When we talk about customer data platforms (CDPs), the conversation usually leans heavily toward the technology: the features, the integrations, the use cases, and the promise of real-time personalization. But there’s another side to CDP success that often gets overlooked, and that’s organizational preparedness.

The truth is, even the most advanced CDP with all the bells and whistles won’t succeed if the organization isn’t set up to maximize its potential. The right people and the right processes are just as critical as the technology itself. In other words, CDP success is a balance of product capability and organizational coordination.

Here’s what organizational preparedness for CDP looks like and why the partnership between marketing and IT is the key to unlocking its value.

Why The Marketing/IT Partnership Matters

One significant challenge in CDP implementations is the disconnect between two critical stakeholders: marketing and IT. For a CDP to thrive, both teams need to align on priorities, responsibilities, and workflows from day one. Here’s why:

Marketing’s Role: Knowing the Playbook

Marketing’s responsibility is to have a crystal-clear picture of how they intend to use customer data. Their job is to come to the table with well-defined use cases that tie directly to business outcomes, such as:

• Increasing customer retention
• Driving repeat purchases
• Boosting campaign engagement
• Reducing churn

It’s not enough for marketing teams to have vague aspirations like “becoming more data-driven.” They need to get specific: What data attributes are necessary for a campaign? What channels will they activate? What’s the measurable impact expected? To make this happen, marketers must also become more data literate—educated enough to understand the data’s potential and translate it into actionable strategies.

IT’s Role: Delivering Accessible Data

On the flip side, IT holds the keys to the data kingdom and must focus on making customer data usable for marketing. While many IT departments are capable of building powerful infrastructures that can enable virtually unlimited possibilities, problems arise when they do so without consulting marketing. A CDP built purely from a technical perspective often becomes a massive underutilized system because it hasn’t been designed with marketing workflows in mind.

IT needs to proactively work with marketing to understand:

• What types of customer data and attributes will be most valuable?
• How should marketers be able to access and segment this data?
• What’s the simplest way to enable campaign execution across channels?

This requires IT to go beyond technical expertise and prioritize usability and accessibility. When marketing feels like co-owners of the CDP rather than passive recipients of its capabilities, adoption skyrockets.

The Roles: CDP Product Owner + Technical Owner

To make sure marketing and IT are working in harmony, many successful organizations create clearly defined responsibilities for the CDP project:

The CDP Product Owner

The CDP Product Owner is almost always marketing-focused. They understand the business objectives and are the go-to expert on use cases, channels, and campaign needs. Their responsibilities include:

• Talking to teams across marketing, sales, service, e-commerce, and other departments to collect use cases.
• Leading workshops to identify opportunities for improvement in current workflows.
• Acting as an advocate for marketing’s needs and ensuring the CDP delivers business impact.

While they could sit within a marketing operations or IT role initially, the CDP Product Owner needs to have a strategic marketing lens—and their “customer” is the marketing team.

The Technical Owner

The Technical Owner is IT’s representative for the CDP. They know the customer data ecosystem inside and out—where all the customer data lives, how integrations work, and what the architecture needs to look like to deliver the use cases outlined by the Product Owner. Their expertise would include:

• Designing the CDP to ingest and structure data correctly for easy access.
• Ensuring best practices and scalability by partnering with vendor technical account managers (TAMs) or professional services teams.
• Working closely with the Product Owner to align technical design with marketing workflows.

Together, the Product Owner and Technical Owner form the backbone of CDP success, from implementation and adoption through growth and maintenance. Their partnership is critical to creating solutions that are not only technically impressive but also highly usable.

Real-World Example: When Partnership Works

Constellation Brands (maker of iconic beverage brands like Modelo, Corona, Svedka, etc.), adopted a cross-functional product team approach, combining IT, marketing, and marketing technology specialists. This structure enabled them to manage organizational change effectively and empower marketers to adopt an agile mindset. By running pilot programs with different brand teams and showcasing measurable success, they built momentum and excitement throughout the organization. This practice made it easier for teams to use the CDP’s capabilities to enhance marketing campaigns and evaluate ROI in real-time.

What Happens When Partnership Breaks Down

On the other hand, when marketing and IT fail to collaborate, adoption suffers. A common pitfall occurs when IT builds a highly advanced CDP but doesn’t include marketing in the process. Without input on usability, segmentation, or activation workflows, marketing teams end up struggling to understand how to use the system effectively.

This is often a slow, frustrating reality—where adoption feels like “pulling teeth” because marketing doesn’t feel ownership or excitement around the platform. Technical-first CDPs may look good on paper, but they lack the critical element of ease-of-use to drive real adoption.

A Final Thought: Building With People In Mind

Choosing the right technology is only half the battle. The other half involves setting up your organization for success. That means:

• Prioritizing partnership between marketing and IT.
• Defining responsibilities for both CDP Product Ownership and Technical Ownership.
• Building workflows that integrate marketing feedback into the CDP design.

Regardless of your maturity with CDPs, ensuring you have both marketing and IT on board from the start sets the foundation for long-term success. When your organization is aligned on the people side of the equation, the product side becomes exponentially easier to execute.