Marketing and data engineering use the same words for different things, and the cost of that shows up six weeks later as a segment refreshing daily instead of hourly.
This is a six-part field guide for closing that gap. Every part is one page you can print and take into a meeting, and the glossary below collects every term across the series.
The six guides
- Same word, different meaning · Published 2 September 2026
Twenty-four terms both sides use and define differently. Download the one-page PDF - How to write a data request someone can act on · Week of 22 September
The event, the identifier, the freshness, the destination and the volume. - What real-time actually costs · Week of 29 September
Batch, micro-batch, streaming and in-session state, and what each is for. - Same customer, different records · Week of 6 October
Match against merge, and how each fails in the opposite direction. - Who is allowed to say yes · Week of 13 October
Consent, governance and the approval path that stalls things in week six. - Writing a goal a system can act on · Week of 20 October
The four-part goal, and the guardrail everyone leaves out.
Every term in the series
Every term from every guide, with what each side usually means by it, is collected and searchable in the glossary.