“If it's broken you really need to fix it. Find a place where you're comfortable and dedicate attention on creative. But at some point, as you grow, becoming a little bit more sophisticated about what you're sending is probably going to unlock value.”

Signal engineering has three states: broken, default, sophisticated

Thomas Petit frames signal engineering as a progression. State one: data is broken (common at all scales) — fix before anything else. State two: data passes but uses default, unoptimised mappings — acceptable while growing. State three: engineered signals that represent real business value drive the platform's ML. Most apps spend years in state two without realising state three is available.