Reverse ETL is plumbing, not strategy
Why treating activation as a product decision — not a category to buy — is the difference between value and shelfware.
Reverse ETL as a vendor category has done real damage to how teams think about activation. The tool is fine. The framing is not.
Activation is a product decision: which segment, into which system, for which use case, owned by which team. The vendor choice is downstream of those questions, not upstream.
The teams that get this right treat activation like any other feature: define the use case, name the owner, ship the smallest thing that moves the metric, iterate. The teams that get it wrong buy the tool first and spend six months looking for a use case worthy of it.
Aisha specializes in semantic layers, dbt architecture, and getting analytics organizations to actually ship.
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