This is a placeholder draft — replace with your own writing when ready.
Most martech failures aren’t technology failures. By the time a platform gets blamed for underperforming, the real problem was usually decided months earlier, in a requirements document nobody challenged, or an org chart that split ownership of customer data across four teams that don’t talk to each other.
I’ve watched organizations spend years and significant budget standing up decisioning and personalization platforms, only to find that the tooling works fine but nothing changes for the customer. The gap is almost never the software. It’s usually one of three things: unclear ownership of the customer journey, data that’s too fragmented to act on in real time, or a launch plan that skipped change management entirely.
Before evaluating a single vendor, it’s worth answering a harder question: who in the organization is actually accountable for the customer experience this platform is supposed to improve? If the answer is “several teams, informally,” that’s the problem to solve first. The best martech implementations I’ve been part of started with organizational alignment, then let the technology follow, not the other way around.