T-Mobile is a major telecommunications provider, well recognisable by its magenta capital T. Together with its other brands Tele2, Ben and Simpel the organization serves millions of users in Europe. The market-leading brand is active in both the business-2-consumer and business-2-business market. Function and T-Mobile started their collaboration mid 2022.

T-Mobile is invested in its data-driven marketing capabilities, and establishing a future-proof architecture. As a result of market developments over the last years, such as browser tracking preventions - and new technical opportunities to collect qualitative online data, such as server-side tracking, the current standard of collecting online data did not fit T-Mobiles ambitions and strategy anymore. Therefore, mid 2022 T-Mobile took the leap to be one of the early adapters in the market to innovate its data collection towards an infrastructure that is fit for the coming years (or buzz term: ‘cookieless era’). Realisation of this infrastructure is needed to maintain the highly valued trust in data quality, so teams can confidently serve business decisions that grow digital business operations.

Our objective is to migrate all media data pipelines (the data that is sent from T-Mobile to platforms like Google Ads, Facebook and Snapchat) for T-Mobile and Tele2 from a client-side implementation towards a first-party, server-side implementation. Working with media related platforms means the involvement of a lot of internal and external stakeholders, and involves critical GDPR consent components.

Established the data fundament for real-time ROAS optimisation: 

In order to estimate how successful a paid campaign is and how its bidding should be tweaked, we have to be able to uncover what the campaign contributes in terms of revenue. We built an infrastructure that has the needed real-time capability and reliable data quality that makes attribution models accurate and meaningful.

Removed any future dependency on third-party cookies in the infrastructure: 

Third-party tags have been replaced or enriched by various conversion API’s.

Data collection using client-side GTM and server-side Tealium products: 

We moved from 100+ third-party tags to 12 first party tags, meaning simplified governance and better website performance.

Structured events with similar definitions towards single – well defined – events, validated the implementation and accuracy, and properly documented the setup for all stakeholders to reference.

As in all data projects, there were some unknowns before our agile team started. The exact stakeholders, possible impediments, current status of the infrastructure and concrete potential value were unknown to an extent. Therefore, we apply our self-developed framework for marketing data initiatives that allows us to onboard and clarify the current status fast, deliver results early, respond to impediments quickly and involve all different stakeholders. You can find our framework 

 on this website, but in short it consists of 4 iterative steps, performed simultaneously during ongoing agile sprints:

To elaborate on how this leads to a quicker time to value, we zoom-in on a real situation:

During sprint 2 we discovered an impediment on an external technical capability. Since there is a high amount of technical requests, choices have to be made in terms of priority, and our requests have a time period before they can be picked up. In case of this specific request, that period was expected to be approximately 5 months. 

During sprint 3 we performed a research spike to find a workaround. In our sprint review we proposed our findings with our stakeholders.

During sprint 4 we implemented the temporary workaround.

4 months later the external team realised the user story, with minimal delay impact on the aimed objective.

Currently, this agile team is responsible for collecting and delivering clean data, prioritising and delivering requests from stakeholders, still using the same agile best practices.

To us, this is what building a data culture means. We believe that everything you give attention to, tends to grow. So if an organisation’s process towards working with data is given the attention needed; facilitating people with the right approach and tech, data makes work easier and decisions better: it becomes functional.

In collaboration with Function, T-Mobile is innovating its data culture by building new technical and organisational engines that drive value. Read below the why, the how, the what and who. 

Read how T-Mobile is building a valuable data culture in collaboration with Function

There is one thing that I have missed quite a bit throughout my career in the data field: qualitative, hands-on data related professional education. 

With the growth ambitions for 2023 - in which recruiting talent will have an essential role - finding a way to offer qualitative education for newly hired professionals had the highest priority. 

I have been following JADS for the last years, and through the course of 2022 the idea arose to set up a partnership. 

After getting in touch and explaining the premise of Function over a couple of calls, we met up at JADS university. It is impressive, to say the least. 

From this insightful visit, we eventually ended up composing the 3 year professional education path as you find it in our 

A big thanks to Chantal Stevens from JADS (TU/e since January) for her efforts and enthusiasm.

Content Source Maps bridge content silos across your enterprise organization, delivering powerful workflows to work with content at scale.

Hyped! Our partnership with JADS Data Science University 

I am thrilled to announce the launch of the new website for Function Data!

For the past 1.5 years Function has had the opportunity to work with great clients, whilst finetuning its proposition and growing its business. Now, there finally is a website that reflects the ambitions and tells the story on how we make data work.

We build data cultures. Why? Because over the last 7 years, it is what I have seen projects succeed or fail by. I have seen great data initiatives with limited resources and money, and I've seen the biggest inconsistencies where the former and the latter seemed to be unlimited.

I have learned that technical solutions to solve data problems are a utopia, and that the best people that can hired will not be able to turn a company into a data-first organisation on their own.

As with most things in life, the best solutions are nuanced, and not one size fits all... However, there can be an approach that is universal, that serves as a framework for every organisation to innovate, that allows for custom needs and adapts to ongoing changes.

I have tried to concretise something like that for data projects.

What I have come up with is something that goes back to the (50+ years old) framework of Process, People and Technology, which I adapted to Approach, People and Data.

A culture is all about behaviour and beliefs. We try to establish a movement in every organisation that positively reinforces these behaviours and beliefs about data. We do so by integrating an approach that works smoothly, resulting in data that can be trusted, all facilitated by passionate enthusiasts.

Too often working with data is still perceived as frustrating and difficult, while it should be the exact opposite. Data should make work easier and decisions better, simple as that. That is why one of our core values became: ‘

’. Beliefs about data should not be complexity, it should be clarity.

Lastly, behaviour is – quite obviously – about doing things. That is why our focus is always to work on something.

 Sometimes doing something wrong is the fastest thing to getting something right.

Every year I select a keyword for the year. 2021 was 'Begin' and 2022 was 'Establish'. 2023 is 'Growth'. I have started Function, established and verified its relevancy in the market and all is now aligned to help more companies forward together together with – soon - a team of ambitious enthusiasts.

I hope you enjoy our storyline and that it triggers your interest. It has been hard work creating this and we are quite proud of it.

Framework: Nextjs | CSS: Tailwind | CMS: Headless CMS Sanity

I am thrilled to announce the launch of the new website for Function Data! 

A web application that explains Function's philosophy on how to build valuable data cultures, in collaboration with our clients. Using a solid approach, good tech and even better people. 






T-Mobile

Read how T-Mobile is building a valuable data culture in collaboration with Function

17-1-2023

Hyped! Our partnership with JADS Data Science University

4-1-2023

The launch of Function's new website: sharing Function's philosophy.