I have described this slow drift towards disorder as: entropy. You don’t have to understand the technical definition to recognize the lived version, the moment when the stack feels heavier every quarter, not because the technology is getting worse, but because the team was never given the support or space to build the literacy the system requires.
That leads to the real hiring challenge for 2026. Martech stacks don’t need more execution capacity. They need people who can make a diagnosis. People who can look at a pile and understand what is valuable, what is noise, and what is quietly draining the team’s energy. Without that ability, entropy – or simply stack decay – becomes the default state. This makes the deck something the team can grow towards rather than hide from.
The literacy gap that prevents teams from reading their deck
Leadership often assumes that martech maturity is a matter of budget or tooling. If the stack is underperforming, the reflex is to buy more features, add another platform, or snag a demo from a vendor that promises a cleaner and brighter future. But the real hole is one layer above the stack. It’s in the team’s ability to read it.
Most teams I encounter in my work as a contractor don’t know how to identify the early warning signs of a system that’s starting to wobble because no one taught them. The same goes for knowing the difference between healthy complexity, the kind that creates room for flexibility, and harmful complexity, the kind that multiplies cognitive load. Without that literacy, each platform feels powerful and vulnerable at the same time.
When you hire in 2026, you need to hire for more than just skills. You also need to hire people for budget training and for perception – for the ability to make meaning of the environment that the organization has built over the years. That sense-making skill has become the real limitation of resources.
Dig Deeper: The More Tools and Tactics Hurt Marketing Performance
Why different martech problems look the same from the outside
One of the most misleading patterns in martech is that very different problems cause the same symptoms. A bad stack behaves much like a team that is not properly trained. And both behave like an organization that has quietly amassed more potential than it has the time or knowledge to use.
From the outside, these situations – or symptoms, I should say – look identical: slow delivery, inconsistent travel, inexplicable failures, growing backlogs, and a general feeling that the system is heavier than it should be. Sound familiar? What’s important to remember is that the underlying causes vary.
Sometimes the stack is really flawed. I see it more often than I’d like to admit. Sometimes the team has never learned to recognize harmful complexity. Often the real problem is that the organization has underutilized capabilities that no one can explore. Not untapped value in the supplier marketing sense, but unclaimed potential that could reduce workload, improve decision-making, or streamline execution if the team had the space and support to experiment.
This is where the literacy gap becomes visible. If people can’t distinguish between valuable complexity and destructive complexity, they can’t see which parts of the stack could unlock growth. Underuse and abuse blur into each other, and everything feels like overhead.
The risk is that leadership responds with the wrong intervention. They can replace a stack that was working fine, retrain a team that needed different tools, or invest in features that have no strategic use for the organization. All because early warning signs, entropy and imbalance are indistinguishable without diagnostic options.
Dig deeper: is it time to clear out your martech pile?
Hire people who can link business goals to system behavior
Most teams are built around functional skills. Look around you and you will see data engineers, analysts, marketing specialists and channel owners. Everyone knows their part of the system deeply, which is commendable. But today’s stack doesn’t reward isolated depth. It rewards people who can move between layers such as data, orchestration and execution, and translate intentions into system behavior.
This is what many organizations struggle with. Data engineers may understand pipelines better than anyone, but often have limited influence on marketing outcomes. Marketers may understand the customer strategy, but lack insight into the underlying architecture. The result is an elegant machinery that runs smoothly, but is not aimed at the right destination.
Hiring in 2026 means looking for the connective tissue roles: the people who can read the system from both angles. They are the ones who:
- Interpret what the stack does and why.
- Link technical decisions to commercial results.
- Discover where underutilized features can meaningfully change workflow or efficiency.
- Explain system behavior in business language.
They’re translators, and every high-performing martech team I’ve seen has at least one. Without them, organizations spend too much on tooling or too little on strategic value because no one mediates between what the business wants and what the stack is capable of.
No one budgets for capacity
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that many don’t talk about. Most companies spend more on unused SaaS features than on training the people who manage them. They invest in tooling, integrations, orchestration layers and AI add-ons, but when you ask about the capacity development budget, the answer is usually silence.
You can’t hire yourself out of this gap unless the organization is willing to give people room to grow. Capacity does not come from job titles. It comes from repetition, reflection and the freedom to experiment without being punished for short-term productivity losses.
And here the imposter feeling comes up again. When organizations underinvest in literacy, employees ultimately blame themselves for not understanding the tools. They carry the weight alone. The stack becomes a source of anxiety rather than a shared practice system.
Dig deeper: Silent martech is redefining the way teams work
Why teams in 2026 will need sharper capabilities, not more staff
If the last decade was about scaling teams to match the stack, the next few years will be the opposite. Smaller teams with greater cognitive reach outperform larger teams with fragmented roles. The winning pattern looks something like this:
- Fewer handoffs, more cross-functional fluidity.
- Fewer tools, but deeper literacy in each.
- More time reserved for maintenance and review.
- Regular diagnostic cycles to clear entropy.
Improve your business environment by creating conditions where people can work with enough mental space to notice what the system is doing.
The challenge of hiring martech isn’t about finding people who can run campaigns faster or build segments faster. These skills are important, but they are not the solution to a struggling stack.
The real question should be, “Who on your team can read the system?” Who can tell the difference between feature bloat and real capabilities? Who can identify the first signs of entropy before your martech stack becomes a fully operational drag? Who can increase literacy for the entire team instead of becoming another single point of failure?
When companies hire for these capabilities, the stack becomes lighter, cleaner, and easier to grow into. If they do not, no instrument, however powerful, will save them from the slow decline into disorder.
Dig deeper: why your martech still feels like an expense – and how AI is changing that
The decade of diagnostic talent begins
Bigger budgets or more advanced platforms won’t be the big change makers in 2026. What will be the case is how well teams understand the systems they already have in place. The organizations that thrive will be those that invest in perception, interpretation and maintenance. Those who do not see martech as a collection of tools, but as a living environment that needs care, education and time.
We hired people to build for ten years. The next decade belongs to the people who know how to maintain, improve, and diagnose – the people who can see the pile clearly enough to help others see it too.
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Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under the supervision of the editors and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. MarTech is owned by Semrush. The contributor was not asked to make any direct or indirect mentions of it Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.
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