Why Your Business Needs a Segment CDP Owner to Ensure Results and Accountability

What is a Segment Owner, and how can your business achieve results and gain accountability from hiring an agency for the role?

There is a growing need for a hybrid technical and business role as more companies add a CDP to their tech stack. It can be difficult to discover business objectives and translate them into technical requirements, especially if you are dealing with multiple departments.

That’s why we recommend businesses define a Segment Owner to fill knowledge gaps across teams.

Having a single person own the CDP probably won’t make sense for large enterprise companies. A whole team will be needed to maintain the many integrations across the stack. But for smaller companies with only a few sources and destinations of data, it’s common to have no CDP owner at all.

Many companies find that it is cheaper to hire consultants or professional services for the critical initial build out, and hire an admin for the day-to-day maintenance after build out. It’s rare to find a single individual who can make the strategic decisions needed for a successful implementation and maintain the integrations over time. Those skills are in high demand, and will require a highly paid position.

The long-term maintenances of a CDP can often be covered by a lower-paid admin, with more skilled consultants leaning in when major architecture or strategic shifts are needed.

Segment is the leading Customer Data Platform (CDP), and McGaw is the leading tech stack agency with the most Segment implementations. That experience has given us insight on where your company could fail when implementing Segment, and where you can get a huge ROI.

Key Takeaways

• Segment Owner is a key role because it is difficult to discover business objectives and translate them into technical requirements between multiple departments.
• Establish a champion with experience implementing CDPs to align all stakeholders from day 1. If you aren’t confident you have someone internally to fill this role, it’s an appropriate time to look at outside consulting.
• Learn how to start creating processes around how the CDP will be maintained over time. What will be the process for updating documentation as new platforms are added?
• Ask each stakeholder what their expectations and criteria for success are. It could be “Build audiences based on lead lifecycle stages” or “Restrict PII from entering downstream platforms.”
• Be transparent about what your overall goals are so everyone is aligned.

The Primary Reason Your Segment Implementation Is Likely to Fail

The most common reason Segment implementations fail is that there is no single owner to maintain the CDP.  Larger organizations will commonly centralize Segment ownership into a Marketing Operations or technology team. Smaller enterprise companies often have a single person responsible for maintaining documentation and fielding requests for CDP usage from other business units.

It’s critical to note that the skills needed to maintain CDP processes are different from the skills needed to successfully implement the CDP the first time. Hire experts to create the core data flows and processes, train your team, and transition into long-term maintenance.

Define the CDP ownership process when implementing Segment, and you will greatly increase your ROI from the platform. An optimized Segment implementation will result in 2.9x year-over-year growth in annual revenue based on survey data from Aberdeen.

Who Should Be Your Segment Owner?

A Segment owner needs to be a solutions architect that understands the needs of your business. This means knowing your underlying technical infrastructure and how Segment integrates with each of your tools. Ultimately, translating that into business value.

I want to be clear that this doesn’t mean that the owner needs to have the role or title of “solutions architect.” The qualities of a great solution architect are key to ensure your CDP implementation is successful and continues to create value for your business.

You will want to bring in the experts to set up your CDP right, the first time. Re-implementation will inflate your cost exponentially and delay time to value.

But, who on your team is responsible for the ongoing processes around Customer Data Platform (CDP) and how it’s used in value creation?

Some common roles this falls under are:

• Product Manager
• Technical Marketer
• Engineer
• External Agency

Segment Owner Responsibilities

A Segment owner is responsible for identifying risks and opportunities in a few key areas:

• A Segment owner communicates and aligns value opportunities across teams 
• A Segment owner understands the different ways Segment and its integrations deliver value 
• A Segment owner defines and leads efforts to customize Segment to the organization

The fundamentals we will cover in this post are all about how to communicate and align value opportunities across your internal teams.

No matter who takes the role, when implementing a CDP you must rely on experienced guidance to navigate the pitfalls of integration between key platforms, and then train your team to correctly use your new stack to unlock your product and marketing use cases.

Who Are the Key Stakeholders Across the Organization

Segment is a big purchase that impacts multiple teams across your company. The first thing you need to do is align expectations across every department the platform will impact. You will need to identify the key stakeholders across teams and put them in a room together.

The specifics vary for every business, which is why it’s important to bring in experienced guidance in the use case alignment process to ensure your implementation will be successful.

If you don’t have representatives across departments in your Segment discussions, STOP!

You must have a coordinated plan to roll out Segment, or you will not achieve the return on investment you are hoping for. So who are the common stakeholders?

A Segment implementation will often intersect with the following teams:

• Engineering
• IT
• Infosec
• Marketing
• Product

It is critical that you identify what teams should be represented when making data infrastructure decisions as early in the process as possible. After everyone is at the table, you need a communication strategy to make those meetings effective.

