For years, UPS's marketing and sales teams wanted a Spotify-style Year in Review for the Digital Direct customer base — a delightful, individually tailored account summary. Everyone agreed it would be “great if only…” so it never happened.

Why? Because getting there meant aligning data, sales, marketing, and an outside agency behind something the org had already quietly written off as “impossible” due to the sheer size and complexity of UPS customer data.

I didn't see why it couldn't be done. From my investigations, it seemed like no one was incentivized to do more than “try.” So I spent the better part of a year doing the part nobody wants to do: rebuilding stakeholder buy-in from people who'd watched this die before, scrubbing customer data — again and again — until it was actually usable at the individual-account level, and negotiating agency support to build something genuinely personalized, not templated. What shipped was the first campaign of its kind at the enterprise: a truly individualized, account-level Year in Review, live in real customer inboxes.

The point wasn't just that it shipped. It's that I proved a category of work the org had labeled "not possible here" actually was — and built it in a way that could scale past one campaign, not just survive as a one-off.