I’ve been the guy buying the platform, convinced it would fix everything. Selling it, knowing it wouldn’t deliver. The integrator inheriting someone else’s architectural mess and creating a few of my own. The advisor called in after the money was spent and nothing changed.
Every seat showed me the same cycle. Platforms bought before anyone could run them well. Results that never matched the pitch. The platform blamed. A new one bought. The real problem still sitting exactly where it was. I made the same mistakes from every seat I sat in.
Once you see that pattern, you can’t unsee it. The Marketing Technology Transformation® framework came from seeing it.
In 1996 I co-wrote a book about enterprise networks called Strategic Networking. One line in it carried the same argument the framework rests on: buying the technology changes nothing until the team can run it. That was thirty years ago, before anyone said the word martech. The pattern was already there. It didn’t have a name yet.