161: Angela Rueda: Meta’s Director of Martech on build vs buy, vendor selection and hybrid stacks

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Angela Rueda, Director of Business Martech at Meta.

Summary: Angela walked into Meta's engineering-first culture, discovering a sprawling mess of DIY custom martech solutions, and leading the organization through a fundamental mindset shift about build vs. buy decisions. She brings us through the technical and emotional journey of aligning more than 150 stakeholders ultimately forcing them to embrace a hybrid build-and-buy approach during a pivotal merger. Angela shares an honest look at what it means to lead big changes at a company like Meta, showing what really works when you're trying to transform how marketing and technology work together.

About Angela

• Angela started her career in the agency world before moving over to the financial services sector at Capital Group 
• She took a break from the corporate world and co-founded a lifestyle product company for moms and babies
• She later returned to finance and joined Citibank where she would spend the next 8 years growing into a Director of Marketing Capabilities role
• Today Angela is Head of Business Martech at Meta where she’s building a new team of data and performance marketers

Build vs Buy: Meta’s Transformation to a Hybrid Martech Stack

Building custom marketing technology sounds like a tech leader's dream: unlimited resources, world-class engineers, and total control over the final product. Angela walked into Meta with stars in her eyes, ready to architect a marketing infrastructure that would reach 200 million global businesses. The mandate sparkled with possibility - create something truly custom, uniquely Meta, uniquely powerful.

Then reality hit. Meta's growth had spawned a sprawling organism of marketing tools, each piece stitched onto the next as urgent needs arose. What looked like a blank canvas from the outside turned out to be a complex tapestry of tactical solutions, each thread woven tight to solve an immediate problem. The engineering team kept adding features:

Custom targeting modules for specific campaigns
Program-specific deployment tools
Siloed analytics systems
Fragmented automation workflows

For that first year, Angela doubled down on the in-house vision. Meta's engineering DNA made external tools feel almost taboo. The team kept building, feature by feature, convinced they could craft the perfect solution. You might recognize this mindset - when you're surrounded by brilliant engineers, buying off-the-shelf software feels like admitting defeat.

A major organizational shift cracked the foundation of this thinking. Business marketing teams merged, exposing a stark reality: half the company used internal tools while the other half relied on third-party platforms. Maintaining multiple stacks drained resources and created confusion. The breaking point arrived organically - continue forcing an internal-only approach, or step back and reimagine the entire stack?

This constraint sparked the creative breakthrough Angela had dreamed of, just not in the way she expected. The pressure to consolidate forced hard questions about build versus buy decisions. The team had to examine their assumptions about custom development and weigh them against business needs. That original blank canvas materialized after all, painted with the colors of experience rather than theory.

What makes Meta's story feel universal is that enterprise teams everywhere build tech kingdoms in isolation, they’re all racing toward their own goals with blinders firmly in place. Marketing squads assembling custom tools and processes at breakneck speed, treating enterprise-wide alignment as a distant luxury and a future-team problem. Then all of a sudden, organizational shifts take place. Restructures, mergers, leadership overhauls… they generate enough force to crack these silos open. When the dust settles and processes collide, teams finally see the cost of their fragmented systems.

Key takeaway: Build a hybrid Martech approach: identify core functions that need customization, integrate best-in-class tools for standard operations, and focus engineering resources on unique competitive advantages. Track implementation time and team satisfaction to measure impact.

Why Meta Ultimately Ditched Their DIY Martech Stack

Meta's engineering culture practically demanded they build everything in-house. You could feel it in every meeting: the subtle eye rolls when someone mentioned third-party tools, the reflexive reach for custom solutions, the collective pride in crafting bespoke technology. Their homegrown marketing stack embodied this philosophy, sprouting feature after feature until it required a small army of PhDs just to create basic audience segments.

Angela walked into this technical labyrinth with a mandate to reach 200 million global businesses. The existing tools scattered across Meta's landscape told a story of rapid growth and tactical thinking:

Data lived in isolated kingdoms, making it impossible to identify true marketable audiences
Campaign targeting required advanced degrees and dedicated data science teams
Channel activation cobbled together "omnichannel" experiences through manual patches
Sales and marketing data existed in parallel universes, never quite connecting

Then came the organizational earthquake: a massive merger that exposed half the company running on internal tools while the other half relied on external platforms. The duplicate systems drained resources faster than a leaky pipeline. This crisis created a rare moment of organizational clarity, pushing Angela's team to step back and question their build-everything DNA.

The evaluation process sparked intense emotions. Engineers who poured years into custom solutions defended their work with spreadsheets and scoring frameworks that mysteriously always ended in perfect ties. You could see the internal struggle written across faces in every meeting: let go of years of custom development or double down on the DIY approach? The breakthrough came through radical simplicity. Meta chose to build where they held unique advantages (their data foundation) and buy proven solutions for standard capabilities. This hybrid model gave both the engineering perfectionists and practical business stakeholders something to embrace.

Key takeaway: Start with ruthless problem definition before touching tools. Map your unique challenges, build organizational alignment around those problems, then evaluate build versus buy decisions through that lens. Your best solution might combine internal strengths with external innovation, creating a practical path forward that serves both technical excellence and business reality.

Build vs Buy Was Really Privacy Control vs Speed to Market

Engineering pride runs deep at Meta. Their developers wield a particular swagger, architecting some of the world's most sophisticated social platforms. So when Angela's team questioned whether to keep building marketing tools in-house, the debates turned fierce. The war room crackled with strong opinions about resource allocation, privacy constraints, and the true cost of maintaining bespoke systems.

The arguments for building centered around three thorny challenges:

Privacy requirements demanded granular control over data handling
Data transfer costs between systems could balloon into millions
Complex account mapping for B2B marketing defied off-the-shelf solutions

Yet the buy advocates painted a compelling picture: Meta's elite engineers could focus on revenue-generating products instead of reinventing marketing wheels. Angela watched the back-and-forth intensify as both camps dug in their heels. One side...