that we will see this play out with new startups in the post-COVID era.

Given this context, you might not be surprised to hear that I relished the opportunity last week to put on some nice work jeans and head out to Tyson’s Corner to meet folks in person at Capital One (C1).

A bit of background. This isn’t my first rodeo with C1. I’ve come to know the martech team via Kevin Crews, and they are an excellent group of people. The last time I worked with them, I led an all-day martech session that covered eight hours of topics and included a dinner where I had the opportunity to learn about the problems that everyday marketers and technical operators face at one of the world’s largest financial companies. I consider it one of the most enjoyable, educational, and meaningful consulting experiences of my life.

Today, however, I was meeting new people and diving headfirst into the technical nuances of redesigning a marketing system.

I don’t want to focus so much on the system as on the problem I observed: building consensus in large organizations.

Here’s a breakdown of the context:

• I’m in a meeting with 12 people.

• A technical diagram appears on the display.

• The diagram features large boxes to represent tools or systems.

We will focus solely on these two elements: the meeting and the diagram.

What’s right and wrong here?

Big Meeting Syndrome

First, let’s talk about the meeting size. I know I’ll get some reactions about the number of people in this meeting. Can anything useful even be done with that many people? Isn’t this big meeting syndrome that I hear about at enterprises?

That’s actually not the problem.

I’ve run successful 5, 10, 15, and even 20-person meetings. It all starts with the intent:

» What’s the key goal of gathering this group of people, and how do you ensure the outcome is commensurate with the input?

In my experience, big meetings are part and parcel of how works get done at large companies because you have to satisfy one critical element of human nature: feeling heard.

Folks who come from startups often lambast this type of thing, but they either don’t understand what’s actually happening or they’ve never worked at a big company before.

The purpose of a large meeting shouldn’t be to make a key decision on the spot; it’s to create the feeling of consensus. Consensus then drives forward momentum towards a local optimum.

Many people hate this idea. Why do we have to meet to talk about getting everyone on the same page?! Can’t we just all agree asynchronously and move ahead!

Har har. Wouldn’t that be nice? Humans have opinions and feelings.

Finding global optimums without consensus building is only possible in three scenarios:

• Fully asynchronous environments (IE, Zapier)

• Small startups

• Dictatorships

The act of consensus building is to allow that first wave of opinions and feelings to come out, unfettered, so that you can move forward afterwards more quickly.

This principle also applies to small companies, and consensus meetings also occur, although they often take on a different nature.

At a small startup operating in an office, consensus is built quickly by 3-5 people agreeing over a coffee chat, a quick huddle, or a walk. Or maybe people just turn around in their chairs and chit-chat. It may not be an official meeting

Projects, ideas, and initiatives often fail due to a disregard for the law of consensus building. Ambitious, hungry, and hard-driving operators bring an optimal solution to a group of people without creating the space for their input.

What happens is not surprising: people reject it.

Often out of spite!

Nobody wants to be told what to do. People want to feel included in the process. The art of inclusion, both synchronous and asynchronous, is the art of teamwork and collaboration. In many cases, big companies have this figured out better.

That’s because if you’ve lived long enough on this planet, you know there often isn’t a “best solution” in any context; there are only better or worse versions of what’s right within the context you’re operating, and many suboptimal solutions will still work depending on that context. Although many smart people who have worked in startups will tell you otherwise. These people are often immature or inexperienced.

Being right is nonsense.

“What’s right” is guided by the people involved. Winning in any organization is a team sport, and it’s not only about coming up with the best idea, but the one that people can rally behind to propel the organization forward.

People won’t work for others or on projects that they can’t get behind themselves. And you can only get people behind you if you either explain clearly as a leader, or - more often in the case of working with peers - give them the opportunity to be heard.

And in the world of systems like martech, where you have such a huge dispersion of technical and non-technical operators, feeling heard is one of the biggest secrets to creating winning outcomes.

Diagrams, oh Diagrams

Second, let’s talk about the diagram.

