Why I’m Here — I’ve joined mParticle to build the future of customer relationships

This article was originally posted on Katie Cerar's Medium here. You can follow Katie on Twitter here.

It takes the right few ingredients to make for a great job. I’ve found them in my new role as Head of Product Strategy at mParticle. A month in, I’ve already learned that Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are critical for the future of company building — and why mParticle is the place for me to work on this incredible opportunity.

I used to believe that commerce was one of the things that differentiated humans from other animals on this planet. Although that’s not true (honestly, animal commerce is so fascinating), what we can say is that commerce and exchange has been a core part of humanity for a very long time.

And for a long time, commerce was very simple. Two humans met, determined a price, and exchanged goods and services. A seller could get to know their customer well, tailor an experience, and form a strong and mutually beneficial relationship.

This was good.

Today, consumers and brands still build relationships. But these relationships are nowhere near as personal or honest. Customers like us want to interact where we are — from our bedrooms, kitchens, and carpools. Whether in websites, apps, social media, texts or somewhere else, our experiences are growing fragmented. Modern brands struggle to keep up with building and maintaining great customer touch-points, find it hard to create consistency and personalization, and have no complete awareness of what we are actually experiencing. In the end, brands are impersonal, blast us with advertising, and seem to never know what we really want (because they don’t!).

This is not good.

Brands, already tasked with the hard job of building companies and great products, waste their valuable time, development resources, and marketing dollars (increasingly so) without knowing if their efforts are really paying off. They have a vision, but are running blind.

Customer experiences are becoming overwhelming, disconnected, and impersonal. Many valuable products and brands can’t compete in the long term because they don’t have the money and time to do the hard work to connect the dots.

At the core of this problem is something powerful but simple: data.

Companies need great, consistent, accurate data that tells the whole story. They need to learn fast from that data. And then they need to turn it into actions that benefit their customers.

I want a future where the relationship that we as consumers have with brands creates a real, trust-based value exchange.

This is where CDPs come in, and why I’m at mParticle.

What do CDPs do? CDPs enable brands and companies to consolidate their data in one consistent place, regardless of where and how they want to reach customers. The data can then be used everywhere customer relationships are being built. And, with unified and consistent data, CDPs can help brands learn faster and choose the right way to act on their learnings. I believe CDPs will be a critical part of the toolset needed to build meaningful and authentic customer relationships in the 21st century.

At the end of the day, a job is about more than just what you’re building. It’s about who you’re building it with. The team at mParticle are truly world class. I remember hanging up on my first Zoom call with Chee Chew (my now boss and mParticle’s CPO) thinking “now THIS is someone I want to learn from to take my career to the next level”. Folks at mParticle earnestly want to build an incredible company that has a true and wide-reaching impact on the world. I love nothing more than solving a hard puzzle with great people. And here’s where I think I will do exactly that.

When you’re offered a seat on the rocket ship, you don’t ask which one. You just buckle in. With leaders like Michael Katz, Andrew Katz, Chee Chew, and all the others here, I know we’re poised to take our recent Series E raise and bring this company through some incredible growth.

I’m joining as Head of Product Strategy to help the company that defined CDPs as a product category figure out their next big step.

If you’re looking for a new role, we’re scaling fast and need smart, compassionate people to redefine this segment and bring customer relationships into the future. Message me or apply here and join us!