Why We Built Adobe Data Distiller?

I got asked this question last week by a customer who wanted to know the philosophical underpinnings of why we built Data Distiller in the first place. He understood all the use cases and their value. The technology is amazing yada yada yada. We ship fast and we ship a lot. But wait....why did you even build it?

I went to the drawing board and started explaining based on what my customers have taught me over the last several years and where they see the value. The value is not what the product can do and its capabilities but how it fits as a key component in their overall experience delivery strategy. Here is how that argument goes.

I am going to assume that the reason why you are reading this documentation is because:

1. You or your organization wants to make a positive impact in the world by changing things for the better.
2. You want to make this impact via the delivery of products or services.
3. The unit of how your users/customers/world will experience what you will offer is an "experience"

The fundamental equation in delivering an experience is:

Experience = Product/Service/Offer + Engagement + Data

Your products or services ultimately define what you have to offer to your customers. This is the reason why you exist in the first place. But that is not going to cut it because you need to engage with them i.e. a means by which they experience the product from awareness to becoming a champion of it. If you have the greatest product but cannot engage- be ready to fail.

Engagement is dependent on when and how you converse with them. The place where you engage becomes the channel, the style of communication, and the content you use (text, images, video). The sum total packaging of these elements and how it manifests when delivered is also critical. But if you do not understand where, who, when, and what to engage with, you are still going to fail.

You will have to work with the data to figure that out. In fact, you have to use the same data to design the product. No. You will create products and engagements that will generate the data so that you can serve your customers better.

If you cannot do this, there are not enough good reasons as to why you should exist as a business.

Reality Check: For as long as we have collected data as a civilization, data has been messy. The messiness is just a projection of the complexity of how we operate as agents. As we build more complex systems, the data we will need to collect about them will increase and become messier.

Corollary: Just having a ton of data and analyzing that data all day is no good either. You will know a lot about how the world works but to make an impact, you need a product.

Data Distiller is one (not the only one) of the data products in the Adobe Experience Platform that is architected to solve your data problems so that you are empowered to deliver the best experience.