Governance is everything: Simo Ahava on making GTM a bridge, not a back door

Episode notes

I’ve wanted this conversation for years. Simo Ahava, co-founder of Simmer and partner at 8-bit-sheep, sits down with me to talk about the messy middle where marketing and engineering meet. We get honest about Google Tag Manager as a bridge, not a back door. We talk governance over clever hacks, and why that choice changes how teams work, not just how tags fire. We also get into where AI actually helps, structure, documentation, repetitive tasks, and where it does not, judgment, production code without review, or pretending to understand your data model. And yes, Simo explains why he now prefers to live in BigQuery instead of the GA UI, and how that shifts the work from dashboards to real analysis. If you care about reliability, consent, and outcomes more than chasing three percent more events, you will enjoy this one. Tell me what part you disagree with most, that is where the interesting stuff usually starts. #martech #technicalmarketing #googletagmanager #gtm #serversidetagging #bigquery #governance #privacy #consent #ai #analytics #cdp #ga4 #measurement #tagmanagement #simmer

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