Welcome to the working half of the Rafaverse
The journey is the car. The tools are just tools.
Twenty years of engines hang on these walls, and not one comes down before the diagnosis. This is how my brain walks a customer journey through the bays — in order.
Roller door’s up. The mechanic wipes his hands.
Nobody walks into a garage asking for a torque wrench. They describe a symptom — it hesitates on cold mornings, something rattles at speed. Customer journeys arrive the same way. Activation hesitates. Retention rattles. Production drags. The stack stays on the wall until the job card says which tools come down.
So we start where every honest garage starts: with the clipboard. Pick the noise your journey is making and watch the rail above — the garage plots the route before it touches a spanner.
Pick the noise. The garage plots the route.
A tool picked before the diagnosis is a guess with a licence fee. Shelfware is not a purchasing mistake — it is a diagnosis mistake that invoices you monthly. The stack is the garage, not the mechanic; the order you walk the bays is the actual skill.
02 — The scanner is already plugged in…
The instrument is chosen by the question, never the other way around. Behavioural noise goes on Amplitude — cohorts, funnels, the day-three cliff. In-product noise goes on Pendo — paths, guides, where the feature went unseen. When the business wants the whole panel lit instead, the observatory takes over — Looker and Tableau for the explores and the exec dash, and Omni for the argument nobody wins without a governed semantic layer underneath.
The scanner tells you where to put your hands. It never tells you what to buy.
Diagnostics scanner — journey OBD
LiveThe scanner names the fault. It never names the fix.
Analytics — the listening wall
BI — the observatory shelf
03 — The fault is never where the noise is. Raise the car…
Day-three dropoff looks like a messaging problem. It almost never is. Under the car sits the loom — the identity wiring that decides whether the person you message is the person who signed up. Segment carries the events, the CDP resolves the person, the warehouse holds the truth. If those wires cross, every bay above this one is polishing paint on a car that won’t start.
Hoist 03 — capacity: one customer journey
The loom hides under the floor. Raise the car and look.
CDP — the manifold
04 — Wiring’s true. Now choose the engine…
A mechanic who has only rebuilt one engine has opinions. One who has rebuilt them all has judgement. These are the blocks that have been on my bench — the era, whose cars they drove, and what I did to each one.
The Oracle years · 2014 – 2023
Big-bore engines for retail at national volume. I owned roadmap and technical solutioning across multi-quarter programs — lifecycle and segmentation built on behavioural triggers and predictive scoring, tuned for the busiest send calendars in the country. Governance was not a slide; it was the torque spec.
The B2B tour · 2023
At SafetyCulture the job was unification: Segment, Braze, Salesforce, Amplitude and Tableau on one loom, so the lifecycle team could run B2B onboarding, adoption and MQL handoff without opening the bonnet twice. Attribution stopped arguing with itself.
The daily driver · 2024 – now
At Prezzee, Braze runs the daily routes — onboarding, adoption and retention across email, in-app and push, with the agentic pipeline bolted straight onto it. Braze Certified Technical Architect and Certified Developer, and it shows on the dyno.
CEP — the organ of horns, where the customer finally hears you
05 — Last wall before the roller door.
Six sets of keys, each one a journey that came in rattling and drove out quiet. The silverware arrived in 2025, all three pieces — Santa AI and the agentic work did the winning.
AMI Excellence Award — Winner
2025
Best Use of Marketing AI — Martech APAC
2025
Bronze — The Drum APAC
2025
If your journey is making a noise, describe it — the garage will plot the route. Diagnosis is free.
The Martech Garage — Rafael Washington · Sydney, AU
