Chris Chapo
Analytics Leader and experienced thought leader with over two decades of retail analytics experience. He serves as VP Advanced Analytics at Amperity and has previously led data teams at Gap Inc., Apple, Intuit, JCPenney, and Enjoy.
About CDPa
The Customer Data Professionals Alliance
A community and resource hub for customer data professionals, advancing customer-centricity through data-driven strategies, expert insights, and professional collaboration.
Our Founder
Sebastian DiGrande
Sebastian DiGrande is the founder of CDPa. Through the alliance, he helps companies develop customer-centric business strategies, drawing on extensive executive and consultant experience.
His work focuses on helping organizations build customer-centric organizations — fostering customer-centric maturity, providing guidance for businesses at every stage of development, and supporting smaller organizations that feel overwhelmed by the process.
Who We Are
Supported by a network of leaders
CDPa is backed by a network of experienced analytics and marketing leaders who contribute insight, articles, and conversation to the community.
Jeanne Jones
Marketing Leader associated with the alliance, contributing to discussions on customer data, loyalty, and data-driven marketing practice.
Sebastian DiGrande
Founder of the Customer Data Professionals Alliance, helping companies develop customer-centric business strategies.
Customer-centricity, built on data
CDPa brings together customer data professionals, marketing leaders, analytics executives, and business strategists around practical, evidence-based approaches to customer intelligence.
What We Focus On
Areas of practice
| Theme | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Customer-centric strategy | Building customer-centric organizations and guiding businesses through growing maturity. |
| Advanced analytics | Applying statistics and evidence-based reasoning across enterprise functions. |
| Retail and consumer intelligence | Articles on retail analytics, marketing, loyalty, and supply chain operations. |
| Data science organizations | Guidance on structuring and growing data science capabilities. |
The Customer Data Professionals Alliance exists as a community and resource hub for customer data professionals who want to move their organizations toward genuine customer-centricity. Rather than treating data as a technical byproduct, the alliance frames it as the practical foundation for identifying, understanding, and activating valuable consumers. Members come from marketing, technology, analytics, and leadership roles, bringing diverse industry experience and shared curiosity about what responsible data practice looks like in practice.
The mission centers on advancing customer-centricity through data-driven strategies, expert insights, and professional collaboration. In practice that means publishing useful commentary, hosting conversations and events, and curating recommended reading for people who are actively building data-informed organizations. The emphasis is intentional: strategies grounded in evidence, insights that survive scrutiny, and collaboration among peers who have already wrestled with the difficult parts of leading change across functions and across industries.
Leadership and advisory voices shape the alliance's perspective, drawing on decades of executive and consulting experience spanning engineering, marketing, operations, and data roles. Contributors have guided analytics programs, built deployment roadmaps, and helped organizations raise adoption of their data platforms. Their collective focus is the difference between collecting customer data and actually using it to shape decisions — a distinction that requires leadership alignment, clear headcount ownership, and an operating model that puts the customer at the center of business strategy.
Resources for the community span blog posts, featured reads, recommended books, event sessions, and ongoing updates that subscribers can follow as the landscape shifts. Global trends in privacy, identity, activation, and analytics continue to reshape how customer data professionals work, and the alliance interprets those shifts for practitioners rather than for a marketing audience. Short, impact-oriented perspectives are paired with longer exploration so that busy professionals can stay current without losing the strategic thread.
Behind the alliance is a commitment to a deliberately diverse, multi-disciplinary community. Customer data work sits at the intersection of people, process, and platform, and progress often depends on bridging teams that rarely share vocabulary. By connecting practitioners across roles and sectors, and by keeping the focus on purposeful deployment rather than novelty, the community builds a durable reputation for the profession. Membership, event participation, and continued learning all reinforce the same aim: helping organizations become measurably more customer-centric over time.