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Customer Data Foundation

Marketing

Stand up the lakehouse, identity layer, and governed CDP that unblock every downstream marketing, sales, and customer-service AI play. Foundational.

Lakehouse storage layer
Customer data platform (CDP) & unified customer view
Marketing automation & lifecycle orchestration
Account-based marketing

Why this track

Every "customer 360" project that skips the lakehouse and tries to connect systems point-to-point ends up with 5+ broken integrations and a CDP that's just another silo. This track puts the data substrate first so the CDP isn't yet another isolated database.

Outcomes by stage

  • After Step 1: Every customer-facing event lands in the lakehouse within minutes of generation. Analysts can query across all sources for the first time.
  • After Step 2: A single profile API exposes resolved customer identities to any downstream consumer.
  • After Step 3: First lifecycle journey running off the unified profile, attribution clearer than the previous siloed tool.

Common pitfalls

  • Treating the CDP as a rip-and-replace project. It's a layer over your existing systems, not a destination database. Plan multi-quarter coexistence.
  • Skipping the consent model. GDPR / CCPA enforcement can land hard; bake consent into the identity resolution before you onboard the first marketing journey.
Detailed path — 4 steps
  1. 1

    Lakehouse storage layer

    Data, Analytics

    Unified data lake + warehouse architecture on open-format object storage, eliminating copy pipelines and providing ACID semantics at petabyte scale.

    MED
    The substrate. Ingest events from every customer-facing system into one columnar store with schema evolution. Decide table format (Iceberg / Delta) before you onboard the second source.
  2. 2

    Customer data platform (CDP) & unified customer view

    Marketing

    Single customer record assembled from fragmented touchpoints via identity resolution and consent management, activated in real time across channels.

    MED✦ AI
    Identity resolution + unified profile API. Wire this on top of the lakehouse, not as a separate silo, or you'll be reconciling two sources of truth forever.
  3. 3

    Marketing automation & lifecycle orchestration

    Marketing

    Multi-channel campaign execution triggered by customer lifecycle events and behavioral signals across email, SMS, push, and in-app channels.

    LOW✦ AI
    First consumer of the CDP. Migrate one lifecycle journey at a time — starting with onboarding — and prove uplift against the legacy tool before retiring it.
  4. 4

    Account-based marketing

    Marketing

    Coordinated targeting of high-value accounts with personalized campaigns, structured from programmatic 1:many through strategic 1:1.

    MED✦ AIOPTIONAL
    ABM is the highest-value second consumer if you sell B2B — same CDP, account-graph view, same marketing-automation orchestration.

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Outcome
One unified customer profile API consumed by Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service, with documented governance and a working consent model.
Audience
B2B or B2C company with 3+ customer-facing systems and no single source of truth for customer identity.
Difficulty
Intermediate
Duration
4–9 months
Departments
MarketingprimaryData, Analytics