What Happened:
In an interview with Lifecycle Letter, consultant Cat Covert said CDP vendors continue to lead demos with outdated talking points like “you can personalize emails” or “you won’t need engineering anymore.” She noted lifecycle teams already know the email benefits and their real challenge is convincing CTOs/CPOs that a CDP improves data architecture, identity resolution, and the full customer journey.
Cat noted that marketers don’t want to rebuild journeys inside a CDP. Most teams already have deep ESP contracts and hundreds of flows running in Braze, Iterable, or Customer.io, what they actually want is clean, real-time data syncing into the tools they already use.
She also said the strongest CDP business cases are coming from product and data teams who want faster event routing, clearer identity resolution, and a shared customer profile. She noted that when those teams get involved early, CDP adoption moves dramatically faster across the organization.
More Insight:
Where CDPs can deliver real transformational value, and where Cat sees the most internal momentum, is in supporting product teams.
She explained that lifecycle is increasingly responsible for shaping the user experience before an email ever lands, including on-site personalization, event taxonomy, identity stitching, and cross-device behavior. When CDPs position themselves strictly as marketing tools, they lose the chance to be adopted as company-wide infrastructure.
But the biggest gap she highlights is analytics. She noted that many CDPs still can’t answer basic performance questions. Teams can target a micro-segment for a send, but can’t report on that same segment’s revenue without exporting data to BI. That disconnect makes the “single source of truth” narrative difficult to defend internally, especially with executives who expect a CDP to illuminate customer behavior end-to-end.
Engineering partnerships also remain central to lifecycle work, no matter how vendors pitch it. Things like new events, refreshed attributes, and schema updates are ongoing needs, and any tool that claims to eliminate that relationship misunderstands the role entirely.
Cat’s view is representative of a broader shift. Lifecycle is a bridge between product, data, and marketing. CDPs that continue selling legacy email benefits miss the larger opportunity to enable companies to orchestrate personalized, real-time experiences across every touchpoint, not just the inbox.