Own the attribution layer
By Aaron Jacobson · Head of B2B Growth Marketing at SpaceXSI ·
A lot of marketers treat attribution as someone else’s job: a dashboard the data team hands over, a number you inherit and argue about later.
I think that’s backwards. If you can’t see how growth actually happens, you can’t steer it. So I’d rather own that layer myself (write the SQL, build the dashboard, sit with the messy version of the truth) than manage growth from a slide someone else assembled.
It’s slower at first. You spend more time in the data than in the deck. But you stop guessing which lever moved the number and start pulling the right one on purpose. When a result looks too good, you know whether to trust it. When it looks bad, you know whether it’s the campaign or the tracking. In B2B, where revenue often comes months after the first click and every dollar has to point at something real, that difference matters.
There’s a second benefit. Owning the measurement earns standing with the teams you depend on. When you can talk to a data engineer in their terms, or show product where a funnel leaks, the conversation stops being “marketing wants something” and becomes a shared problem.
The unglamorous skills compound. The willingness to go one layer deeper than your title requires is, more often than not, the whole edge.