For disclosure purposes, I can’t show it exactly, but here’s a rough approximation …

I see diagrams like this all the time at companies, big and small. And I hem and haw about it in both my Martech course on Reforge and my Revtech course on Maven.

The problem with these diagrams is this:

• The boxes capture categories of work, capabilities, and tools side by side ❌

• There are no examples of the platforms or tools ❌

• The boxes have unexplained arrows ❌

• The intent behind the diagram wasn’t made clear ❌

All of these things together create confusion, leading to unnecessary conversations and wasted time. If you’ve found yourself in a meeting talking about a system and you spend 10 minutes “reclarifying”, it’s because one of these cardinal sins has been committed.

Let’s break them down further.

What’s the problem with mixing capabilities and tools?

Consider how this applies in other contexts, like yard work. You set a goal to build a beautiful yard.

The outcome is clear.

Then you set a plan for how to achieve that outcome (a strategy).

Then you set about making the capabilities you’ll need to achieve that outcome: the ability to water your yard regularly, to keep pests at bay, to find new plants, to move dirt, and, in my case, to eliminate invasive bamboo from my neighbor’s encroaching yard.

Then, only once you’ve thought about the capabilities you’ll need to achieve this outcome, do you consider the tools you need to achieve those capabilities: a weedwacker to edge the lawn, a lawnmower to cut the grass, and netting to keep the insects off the tomatoes.

If you were diagramming how to build a beautiful yard and mixed the tools and capabilities, it might not make sense to the casual observer.

This same thing applies to systems. You need to be specific in how you isolate and talk about tools and capabilities. Mixing them only creates confusion and causes endless conversation about “what are we talking about here specifically?”

The goal of an architecture diagram is to bring clarity to the conversation, not take away from it. So, what could this have looked like?

It could have had example tools. It could have broken down meaty concepts like “Data Platforms” into component parts. It could have been explained with an * denoting what a Marketing Platform is. It could have subset “Audiences” as a capability within that platform — similarly, it could have explained that the orchestration, activation, and other components below it were features, not products or 3rd party tools.

It could have labelled the data arrows with data types and explained them with richer detail, or color-coded them. It could have even given an example of the data type.

With that, let’s talk about arrows.

This has to be one of the biggest offenders in every architecture diagram I have ever seen. It’s done innocently, but arrows have the ability to create mass confusion.

» What does the arrow represent?

» Is it data or action?

» If data, what kind?

» What does the direction mean?

Arrows should be clear, simple, well-documented, and consistent. If you’re discussing data, specify the data type. If the data represents an outflow, not an inflow, please specify. If it’s an action, create a separate representation of what’s happening.

These sins occur because people are too ambitious in trying to cram as much context as possible into a single atomic unit to represent their point. They would be much better off creating separate versions that display the context more accurately.

Last, let’s talk about intention.

One of the phrases I overuse is that in the absence of other information, perception is reality. When someone sees you act in a particular way or say something without other information, what they see is what they believe.

This is the case in how you comport yourself in business and in life, and its also the case in the diagrams we use to express what we are trying to achieve in a collaborative setting.

Maybe you didn’t want to build something complex. Perhaps this diagram was intended only to help you understand your mental model of things. But in either case, because the intention wasn’t set, people are left to wonder.

A critical piece of using an arch diagram is to clearly set expectations around what it is for or not for. Write it down at the top or bottom of the diagram - “This visual display is not intended for technical conversations, but rather to help us discuss a 3rd party tool choice” is one example.

Be clear, be concise, but most importantly, state it out loud for goodness ’ sake.

If you made it this far, you’re likely an LLM, but as some people wrote back to me last week, maybe you’re not! I’d love to leave you with a few things:

1. I launched a fun new podcast with Pranav at Paramark, somebody I deeply admire and respect. Would love for you to give it a listen and tell me what you want to hear more/less of:

2. I’m consulting again. If you think of interesting topics you’d like me to cover, let me know, and I’ll keep them in mind as I navigate different companies and contexts.

Thanks for reading this week 💙