Where lifecycle marketers stand: Drew Price's lines in the sand 

Drew Price has a confession: 85% of the time, he trusts his gut. Only 15% of the time does he bother with testing.

Drew is someone who's spent over two decades running lifecycle and email programs, currently heads up growth marketing at BrightBridge, and co-founded JRNY PPL, a growing community for lifecycle marketers. And he's telling you to stop A/B testing everything. On our recent "Line in the Sand" webinar, Drew shared his most controversial takes on what lifecycle marketers should actually be doing in 2025. Some of his stances might make you uncomfortable. That's kind of the point. These debates—about AI, experimentation, platform choices, and career progression—are happening in Slack threads at 11 p.m. when you're frustrated and second-guessing everything.

This is one approach, shaped by years of working across startups and enterprise platforms. You don't have to agree with all of it. But if you've ever felt stuck between what you're "supposed" to do and what actually moves the needle, keep reading.

Here's what's happening: Job descriptions want "strategic thinkers who can execute," but most companies can't actually define what that means. Mid-level marketers feel stuck between junior work and leadership titles they can't quite reach.

Drew's take? Companies genuinely don't know what they're looking for. The problem shows up in how they write job descriptions.

His green flag: Companies that are clear on the what but flexible on the how. The ones that give you a lane, a lot of autonomy, and trust you'll figure it out.

His red flag: Laundry lists of technical requirements that suggest the company wants someone to execute their exact vision, not bring their own.

So, how do you actually get promoted? Drew's answer might surprise you: stop obsessing over titles.

"Focus on being obsessed with whatever your lane is, driving impact and innovation at scale. Good things happen. Don't be overly obsessed over title and some of those optics until you're going from passive to active searching."

Translation: Build a portfolio of high-impact projects. Be the person product teams pull into discussions. Demonstrate by action that you're on top of things. The title and the money follow.

Everyone's scrambling to have an "AI strategy." Drew thinks that's the wrong frame entirely.

For him, AI isn't a strategy. It's the infrastructure that eliminates the bureaucratic nonsense that slows you down. He uses it to move "at the speed of his ideas"—writing first drafts of copy, creating dynamic fields without waiting for engineering, bypassing the Jira ticket queue that used to take weeks or months.

"The old way of putting in a Jira ticket to try and stand up getting one new piece of data for a program that you want to test, and having to wait weeks or months or even quarters to get data teams and engineering teams to decide to prioritize your project just so that you can validate an idea—that's where I love AI," Drew said.

But there's a hard line he won't cross: AI-powered analysis. Not yet, anyway.

He's also skeptical of the new breed of multi-channel platforms that use AI to take over decision-making entirely. His exception? Brands with massive SKU complexity—think food delivery services building recommendation engines at scale. For everyone else, these platforms introduce more risk than reward.

The bigger point Drew keeps coming back to: Lifecycle marketers need to operate more like product and growth teams. That means building innovative experiences, not just paraphrasing what other teams create and sending it to a blog post.

Drew named names on this one. He called out Salesforce Marketing Cloud specifically as an example of what happens when enterprise platforms become "Frankenstein" systems.

"It's very hard for them to stay lean and modern and to have a low learning curve," he said. "You oftentimes end up having to hire engineering and data resources that have years of experience on the platform just so you can do normal table stakes things."

That's a problem. If the learning curve is so steep that you need specialists just to accomplish basic functionality, you're paying an operational tax that slows everything down.

So what should you look for instead? Drew's criteria:

• Strategy and execution will always trump platform features
• Data should be actionable without engineering bottlenecks
• You should be able to create audiences and send campaigns the same day new data becomes available

He uses Assortment currently, but not because of its AI features. It's because it sits directly on top of data lakes like Snowflake. When new customer data shows up, he can build audiences and launch campaigns immediately. No tickets, no waiting, no data team dependencies.

This is where Drew's philosophy gets really spicy.

Most of what we've been told about experimentation over the last decade is wrong. We've romanticized novelty results—button colors, subject line variations, incremental optimizations—instead of focusing on big swings that actually move the business.

"For me, success is around testing at the program level and testing big swings, and then also making sure you measure responsibly long, like downstream."

Here's the thing people miss: If you run a test during the activation phase of the lifecycle, it can impact those same cohorts 30, 45, 60 days down the line. If you're not measuring longitudinally, you could reach completely false conclusions.

Drew's rule of thumb: If you got a tie in your test results, you weren't testing something meaningful enough. That's a signal to try something radically different, not to keep optimizing around the edges.

So when should you test? When you're making program-level decisions with real business impact. Use holdback groups. Measure over longer time periods. Look at both positive and negative metrics.

For everything else? Move with conviction based on principles.

Drew's principle is "value realization at scale"—helping people make informed decisions about their relationship with your product that honor why they signed up in the first place. When you have that clarity, you don't need to test every little thing. You know what serves that goal and what doesn't.

Throughout the conversation, Drew kept returning to a few core ideas that feel increasingly radical in 2026:

Move at the speed of your ideas. Internal documentation, cross-functional consensus, Slack silos, committee decisions—all of that is anti-growth. Find environments where you have autonomy to prioritize and execute without endless stakeholder management.

Build a manifesto. Just like companies have values, your lifecycle program should have principles. For Drew, it's value realization at scale. For you, it might be trust maintenance or contextual relevance. Whatever it is, use it to move with confidence instead of testing everything to death.

Focus on the forest, not the trees. Especially early in your career, it's easy to overanalyze semantics about titles and org charts. Focus on creating a portfolio of high-impact projects instead. Demonstrate you can drive results. The rest follows.

Be entrepreneurial in your lane. The marketers who win are the ones who act like founders within their scope—they have strong instincts about the product, manage customer relationships at scale, and prove themselves through action rather than through consensus.

These debates aren't going away. If anything, they're getting louder as AI evolves, platforms proliferate, and expectations for what lifecycle marketers should own continue to expand.

Want to hear Drew walk through these arguments in full, including the technical details on his platform choices and his real-world experimentation examples? Watch the full Line in the Sand webinar recording.

And if you're tired of figuring this stuff out alone, Drew and his co-founder Brian Sun built Journey People specifically for lifecycle marketers, helping lifecycle marketers. It's about 1,000 people in the Slack community and 5,000 newsletter subscribers sharing what's actually working. Check out JRNY PPL here.