UNITED STATES · COAST OF MAINE

THORR

CHART No. 207 · SURVEY OF A MARTECH CAREER

Surveyed and drawn by
Therion Thacker
From original surveys
2005 to 2026
Depths in
fathoms
Projection
Equirectangular, standard parallel 44°00′N
Extent
71°03′W to 66°36′W · 42°29′N to 45°03′N
Sheet covers
192 by 154 nautical miles

surveyed from maine

THE CHART

A plotted course through deep water, bottom-left to the light

25502734191222168Lt · P.A.Ball Packaging (USW)Backend Production ChiefGAP Inc.IT Service OperatorAdvanced Drainage SystemsLead Desktop Support EngineerRevolent GroupSFMC Program OwnerMinloPro PartnersSenior SFMC DeveloperAttain PartnersSenior Solutions ArchitectThe Aspen GroupSFMC Lead Dev Manager · est. 2025 · underway

CHART LEGEND

Platforms

  • Salesforce Marketing Cloud
  • Braze
  • Health Cloud
  • Data Cloud
  • Sales Cloud
  • Attentive

Languages

  • AMPscript
  • SSJS
  • SQL
  • HTML

Architecture

  • MC Personalization SDK
  • BigQuery / GCP
  • Identity Resolution
  • Data Harmonization
  • Preference Centers
  • API Integration

CERTIFIED: MC ADMINISTRATOR / MC EMAIL SPECIALIST / PSM I / SAFe SCRUM MASTER

SURVEY RECORDS

Selected soundings from the log

SURVEY No. 1

More than half of what my team shipped, I scoped first.

Since January 2025 I've led four engineers across four healthcare brands, on a stack running two SFMC instances, two Braze instances, Health Cloud, Sales Cloud and Data Cloud. Most of what we delivered started as an ambiguous business request with no owning system and no clear ask, and turning those into buildable work was the actual job. I owned most of the epics in flight and carried my own delivery queue alongside them. That's the part of leading that doesn't show up in a title.

SURVEY No. 2

When the sends broke, I owned the write-up.

Five formal root cause analyses: a major mailbox provider deferring our mail, a platform connectivity outage, a keyword change that disrupted SMS, a degradation event, and an appointment messaging defect. One of them had been pinned on the internal network by everyone who looked at it. It was a stale DNS token on a sending subdomain. Every RCA also came with the incident comms and the stakeholder brief, which is the part no ticketing system captures and the part executives actually read.

SURVEY No. 3

Built the deliverability program everything else now sits on.

Google Postmaster and Microsoft SNDS reputation data pulled into Validity Everest, inbox placement alerting, unsubscribe monitoring running daily on an automation, IP reputation analysis and a short code audit. Before this there was no instrumentation at all. You found out you had a problem when somebody told you.

SURVEY No. 4

Governance that holds up under audit.

Identity resolution, segmentation governance and consent management across multiple data sources, GDPR and CCPA compliant from the first build rather than retrofitted. In healthcare the consent surface is the highest-consequence thing you own. It gets built with clear ownership and traceability, or it gets built twice.

SURVEY No. 5

I still build the first version myself.

The quiz data decisioning work started as a JSON parsing proof of concept I wrote myself, because the fastest way to find out whether a thing is possible is to build the ugly version of it. Once it worked I handed it over to be productionized and automated properly. That flag now drives two quarterly audience refreshes. AMPScript, SSJS and SQL are tools I use, not things I used to know.

SURVEY No. 6

The best evaluation I ran ended in a no.

SMS vendor pilots, a personalization platform demo, analytics connector work, a review platform integration and a marketing intelligence implementation audit. Roughly one in seven of the things I opened got cancelled, and that ratio is deliberate. Exploratory work that reaches a conclusion and stops costs a fraction of exploratory work that becomes a platform nobody asked for.

Engraved portrait of the surveyor looking out over the Maine coast at dusk, a lighthouse in the distance
PLATE I. · THE SURVEYOR ·
Coast of Maine, at dusk.

NOTICES TO MARINERS

  • Water. Bass, striper, and anything large enough to fight back.

  • Terrain. Mountain biking, hiking, and quiet trails with two good dogs.

  • Pack. Bean and Liam. Two dogs, two reasons to keep the trails warm.

  • Cold. Cross country skiing through long Maine winters.

  • Guardian. Bungie since the beginning. Marathon, Destiny, whatever ships next.

  • Hearth. Maine, between the rivers and the coast. With Alison.

Send up a flare.

SIGNAL STATION

Open to Director and Senior Director MarTech roles, and to senior IC work where building is still part of the job. Available for fractional engagements too: incident practice, deliverability programs, consent architecture, vendor evaluation. Remote. The last few years have been regulated healthcare, though consent, deliverability and identity resolution behave the same everywhere.

LINKEDIN →EMAIL →