March 2025 Recap: Trends, Conversations, and Reader Responses

We’ve made it through the first quarter of 2025!

It’s time to look back the previous month and reflect on:

1. Trends I see across clients
2. Conversations with practitioners
3. Responses to the past month’s newsletters from readers like you

If you missed the start of this series, you can check out the recaps from January and February.

Trends I see across clients
Data is the new oil! Or, maybe data is the new wind power because that’s the new oil?

Regardless, clients are focused on how they can better work with and use their data.

Let’s dive into examples from three different advisory clients:

1. Complexity of working with data and how it drives design decisions
2. Integrating data between systems to automate revenue allocation
3. Using data to understand the relative profitability of customers and channels

In the first example, a client has realized that the data they’ve been activating for marketing campaigns is not necessarily meeting the criteria they planned to execute, which is in part due to the high complexity of their current state.

To reduce complexity, we’re also looking at data volumes for specific use cases to understand whether those should be deferred from the first version of their soon-to-be future state.

In the second example, a client has focused on integrating data between two different core platforms to automate an internal revenue allocation process. The current process is highly manual and costly to their organization’s ability to scale, which has hit a tipping point as their growth continues to accelerate.

In the third example, a client is reviewing utilization data by customer and channel to determine baseline profitability, and then assess the viability of investing in specific technology projects. This approach is incredibly powerful, and ties back to my recommendation of knowing the value of projects.

Conversations with practitioners
Dovetailing with the interest in data, I have been polling my network regarding Salesforce’s Data Cloud, as a client is currently reviewing this product as a potential addition to their data stack.

There were not many responses, and those that did respond can be categorized as:

1. Hand wavy or filled with buzzwords
2. Hearing second-hand that someone has done something with it, although can’t share more details
3. Questioning whether investment in Data Cloud is worth it compared to a solution involving multiple vendors with best-in-class offerings

I’m maintaining a neutral to cautiously optimistic view, which aligns with my perspective in December that “Data Cloud is technically impressive in terms of how it democratizes traditionally tedious work to ingest, model, transform, coalesce, and publish data”.

Stay tuned for a more refined and concrete perspective in late April or May based on the evaluation and POCs with a client.

Responses to the past month's newsletters
Admittedly, I’ve been a bit lighter on publishing this month with a handful of client intensives and working with a consultant to further develop my own positioning.

Two newsletters over the past month spurred responses:

1. Incorporating a Through Line into Your Discovery & Design Sessions received a response from a reader that is a voice and stage actor, which led to some additional tips from their experiences: think about the overall goal of the project, instead of your performance as a part of it; listen to others and don’t risk losing spontaneity; connecting with others leads to more interesting and persuasive work over the alternative of operating in a vacuum; and, applying lessons learned from each part within a project builds the narrative and throughline.
2. Why Eliminate Unnecessary Complexity? received a response suggesting that you can ask “what is the shortest time it would take your organization to deploy a replacement with only a one line change of the code?” to measure complexity related to releasing technology changes.

Thank you for being a subscriber 🙏🏼 I hope you enjoy the joke that lands in your inbox tomorrow on April Fool’s Day!

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