I build marketing systems people can trust and use.

About Dan Dawson

I'm a product and platform leader for marketing systems: the tools, workflows, data, and governance that help marketing, creative, and go-to-market teams create, launch, measure, and improve digital work.

My users often sit in marketing. But the work itself is product work: roadmaps, requirements, prioritization, adoption, governance, cross-functional delivery, and the operating model around the technology.

I'm hands-on enough to understand how the machinery works, but my role has usually been larger than the machinery itself: leading teams, aligning stakeholders, managing budgets, and building systems an organization can trust.

How I Got Here

I started in politics, back when digital marketing, campaign technology, and UX were still frontier concepts for campaigns.

The interesting part to me was always the tradecraft: testing messages, reading people, building tools, and making decisions in high-stakes environments where the deadline does not move. Campaigns taught me how to operate inside ambiguity. They also taught me that systems only matter if people actually use them.

That idea has followed me through the rest of my career: UX research at The Coca-Cola Company, product ownership at NCR Corporation, and digital and MarTech leadership at NCR Atleos.

What I've Built

Most recently, I built NCR Atleos's post-spin-off digital and marketing technology operation from zero in a regulated fintech environment.

That meant 11 websites, a 15-platform MarTech stack, content workflows, analytics, attribution, governance, AI-enabled creative production, and the operating model to support it across 141 countries.

The work helped produce $337M in marketing-originated pipeline, 14x digital spend ROI, and significant platform cost reductions. But the part I'm proudest of is simpler: the systems worked for the people using them.

Marketers became more self-sufficient. Creative workflows became easier to govern. Leadership had better visibility. And teams that did not naturally speak the same language had a clearer way to work together.

How I Work

Over time, I've become a kind of organizational polyglot.

I can speak marketing, creative, product, IT, legal, risk, analytics, procurement, finance, and executive strategy well enough to help those groups build the same system instead of talking past each other.

That is where I do my best work: complicated environments, high stakes, many stakeholders, and a need to turn fragmented workflows into something usable.

The technology matters. So do the people, incentives, approvals, constraints, and trust around it.

What I'm Focused On Now

I'm especially interested in the next generation of marketing systems: AI-enabled workflows, content operations, marketing engineering, attribution, answer engine optimization, and product platforms that help teams move faster without losing governance.

The best fit for me is a senior product, platform, MarTech, or marketing engineering leadership role where the work is complex enough to need both technical fluency and organizational judgment.

I like the messy middle. That is usually where the important systems live.