Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (turn and face the strange)

Simon Sinek says “Start with Why.”

Men think about the Roman Empire . Marketers think about Joseph Campbell . We think specifically about his research into the Hero’s Journey because we are “storytellers” and want to tap the deep veins that cross culture and time: my (wisdom, widget, AI-enabled chatbot) ushers the Hero (customer) through their challenge (dragons, demons, decentralization) so they can return to their kingdom victorious, changed for the better and ready to share the fruits of their hard-won conquest. Tale as old as time, told on cave walls, parchment and PowerPoint.

Have you ever looked at your own life through this narrative structure? Where are you on your hero’s journey? Many of you are in the thick of the quest. I always liked that cloying United Airlines commercial where the businessman/knight Dad is flying around slaying dragons. It’s a bit on the nose, but the imagery is powerful. (But why can’t Mom take out a Smaug or two)?

Lately, I find myself thinking more about what happens to the hero after the central quest wraps. This line of inquiry brought me to theologian Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward. He articulates what the wise have come to know in a profound way: the identity-building efforts that worked for you in the first half of life don’t serve you as well on the back nine. The soldier you cultivated with such discipline may find themselves confused, even bereft as the battle winds down or life events cause the field of play to shift underneath you.

So, I've been pondering the question of identity. As the book says, “When you get your, 'Who am I?' question right, all of your, 'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves.”

So What Now?

I have worked in, around and with data for my entire career; if you are reading this, you probably have, too. I bore witness to client/server computing, personal computing, grid computing, cloud computing, “big data,” Webs 1,2 and 3 dot 0, and now Generative AI. If I were to crystallize the one central question that has been a constant, it is, “How do we balance innovation and responsibility?” How do we balance growth with safeguarding individual rights and freedoms: autonomy, choice, freedom from discrimination and manipulation?

An unbridled quest for growth eats everyone in its path like PacMan: employees, customers, and families. I’ve seen it. Overzealous data policing in service of risk management kills morale and gives more agile competitors a head start that is sometimes unrecoverable. Dualism is a scourge in politics, and it’s not great for business, either.

I’m in marketing; you can guess which side of the seesaw my thumb is on. Growth for a business is existential, but issues around compliance, customer trust and brand erosion caused by loose data management practices can stop progress in its tracks. However, most marketers and product managers have only had to learn “the basics” when it comes to issues of data management and governance. Is it GDPR compliant? Check. Are we in violation of CAN-SPAM? Check.

A vast and interesting world is unfolding with the rise of generative AI. We’re on the precipice of something monumental and don’t know what it looks like yet. As Ethan Mollick says, keep reminding yourself this is the worst generative AI you will ever use. It will be in every marketer’s, if not every employee’s best interest to become an educated data steward. If we are to avail ourselves of the power of the intelligence and all of the world-changing progress it portends, it is incumbent on us to understand its limitations, the risks it poses, and how it works.?

There was a New Yorker article recently about the history of the Faustian bargain . We think that thanks to Science, we understand the world well enough to preclude us from exchanging our immortal souls for some tantalizing sorcery. But it ended with this: “We write our contracts not in blood but in silicon—both figuratively, insofar as we sign away our identities and privacies for all the short-term benefits of material ease, and literally, whenever we scroll rapidly through one of those unreadable online contracts, eager only to assent. Somewhere out there in the ether, the ghost in the machine hears our weak little mouse clicks and pricks up his horns.”?

I’ve worked for those “ghosts in the machine”; the bargain is intentionally opaque, and I believe companies that are transparent about how they collect and use data will have an edge competitively, not just ethically.?

There is value in communicating sound, ethical, transparent and bias-free (or at least bias-aware) data practices. With all the bad press around data breaches, privacy violations, and the fear and uncertainty about how LLMs ingest and use data, the time is ripe for a conversation about what best practices look like and who is implementing them. Operational excellence, governance and radical customer transparency can positively correlate to performance. For example, in response to Dieselgate , Volkswagen undertook a concerted transparency initiative, publishing regular updates with financial disclosures and detailed reporting on governance reforms, internal audits, and compliance framework changes. Not only did they weather the crisis, but they went from losing 37% of their value to posting record sales in two years.

Good product marketers are often said to bridge the gap between product/engineering teams and customer or customer-facing stakeholders like Sales. Great product marketers sit in the center of a larger Venn diagram that includes Legal, Privacy, InfoSec and Governance. To be persuasive in this seat requires a new fluency borne of a passion for advocating for customers (your peers, your parents, your kids, it’s not hard to get there) and their protection.?

Get to the Update Already

I am designing a different work life because I’m not on the same quest as I used to be. The Trojan War is over, so I’m headed back to Ithaca. I’ll still have plenty of Sirens and whirlpools to deal with along the way.

I am grateful for the web of extraordinary people this windy career path continues to lead me to. Last week, I met with a CEO and an executive at what I would posit is the busiest company in tech right now. Both strangers, both exceedingly generous with their time and intellect, sharing heady ideas and contagious enthusiasm about what is possible. These conversations are why I’m still committed to this sometimes exhausting, fickle industry.

When I look back on countless projects: product and company launches, board presentations, sales kickoffs and large campaigns - both successful and spectacularly not - Maya Angelou’s words come to mind. I remember more how the people I was working with made me feel than the actual work we did together, though at the time the work was Everything.

One of these people is a new friend. She is a razor-sharp, richly experienced B2C and B2B product manager with exceptional skill in the things good product managers do well: find and validate product-market fit, act as the voice of the customer, engineer solutions to problems and collaborate with technical teams. She is an engineer by background with a master's in computational mathematics and engineering from Stanford. Safe conclusion: she knows many things I don’t know.?

Together, we bring a formidable set of skills and experience to the wild and woolly world of product, in particular data management, and not a little curiosity about where we are going - as an industry, as knowledge workers, as a republic, as women. We want to help companies solve their data challenges upstream, in the form of privacy by design, smart data product ideation, sound governance policies and stakeholder communications.?

Therefore, I am joining Chihiro Fukami at Marigold Data , an alternative to large and costly consulting firms, delivering pragmatic and concrete outcomes, not just slide decks (though we can do those, too). The kinds of engagements we will support include what you might expect from a product management and marketing team - roadmap development, customer and market research, sales enablement, launch planning and stakeholder comms - but we are placing intentional emphasis on data-related projects: level-up training sessions, cross-functional team building, data policy development and training, data maturity and AI readiness assessments, vendor or partner evaluation, and so forth.

We want to help companies do right by and with their data so that it serves the organization’s objectives to its fullest potential. We also want to help companies talk about their data initiatives so that everyone understands why they are essential, how they support competitive advantage, what right action looks like, and the individual stakeholder relationship to it. We want to see data used in the service of growth, and companies to think of themselves as shepherds of something of great worth. The Maori in their data sovereign policies refer to data as “living taonga,” or “treasured possession,” just as valuable as land or foods central to their identity and well-being. So, with gratitude and humility, we begin the next act: Marigold Data.?

“I wanna talk about what I have learned; The hard-won wisdom I have earned; I wanna sit under my own vine and fig tree” (Lin Manuel Miranda, Hamilton )

“Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.” (Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life )

“But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.” (David Foster Wallace: This is Water )