Essential Insights for Agency Product Teams

Welcome to a special clips edition of "What Gets Measured," curated especially for product and engineering teams at advertising agencies. In this episode, we explore how to enhance and improve your product and engineering strategies. 

We've selected only the tastiest quotes from a selection of our best episodes for this topic, to guide you in developing data-driven product innovations, reliably incorporating tech solutions, and maintaining effective data integration practices. Let’s get to it.

Balancing Data for Better Product Innovation

We begin with a clip from our interview with Jason Tatum, Head of Product at CallRail. In his episode, “Data-Driven Product Innovation in MarTech” he highlights the importance of balancing qualitative and quantitative data in product management.

"If a product team focuses solely on one metric, it might miss other stats and insights crucial for informed product development decisions," explains Jason.

In our episode “Key Insights from the MarTech Handbook,” Darrell Alfonso, Director of Marketing Strategy and Operations at Indeed.com, highlights the chaos that comes from lacking a holistic martech strategy. He notes, "Cobbling together a bunch of tools and platforms without an overarching strategy leads to inefficiency—a prime indicator of a martech strategy deficit."

Architecting Robust Data Infrastructures 

The clips continue with insights from Deven Revel, former Head of Partnerships at Hightouch, in “Unboxing the Marketing Data Warehouse” and Eric Dodds, Head of Product Marketing at Rudder Stack in “The Data Integration Imperative.” These clips underscore the importance of data warehouses and communication in consolidating data across platforms, emphasizing the need for abstracting data for comprehensive analytics.

"Without abstracting data from tools or platforms,” says Eric, “You’re stuck with limited analytics capabilities," he notes, highlighting the need for a holistic approach to data management.

Overcoming Data Integration Challenges 

Drawing from our interview with co-founders of Cimply, Mark Donatelli and Daniel Kowal in the episode, “Marketing Data Integrations: Expectations vs. Reality," we tackle the challenges of managing increasingly vast data sources. They share strategies for keeping data federation at the forefront of product and engineering teams’ focus.

Mark Donatelli warns of the confusion tools can bring to data integration, stating, "Everyone aims to improve their data handling, yet not knowing how can lead to data overload." Daniel Kowal adds, "Data integration is essential for operational efficiency, speeding up the collection of actionable insights from vast datasets."

Ensuring Effective Data Governance in the Age of AI

Our final clip features snippets from “Data Governance and AI” and our awesome interview with Tiankai Feng, Data Strategy and Governance Lead at Thoughtworks Europe. We discuss the role of accurate and reliable data governance and how thoughtful and well-connected frameworks can support the scalability and reliability of data infrastructures.

"The most crucial aspect of data governance isn't technology, but talent,” says Tiankai. “You need the right people with the right mindset before you can effectively leverage technology. And with AI, the need for robust data governance is even more critical"

From developing a strategy for technology, to establishing infrastructure and governance roles, to knowing how to bridge the gap between information and insights, this episode aims to empower the product and engineers, and highlight the critical work they dutifully perform.

For deeper insights, be sure to check out the full episodes linked in the show notes. Subscribe to our podcast, share this episode with your peers, and join our newsletter for more tailored content designed to elevate product and engineering roles in the advertising world.

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