Don't let technology drive your strategy.
Talking to a CMO about personalization recently, I asked them to give me their top use cases. What I got back was an enthusiastic description of a particular vendor's features, but they couldn't articulate what they'd actually do with it for their own customers if they had it tomorrow. This happens constantly. Teams get enamored with capabilities — "AI-driven recommendations" or "real-time personalization" — without first establishing a clear vision for how these tools would transform customer experiences. The entire B2B SaaS space is out there trying to solve your problems before you even know you have them.
Here's what I believe: data drives vision, vision drives strategy, capability drives execution. The most successful transformations I've led started with concrete use cases defined before any vendor was brought into the room. Don't start with "what can this tool do?" Start with "what would we do if we had no limitations?"
When you let system capabilities drive your strategy, you've surrendered your initiative. Surrendered to someone who doesn't know your business. Surrendered to another organization's timeline. Surrendered to the mediocrity of what competitors do with the same tech.
Think bigger. Whether talking to a vendor, an IT leader in your company or your CEO — if you want to own your strategy and get real buy-in when it matters, be ready with your top three use cases: if there were no tech constraints, what would I do for the customer, and if I could do that, what impact would it make on the business?
Only after being able to articulate this vision can you properly engage technology partners about your strategies and the capabilities needed to build a custom roadmap to get there.
Every software vendor and IT leader I've ever worked with preferred it when we came with a vision and use cases in hand, because it massively increased their chances of success, too.
The tech will never be perfect. Your strategy shouldn't wait for it to be.