158: Jeff Lee: How Calm’s Billion customer message machine unites martech and engineering

Jeff built a billion-message marketing machine at Calm with three people. But it was a journey. Push notifications sparked a three-year battle until a new CPO, unburdened by notification trauma, green-lit the project in six weeks. It was a four-year battle for ML recommendations but the data tells an unexpected story. Jeff also shares tactics for winning over the most skeptical product and engineering teams. It starts with operational empathy by taking a stab at a working prototype of your idea but also recognizing that product and martech decisions often stem from personal bias that requires champions who have experienced positive outcomes.More

157: Sandy Mangat: How to fix outbound with a crystal ball and signal-powered AI agents

AI and outbound prospecting has flooded our inboxes with poorly personalized, irrelevant, and frankly lame template attempts at human connection. But some teams are seeing the light… the purple light. Sandy takes us inside the dimly lit fortune telling parlor of Pocus where we gaze into the swirling galaxies of the crystal ball of modern sales. We travel through visions of product-led sales, network referrals, signal correlation and AI agents all swirling together to fill pipelines.More

156: Chris Golec: The Godfather of ABM is on his 3rd company and he’s solving attribution for B2B marketers with AI

The Godfather of ABM takes us through his humble beginnings in Detroit’s industrial trenches to category creation and entrepreneurial expeditions. His journey spans building magnetic company cultures, cracking the code on remote work, sharing candid hiring wisdom, and transforming marketing failures into fuel for growth. Now building Channel99, he’s rewriting attribution with a touch of AI engineering, predicting marketing ROI, using a white box approach.More

153: Sundar Swaminathan: How Uber measures the ROI of marketing according to their former Growth Marketing Data Science Lead

After leading Uber’s Marketing Data Science teams, Sundar shares insights that work for both tech giants and startups. Beyond uncovering that Meta ads generated zero incremental value (saving $30 million annually), they mastered measuring brand impact through geo testing and predicting LTV through first-week behaviors. Small companies can adapt these methods through strategic A/B testing and simplified attribution models, even with limited sample sizes. More

152: Sarah Krasnik Bedell: A data eng turned marketer on embedded marketing analysts and batch vs webhook pipelines

What happens when a data engineer with an obsession for truth-testing crashes into marketing’s ‘best practices’? Sarah’s journey from code to growth unfolds like a trained detective story, where she picks apart marketing myths and rebuilds them with an engineer’s first principles. Her fresh take on centralyzed vs decentralyzed data team structures favors embedding an analyst deeply in marketing and growth teams.More

151: Austin Hay: An operator’s guide to AI agents, composability, building in concert and self-designing APIs

Something extraordinary is brewing in the world of martech. In the near future, Austin thinks AI agents will turn into an omniscient digital butler, anticipating your needs with uncanny precision while vanishing into the background of your workday. But the real revolution unfolds in the seemingly mundane machinery of marketing operations, where innovative companies are transforming their spaghetti mess of data pipes and platforms into something approaching digital poetry. More

150: Welcoming Darrell Alfonso as a co-host, celebrating baby milestones and the top 2 predictions for martech by 2030

The Humans of Martech enters an exciting new chapter with Darrell Alfonso joining as co-host, bringing fresh energy and insights to the show. As a long-time listener and new dad, Darrell offers relatable stories of juggling work, family, and community while sharing bold predictions like the shift to warehouse-native architectures in martech, which promise to streamline data operations for enterprises. More