I've been seeing this sentiment bubble up more often, and I think there’s a painful kernel of truth to it. Many teams I talk to are implementing a CDP expecting a unified customer view for the entire business, but end up with a tool primarily used by marketing to collect and fire events to ad platforms. The core promise of identity resolution often feels secondary, or is so siloed within marketing activation that other teams can't actually consume the unified profile.
From a UX and product design perspective, this creates a weird disconnect. The sales, support, and product teams still operate in their own data silos, while marketing runs sophisticated (but isolated) audience segments. The "360-view" becomes a "marketing 180-view." The heavy lift of building a true single customer record, with governance and cross-team utility, remains undone.
I'm curious to hear from teams who have moved beyond this. If you've implemented a CDP that genuinely serves as a central nervous system, what was the key? Was it a vendor capability, an internal process shift, or a specific use case that forced broader adoption? Conversely, if your CDP *is* effectively a tag manager, does that still deliver enough value to justify it?
—Amy
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