Summary

The data warehouse has become the central component of the modern data stack. Building on this pattern, the team at Hightouch have created a platform that synchronizes information about your customers out to third party systems for use by marketing and sales teams. In this episode Tejas Manohar explains the benefits of sourcing customer data from one location for all of your organization to use, the technical challenges of synchronizing the data to external systems with varying APIs, and the workflow for enabling self-service access to your customer data by your marketing teams. This is an interesting conversation about the importance of the data warehouse and how it can be used beyond just internal analytics.

Announcements

• Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Tejas Manohar about Hightouch, a data platform that helps you sync your customer data from your data warehouse to your CRM, marketing, and support tools

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can you start by giving an overview of what you are building at Hightouch and your motivation for creating it?
• What are the main points of friction for teams who are trying to make use of customer data?
• Where is Hightouch positioned in the ecosystem of customer data tools such as Segment, Mixpanel, Amplitude, etc.?
• Who are the target users of Hightouch?
  • How has that influenced the design of the platform?
• What are the baseline attributes necessary for Hightouch to populate downstream systems?
  • What are the data modeling considerations that users need to be aware of when sending data to other platforms?
• Can you describe how Hightouch is architected?
  • How has the design of the platform evolved since you first began working on it?
• What goals or assumptions did you have when you first began building Hightouch that have been modified or invalidated once you began working with customers?
• Can you talk through the workflow of using Hightouch to propagate data to other platforms?
  • How do you keep data up to date between the warehouse and downstream systems?
• What are the upstream systems that users need to have in place to make Hightouch a viable and effective tool?
• What are the benefits of using the data warehouse as the source of truth for downstream services?
• What are the trends in data warehousing that you are keeping a close eye on?
  • What are you most excited for?
  • Are there any that you find worrisome?
• What are some of the most interesting, unexpected, or innovative ways that you have seen Hightouch used?
• What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while building Hightouch?
• When is Hightouch the wrong choice?
• What do you have planned for the future of the platform?

Contact Info

• LinkedIn
• @tejasmanohar on Twitter
• tejasmanoharon GitHub

Parting Question

• From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

• Hightouch
• Segment
  • Podcast Episode
• DBT
  • Podcast Episode
• Looker
  • Podcast Episode
• Change Data Capture
  • Podcast Episode
• Database Trigger
• Materialize
  • Podcast Episode
• Flink
  • Podcast Episode
• Zapier

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA