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50 Things I believe about MarTech

Inspired by Tim Wilson’s list – I took a developer viewpoint to create my own.

In no particular order:

  1. Anything that includes ‘with a single line of JavaScript’ in the marketing material likely isn’t being fully honest.
  2. Analytic implementations can break without notice.
  3. Analytic implementations can break and it’s no one’s fault.
  4. Data Loss happens and can’t always be prevented.
  5. You should have a data recovery plan.
  6. You should have a disaster recovery plan.
  7. The more systems you link together, the greater the chance something will fail to work as expected.
  8. There is a real cost associated with Big Data in terms of storage and querying. 
  9. Cloud tech solves problems – and introduces new ones.
  10. Microservice designs solve problems – and introduce new ones.
  11. Monolith designs solve problems – and introduce new ones.
  12. Not everything needs to be tracked.
  13. Security assessments matter.
  14. PCI-DSS, HIPPA, etc – may apply and are not optional when they do.
  15. Anything dealing with the concept of time is likely to be buggy on release.
  16. Any bugs related to the concept of time are likely to be difficult to find.
  17. Any bugs related to the concept of time are likely difficult to explain.
  18. Anything dealing with the concept of location is likely to be buggy on release.
  19. IP Address lookups and GPS lookups are less accurate than you might think.
  20. Remarketing is likely on its way out.
  21. The marketing tech stack will change dramatically over the next few years due to privacy issues.
  22. Any work involving privacy laws is going to take longer and be more difficult than anyone expects.
  23. Analytics and Data Governance are operational costs, not capital.
  24. People often adopt personalization without fully understanding the implications to their staffing or processes.
  25. A/B testing is mostly technically straightforward, designing multiple viable user experiences is hard.
  26. The design of the database you are storing data in matters.
  27. You can never trust the user’s browser
  28. Comparing data between different systems is often a rabbit hole from which few emerge.
  29. Not every page needs to be a Single Page Application.
  30. Not every problem should be solved with (insert language here).
  31. You should have automated testing.
  32. Deployments don’t happen on Fridays, before holidays etc – unless you have 24/7 Dev Op support.
  33. Deployments should happen during the period of lowest user activity when possible.
  34. Continuous Deployment should be something to strive for.
  35. A feature isn’t complete if the analytics don’t function properly.
  36. Tags can have a performance impact to site speed.
  37. Page Performance matters.
  38. Almost any tool you install will need custom configuration for your site.
  39. Most development training does not cover analytics, privacy or  tagging.
  40. Systems can count differently on a fundamental level.
  41. The same term can have different definitions across platforms.
  42. All data should be validated on the server.
  43. The system should assume that anything sourced from the client may be missing, wrong, or harmful.
  44. That the closer to real time you want something, the more it’ll cost.
  45. That the closer to real time you want something, the more difficult it will be to design.
  46. The priority is fixing a broken build.
  47. A.I. solves some problems – and introduces new ones.
  48. Machine Learning solves some problems – and introduces new ones.
  49. Getting consistent behavior on multiple form factors, browsers and rendering engines isn’t trivial and is sometimes impossible.
  50. Version Control isn’t optional.

This post is a mirror of my LinkedIn article.

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