173: Samia Syed: Dropbox's Director of Growth Marketing on rethinking martech like HR efforts

Humans of Martech

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Samia Syed, Director of Growth Marketing at Dropbox.

Summary: Samia Syed treats martech like hiring. If it costs more than a headcount, it needs to prove it belongs. She scopes the problem first, tests tools on real data, and talks to people who’ve lived with them not just vendor reps. Then she tracks usage and outcomes from day one. If adoption stalls or no one owns it, the tool dies. She once watched a high-performing platform get orphaned after a reorg. Great tech doesn’t matter if no one’s accountable for making it work.

Don’t Buy the Tool Until You’ve Scoped the Job

Martech buying still feels like the Wild West. Companies drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on tools after a single vendor call, while the same teams will debate for weeks over whether to hire a junior coordinator. Samia calls this out plainly. If a piece of software costs more than a person, why wouldn’t it go through the same process as a headcount request?

She maps it directly: recruiting rigor should apply to your tech stack. That means running a structured scoping process before you ever look at vendors. In her world, no one gets to pitch software until three things are clear:

1. What operational problem exists right now
2. What opportunities are lost by not fixing it
3. What the strategic unlock looks like if you do

Most teams skip that. They hear about a product, read a teardown on LinkedIn, and spin up a trial to “explore options.” Then the feature list becomes the job description, and suddenly there’s a contract in legal. At no point did anyone ask whether the team actually needed this, what it was costing them not to have it, or what they were betting on if it worked.

Samia doesn’t just talk theory. She has seen this pattern lead to ballooning tech stacks and stale tools that nobody uses six months after procurement. A shiny new platform feels like progress, but if no one scoped the actual need, you’re not moving forward. You’re burying yourself in debt, disguised as innovation.

“Every new tool should be treated like a strategic hire. If you wouldn’t greenlight headcount without a business case, don’t greenlight tech without one either.”

And it goes deeper. You can’t just build a feature list and call that a justification. Samia breaks it into a tiered case: quantify what you lose without the tool, and quantify what you gain with it. How much time saved? How much revenue unlocked? What functions does it enable that your current stack can’t touch? Get those answers first. That way you can decide like a team investing in long-term outcomes, not like a shopper chasing the next product demo.

Key takeaway: Treat every Martech investment like a senior hire. Before you evaluate vendors, run a scoping process that defines the current gap, quantifies what it costs you to leave it open, and identifies what your team can achieve once it’s solved. Build a business case with numbers, not just feature wishlists. If you start by solving real problems, you’ll stop paying for shelfware.

Your Martech Stack Is a Mess Because Mops Wasn’t in the Room Early

Most marketing teams get budget the same way they get unexpected leftovers at a potluck. Something shows up, no one knows where it came from, and now it’s your job to make it work. You get a number handed down from finance. Then you try to retroactively justify it with people, tools, and quarterly goals like you’re reverse-engineering a jigsaw puzzle from the inside out.

Samia sees this happen constantly. Teams make decisions reactively because their budget arrived before their strategy. A renewal deadline pops up, someone hears about a new tool at a conference, and suddenly marketing is onboarding something no one asked for. That’s how you end up with shelfware, disconnected workflows, and tech debt dressed up as innovation.

This is why she pushes for a different sequence. Start with what you want to achieve. Define the real gaps that exist in your ability to get there. Then use that to build a case for people and platforms. It sounds obvious, but it rarely happens that way. In most orgs, Marketing Ops is left out of the early conversations entirely. They get handed a brief after the budget is locked. Their job becomes execution, not strategy.

“If MOPS is treated like a support team, they can’t help you plan. They can only help you scramble.”

Samia has seen two patterns when MOPS lacks influence. Sometimes the head of MOPS is technically in the room but lacks the confidence, credibility, or political leverage to speak up. Other times, the org’s workflows never gave them a shot to begin with. Everything is set up as a handoff. Business leaders define targets, finance approves the budget, then someone remembers to loop in the people who actually have to make it all run. That structure guarantees misalignment. If you want a smarter stack, you have to fix how decisions get made.

Key takeaway: Build your Martech plan around strategic goals, not leftover budget. Start with what needs to be accomplished, define the capability gaps that block it, and involve MOPS from the beginning to shape how tools and workflows can solve those problems. If Marketing Ops is looped in only after the fact, you’re not planning. You’re cleaning up.

Build Your Martech Stack Like You’re Hiring a Team

Most teams buy software like they’re following a recipe they’ve never tasted. Someone says “we need a CDP,” and suddenly everyone’s firing off RFPs, demoing the usual suspects, and comparing price tiers on platforms they barely understand. Samia draws a clean line between hiring and buying here. In both cases, the smartest teams treat the process as exploration, not confirmation.

Hiring isn’t static. You open a rec, start meeting candidates, and quickly realize the original job description is outdated by the third interview. A standout candidate shows up, and suddenly the scope expands. You rewrite the role to fit the opportunity, not the other way around.

Samia thinks buying Martech should work the same way. Instead of assuming a fixed category solves the problem, you should:

• Map your actual use case
• Talk to vendors and real users
• Compare radically different paths, not just direct competitors

“You almost need to challenge yourself to zoom out and ask if this tool fits where your company is actually headed.”

Samia’s lived the pain of teams chasing big-budget platforms with promises of deep functionality, only to realize no one has the bandwidth to implement them properly. The tool ends up shelved or duct-taped into place while marketing burns cycles trying to retrofit workflows around something they were never ready for. That kind of misalignment doesn’t show up in vendor decks or curated testimonials. You only catch it by doing your own research and talking to people who don’t have a sales quota.

Buying tech is easy. Building capability is hard. Samia looks for tools that match the company’s maturity and provide room to grow. Not everything needs to be composable, modular, and future-proofed into infinity. Sometimes the right move is choosing what works today, then layering in complexity as your team levels up. Martech isn’t one-size-fits-all, and most vendor conversations are just shiny detours away from that uncomfortable truth.

Key takeaway: Treat your Martech search like a hiring process in motion. Start with a goal, not a category. Stay open to evolving the solution as new context surfaces. Talk to actual users who’ve implemented the tool under real constraints. Ask what broke, what surprised them, and what they’d do differently. Choose the tech that fits your team’s real capabili...