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Value-First Data — The Story So Far: Eight Months Building the Unified View, Live
June 23, 2026
A retrospective episode of Value-First Data: Chris Carolan, Klemen Hrovat (Sellestial), and Casey Hawkins look back across eight months of the series — from the Value-First Data Summit and loop marketing, through the Value Path and the unified customer view, to today's harder admission that "clean data" was never the right goal. The honest center of the show: after eight months, none of them can point to a single finished "clean portal," and that turns out to be the point, not the failure.
Key takeaways
"Clean data" is the wrong goal. Data flows from every direction and users keep creating more of it; the realistic target is a unified view that tells you where someone is in their journey, not a spotless portal.
After eight months, the team can point to no finished "clean portal" — and they reframed that honestly as the nature of the problem, not a failure of the work.
Context is the prerequisite for AI. If the data feeding the AI isn't structured, unified, cleaned, and de-duplicated, "that AI doesn't work for me" is the inevitable result — the model never had the context to begin with.
Trust, not raw capability, gates AI adoption inside an organization. A proof of concept that "works" but can't be trusted by the rest of the team never makes it into real use.
A unified customer view means different things to different teams — accounting and marketing need different slices — so you collect everything together once, then present the relevant view per team.
The biggest wins so far are relational, not technical: aligned teams, productive conversations about shared goals, and one customer opening a board meeting without questioning the data for the first time in eight years.
Human-to-human presence — events, being genuinely part of a community — keeps outperforming low-yield broadcast motions; you can't fake belonging to an audience anymore.
Keep learning
You just watched the work. Now build it.
The next step is doing it yourself — live, with people on the same path.
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