Exploring The Evolution And Adoption of Customer Data Platforms and Reverse ETL

Summary

The precursor to widespread adoption of cloud data warehouses was the creation of customer data platforms. Acting as a centralized repository of information about how your customers interact with your organization they drove a wave of analytics about how to improve products based on actual usage data. A natural outgrowth of that capability is the more recent growth of reverse ETL systems that use those analytics to feed back into the operational systems used to engage with the customer. In this episode Tejas Manohar and Rachel Bradley-Haas share the story of their own careers and experiences coinciding with these trends. They also discuss the current state of the market for these technological patterns and how to take advantage of them in your own work.

Announcements

• Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Rachel Bradley-Haas and Tejas Manohar about the combination of operational analytics and the customer data platform

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can we start by discussing what it means to have a "customer data platform"?
• What are the challenges that organizations face in establishing a unified view of their customer interactions?
  • How do the presence of multiple product lines impact the ability to understand the relationship with the customer?
• We have been building data warehouses and business intelligence systems for decades. How does the idea of a CDP differ from the approaches of those previous generations?
• A recent outgrowth of the focus on creating a CDP is the introduction of "operational analytics", which was initially termed "reverse ETL". What are your opinions on the semantics and importance of these names?
  • What is the relationship between a CDP and operational analytics? (can you have one without the other?)
• How have the capabilities of operational analytics systems changed or evolved in the past couple of years?
  • What new use cases or capabilities have been unlocked as a result of these changes?
• What are the opportunities over the medium to long term for operational analytics and customer data platforms?
• What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen operational analytics and CDPs used?
• What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on operational analytics?
• When is a CDP the wrong choice?
• What other industry trends are you keeping an eye on? What do you anticipate will be the next breakout product category?

Contact Info

• Rachel
  • LinkedIn
• Tejas
  • LinkedIn
  • @tejasmanohar on Twitter
  • tejasmanohar on GitHub

Parting Question

• From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Closing Announcements

• Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, Podcast.__init__ to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used.
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Links

• Big-Time Data
• Hightouch
  • Podcast Episode
• Segment
  • Podcast Episode
• Customer Data Platform
• Treasure Data
• Rudderstack
• Airflow
• DBT Cloud
• Fivetran
  • Podcast Episode
• Stitch
• PLG == Product Led Growth
• ABM == Account Based Marketing
• Materialize
  • Podcast Episode
• Transform
  • Podcast Episode

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA