Technology starts with the customer
How a CRM job turned into a technology job, one system at a time.
My LinkedIn headline changed from CRM to Tech somewhere in 2025, but nothing about the work changed direction. It just went deeper.
The chain
Customer behaviour produces data. Data needs a CRM to become useful. A CRM needs automation to act at scale. Automation needs personalisation to be worth acting on. Personalisation needs technology — real integrations, real identity resolution, real storefront changes. And the whole point of the technology is a better experience for the person at the top of the chain.
Follow that chain from the top and you end up building software. Not because you set out to, but because every layer needs the one beneath it.
The evidence
The paid membership at Mokobara is a CRM idea implemented as automation: Flow tags the customer, the perks trigger themselves, and members buy roughly three times as much as non-members.
The first-party data work with Epsilon was a CRM idea implemented as identity resolution across devices, measured incrementally: 4.1:1 iROAS against a 1.6:1 target.
Neither of those is a marketing campaign. They are systems.
Why the order matters
If you start from the technology, you build things nobody needed. If you start from the customer, the technology is obvious — and usually smaller than you feared.