Build vs Buy Martech, Meta's Move to a Hybrid Martech Stack

In this video you'll learn how Angela Rueda's experience at Meta evolved from excitement about building custom marketing infrastructure to recognizing the challenges of maintaining homegrown solutions. Discover her journey starting with a mandate to create internal tools for targeting 200 million small businesses globally, and how organizational consolidation created an opportunity to reimagine their MarTech approach. Angela shares candid insights about being a "full believer" in building proprietary solutions at an engineering-focused company before realizing the unsustainability of operating multiple platforms, ultimately leading to a strategic rethinking of their entire marketing technology ecosystem.

#EnterpriseMarTech #BuildVsBuy #MarketingInfrastructure #MetaMarketing #OrganizationalChange #TechConsolidation #CustomSolutions #MarketingStrategy #TechStackDecisions #EnterpriseTransformation

Full episode: https://humansofmartech.com/2025/03/1...

Building custom marketing technology sounds like a tech leader’s dream: unlimited resources, world-class engineers, and total control over the final product. Angela walked into Meta with stars in her eyes, ready to architect a marketing infrastructure that would reach 200 million global businesses. The mandate sparkled with possibility – create something truly custom, uniquely Meta, uniquely powerful.

Then reality hit. Meta’s growth had spawned a sprawling organism of marketing tools, each piece stitched onto the next as urgent needs arose. What looked like a blank canvas from the outside turned out to be a complex tapestry of tactical solutions, each thread woven tight to solve an immediate problem. The engineering team kept adding features:

Custom targeting modules for specific campaigns
Program-specific deployment tools
Siloed analytics systems
Fragmented automation workflows
For that first year, Angela doubled down on the in-house vision. Meta’s engineering DNA made external tools feel almost taboo. The team kept building, feature by feature, convinced they could craft the perfect solution. You might recognize this mindset – when you’re surrounded by brilliant engineers, buying off-the-shelf software feels like admitting defeat.

A major organizational shift cracked the foundation of this thinking. Business marketing teams merged, exposing a stark reality: half the company used internal tools while the other half relied on third-party platforms. Maintaining multiple stacks drained resources and created confusion. The breaking point arrived organically – continue forcing an internal-only approach, or step back and reimagine the entire stack?

This constraint sparked the creative breakthrough Angela had dreamed of, just not in the way she expected. The pressure to consolidate forced hard questions about build versus buy decisions. The team had to examine their assumptions about custom development and weigh them against business needs. That original blank canvas materialized after all, painted with the colors of experience rather than theory.

What makes Meta’s story feel universal is that enterprise teams everywhere build tech kingdoms in isolation, they’re all racing toward their own goals with blinders firmly in place. Marketing squads assembling custom tools and processes at breakneck speed, treating enterprise-wide alignment as a distant luxury and a future-team problem. Then all of a sudden, organizational shifts take place. Restructures, mergers, leadership overhauls… they generate enough force to crack these silos open. When the dust settles and processes collide, teams finally see the cost of their fragmented systems.