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Segment Databricks Marketing Customers

MediumMachine Learning00:00
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Problem

Business Context

Databricks marketing wants a reliable customer segmentation framework for 420K accounts and leads across self-serve, commercial, and enterprise motions. The output will be used to personalize campaigns in Databricks Lakehouse Monitoring dashboards and improve conversion from marketing-qualified lead to pipeline.

Dataset

You are given an account-level dataset built in Delta Lake from 18 months of CRM, product usage, campaign engagement, and firmographic history.

Feature GroupCountExamples
Firmographic12industry, employee_band, region, cloud_provider, funding_stage
Marketing engagement14email_open_rate_90d, webinar_attendance_count, content_downloads_30d, paid_media_clicks_30d
Product usage16workspace_creations_30d, notebook_runs_30d, sql_queries_30d, active_users_30d
Sales / lifecycle9lead_source, opportunity_stage, days_since_last_touch, account_age_days
Financial / account value7estimated_arr, contract_value, expansion_flag, renewal_in_90d
  • Rows: 420K accounts, 58 features
  • Target for downstream validation: Binary — converted to qualified pipeline within 60 days
  • Missing data: 18% missing in product usage for non-trial accounts, 11% missing in firmographics, 6% missing in engagement metrics
  • Data quality issues: right-skewed spend and usage variables, high-cardinality categorical fields, and correlated activity metrics

Success Criteria

A strong solution should produce segments that are both analytically coherent and operationally useful:

  • Stable clusters across monthly refreshes
  • Clear business interpretation for campaign strategy
  • Downstream lift over current rule-based segmentation on pipeline conversion
  • A reproducible workflow in Databricks that can score new accounts weekly

Constraints

  • Marketing stakeholders need interpretable segments, not black-box embeddings only
  • Weekly batch scoring must finish in under 20 minutes on Databricks
  • Segment definitions should be refreshable monthly without manual relabeling

Deliverables

  1. Build an end-to-end segmentation pipeline, including preprocessing and clustering.
  2. Select the number of segments using quantitative and business criteria.
  3. Evaluate segment quality and stability, then validate usefulness against 60-day pipeline conversion.
  4. Propose how to productionize scoring and monitoring in Databricks.