How Do You Communicate with Each Stakeholder

Each team has different needs. The key will be to understand the common priorities different teams will have going into the internal conversation. For instance, some companies will need to have further discussions to identify and mitigate legal and security concerns, particularly in industries that require HIPAA compliance.

Companies that operate in the European Union will need to factor in GDPR. Privacy should be brought up early to understand what restrictions your legal and security teams need across all sources and destinations of data.

If you don’t have experienced advice during those conversations, you will inevitably miss risks or opportunities that will require re-work. Save yourself the headache, bring in the experts to guide you through this initial critical conversations. This is one reason having an agency to implement and provide ongoing operational support can save you time, money, and achieve business results.

Here are some potential questions and concerns each team may bring up when discussing a Segment implementation:

Engineering

• How much support will you need from engineering to maintain this tool?
• Will this reduce engineering hours needed to support the downstream destinations?

These are common questions you might hear from the software engineers that are tasked to evaluate and eventually support a CDP. What you need to know is what destinations will ingest data from Segment, and whether those destinations have native integrations with Segment.

If a tool does not have a native integration, it can most likely still be integrated, but it will require more engineering support.

IT 

• Who will have access to this tool?
• What permissions are needed? What sensitive data is shared?

IT will want to know how much they will need to manage access and permissions, and they may have crossover with Risk/Security on things like sensitive data.

Fortunately, Segment has robust tools to manage access including SSO support, and data sanitation options to ensure sensitive data is handled properly. You need to audit and document what data your company would need to send through Segment, and line that up with your internal policies on transferring data to 3rd party tools.

Infosec

• Will we be sending PII into this tool?
• How do we handle a data deletion request?
• How can we be sure this is GDPR-compliant?
• What are their HIPAA compliance policies?

Information security is often one of the toughest hurdles in onboarding a new technology, particularly one as huge and impactful as a CDP. It is critical that you meet with this team and understand ALL of their concerns, and address them one by one.

You will save yourself a lot of time and headache by documenting security requirements ahead of time and establishing clear guidelines for how data will be integrated into the CDP.

Marketing

• How will this integrate into our existing marketing platforms?
• Can we sync audiences from our CRM?
• Will lead stages and scoring be integrated?
• How does this enable us to do things we can’t already do?

Marketing teams tend to be very story-driven, and you will get a lot more engagement if you tell a story of how their activities will change (and hopefully improve!) after onboarding Segment. To do that, align marketing’s current KPIs and goals with key functionalities of the CDP. Set goals on how you will measure success, so the team is aligned and excited to make progress.

Product

• Will we be able to track X behavior now?
• How will user profiles work?
• Can we use this data in X analytics platform?

Product teams tend to be very data-driven and want to get to where they can gain insight and take action. Segment can definitely power up customer profiles and supercharge data in the data warehouse and in event-based analytics platforms.

When you meet with the product team, ask them what the gaps are in their user tracking today. Build your Segment implementation plan to include improvement on those data gaps, and you will without a doubt be a hero to the product team.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid when Implementing Segment

A CDP touches virtually every department, which makes it easy to overlook accountability and see things slip through the cracks. There is always risk when onboarding a new tool, and Segment is no exception.

1. DON’T silo the decision-making process.

Your team is excited, you have executive buy-in, and you are pushing the project forward to the next steps.  Maybe you’re the visionary leader on a team that is ready to push the company forward to the next level, great work. For everyone else, listen up.

If other departments are giving you the cold shoulder, do not bypass them at this stage. Trying to align multiple stakeholders after purchase is a huge mistake, and it will slow down your implementation and potentially prevent you from getting the full ROI you know you can achieve.

Bringing in a third-party consultant can help provide an unbiased opinion to those internal conversations.

Ask questions to understand the other teams’ concerns, and use the value to the business as a way to align everyone to the company’s vision.

2. DON’T wait to set a Segment Owner.

Failure to set a clear owner at the beginning leads to an underutilized or failed implementation. We’ve done hundreds of these, and it’s proven time and time again that failure to set an owner is a mistake.

3. DON’T wait to document your implementation.

After agreeing on your CDP owner and designating responsibilities, make sure those responsibilities include documenting your unique configurations and project history.

It can be tough to find someone with the business knowledge, technical savvy, and communication skills to understand and document the needs of every team impacted by a CDP. The documentation should be thorough enough that others can understand and follow the process.

In future posts, we will cover the next steps after your business is aligned on how you are going to use as CDP. The question C-Suite will be asking is most likely, “How are we going to get ROI on this purchase?” We’ll cover that topic in a future post.