"Most martech teams I spoke with this year admitted the same thing. They weren't sure whether their stack was genuinely flawed or whether they never learned how to judge it. That uncertainty is the real source of friction. When people can't distinguish between workable and harmful complexity, everything starts to blur. Features get duplicated, journeys half break without anyone noticing, and no one feels confident about what should stay or go."
"I've described this slow drift into disorder as entropy. You don't need to understand the technical definition to recognize the lived version, the moment when the stack feels heavier each quarter, not because the tech is getting worse, but because the team never got the support or space to build the literacy the system demands. Which leads to the real hiring challenge for 2026. Martech stacks don't need more execution capacity."
Many martech teams cannot tell whether problems stem from flawed tooling or a lack of judgment, creating operational friction. Inability to distinguish workable complexity from harmful complexity produces duplicated features, partially broken journeys, and low confidence about what to keep. The stack often drifts into entropy because teams lack support and time to build the necessary literacy. Hiring should prioritize diagnostic capability over execution capacity: people who can evaluate what is valuable, what is noise, and what silently drains energy. Leadership frequently misallocates resources by buying more tools instead of closing the literacy gap.
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