A DTC ecommerce brand. Nine figures in revenue. Millions of emails per year. Hiring a Lifecycle & Retention Marketing Manager. $100–120K. Remote.

Sounds like a company that takes retention seriously. They have the tools. The budget. The headcount approval.

But job posts lie on the surface. The truth is in the details.

I found three problems hiding in plain sight. And if you run an ecommerce brand, you probably have the same ones.

The hiring manager posted this on LinkedIn. It was meant to impress.

It told me everything I needed to know.

39 million emails is real volume. A 70% open rate sounds elite. But here's the thing : since Apple Mail Privacy Protection rolled out, open rates mean almost nothing. Apple pre-fetches email content for every user who opts in. Your open rate goes up. Your actual engagement stays flat. A 70% open rate in 2025 is not a flex. It's a measurement failure.

Now look at what wasn't mentioned. No repeat purchase rate. No revenue per recipient. No cohort retention. No LTV trend. Nothing.

When someone brags about sends and opens, it means that's what the team was optimized for. Activity, not outcomes. The dashboard looked green. Nobody asked harder questions.

This is root cause number one. Lifecycle was measured as a channel, not as revenue infrastructure.

The KPIs rewarded volume. More sends. Higher opens. More clicks. None of it connected to whether customers actually came back and bought again.

If your lifecycle team can't show you the incremental LTV difference between customers who went through your program and those who didn't, in actual revenue data, then your measurement framework is broken. Full stop.

You're not running a retention strategy. You're running a content distribution program and calling it lifecycle.

This line from the job post is the most revealing. Read it again.

"Quickly audit and assume ownership of active, in-process campaigns and automation workflows to ensure seamless execution and zero downtime."

Translation: someone left. Campaigns are running. Nobody knows exactly how they work.

The hiring manager framed it nicely. "You're stepping into something with scale. You're not starting from zero." That's a polite way of saying things are on autopilot and we need someone to grab the wheel before we crash.

Here's the uncomfortable truth. If one person leaving puts your entire retention engine at risk, you don't have a system. You have a dependency.

And this is everywhere in ecommerce. Most lifecycle programs are held together by one person's knowledge. The segmentation logic in their head. The naming conventions only they understand. The flow triggers set up during a sprint and never documented. The platform workarounds nobody else knows about.

That person leaves. They always leave. And what's left behind is a collection of automations nobody understands, segments built on undocumented logic, and A/B tests running with no record of the original hypothesis.

This is root cause number two. The company hired a campaign operator instead of building lifecycle architecture.

There's a big difference between the two. A campaign operator runs your email program. Lifecycle architecture is the system that makes the program work regardless of who's operating it.

Documentation for every flow. Trigger logic. Audience criteria. Exit conditions. A segmentation framework that maps customer states to lifecycle stages to messaging strategies. A testing playbook anyone competent could pick up on day one.

This company didn't build any of that. They hired a person and hoped they'd stay.

Ask yourself: if your lifecycle lead quit tomorrow, could a replacement fully understand and operate every active flow within two weeks using only your internal documentation?

If the answer is no, your system is a person. And that's a single point of failure sitting in your org chart.

These appeared in the job requirements. They sound like capabilities the company wants in a candidate.

They're actually capabilities the company doesn't have.

Think about it. If they already had deep audience segmentation, why list it as a requirement? If dynamic personalization was operational, it would be in their results , not their wish list.

The irony: they already own a CDP/ESP that supports all of this. The tool can ingest behavioral data, build dynamic segments, and power personalized messaging across channels. The technology is sitting right there.

But technology without architecture is just expensive shelfware.

What actually happens at most brands is reactive segmentation. A marketer joins. They need a win-back flow. They create a segment: "hasn't purchased in 90 days." Launch the flow. It works. Then another flow. Another segment. Another set of criteria. Each one built in isolation. Each one solving an immediate problem without connecting to anything bigger.

Six months later, the system is a patchwork. Overlapping audiences. Conflicting messages. Customers entering three flows simultaneously because nobody designed priority and exclusion rules.

The job post also says the role "works closely with ecommerce, creative, product, and merchandising." That's corporate speak for: these teams are siloed and you're the bridge.

This is root cause number three. There's no shared customer data model across teams.

Product knows what customers buy. Ecommerce knows what drives traffic. Creative knows what gets clicks. Merchandising knows what's in stock. But nobody built the shared model that connects all of this into one view of the customer — the kind that actually powers personalization.

Without that model, personalization stays in the strategy deck. It never reaches the customer.

Ask your team: do lifecycle, product, merchandising, and analytics share a single documented definition of your customer lifecycle stages? Including the behavioral signals that trigger transitions between stages?

If each team has their own version, your personalization is built on sand.