I’m reading Shop Class as Soulcraft, which has been interesting so far, if a bit verbose and high minded of itself. A few chapters in, the author mentions this concept of blueprinting. This idea of building a complete, higher performance car engine from disparate parts across different manufacturers (instead of just buying one prebuilt).
By careful measuring and hand fitting, the motor can be brought to a higher level of precision than is achieved when you take for granted the fit of aftermarket parts–for example, these intake manifolds—where there is no consistent engineering intention among the various manufacturers.
He then goes on to describe the role the builder must take in the process.
Someone building a higher performance motor combines parts from different makers so he has to be something of an engineer himself, often modifying parts; there is nobody else in charge of making it all work together properly. (And in fact it is common for “high performance” engines to preform wretchedly, worse than stock.
This felt so remarkably similar to my experience in martech that it seemed worthy of mentioning. Despite the consolidation in this industry, despite the platforms that supposedly “do it all”, most practitioners are still building franken-stacks, and for good reason.
The best in class tools in each category are often an order of magnitude more effective, and sometimes even more cost efficient, that buying into an existing platform’s add on functionality. This isn’t a rule, but it certainly is common in my experience.
Our role then, as a marketing technologist, is in blueprinting our stack into a functional, high performing machine. And that often means modification to fit things together. The difference in this analogy between motors and martech is that the martech landscape, though huge, is still finite enough for most vendors to have most common integration use cases figured out.
The second lesson is that simply buying all the high performance parts won’t automatically get you the performance you desire. You’ve got to be willing to take pieces from one tool and leave others, you’ve got to do the legwork to make the various components work together, and be willing to change course when things aren’t playing nice.
The real value to be reaped in a martech stack is reserved for those who are willing to look past the “stock” configuration into something more custom. The equivalent of a tuner car.