Latest From Bala Kandula
How Challenger CPG Brands Build a Measurement System That Outperforms Legacy Competition
DTC-born CPG brands rely on five metrics that systematically overstate performance. As they expand to retail, the measurement gap compounds, and most teams misdiagnose the crisis as a media problem. This playbook sets out the closed-loop architecture that permanently closes the gap, from the first geo experiment to a fully compoundin.
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From Measurement to Budget Decisions Your CFO Will Approve
Most measurement systems stop at the insight. This playbook shows CMOs and CFOs how to integrate Agile MMM, incrementality testing, and budget planning into a single system that turns media data into defensible capital allocation decisions.
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Bala Kandula is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at LiftLab, where he owns the product vision and roadmap behind the company's full-funnel measurement and incrementality testing platform. He's played an instrumental role in shaping how LiftLab's platform balances the statistical rigor of MMM with the real-time responsiveness marketers need to act on it.
Bala's path to LiftLab runs through over a decade in analytics and client services leadership, including roles at DataSong, MarketShare, and Neustar, where he managed cross-functional teams spanning engineering, modeling, and client success. He co-founded LiftLab in 2018 alongside John Wallace, bringing that operational depth to the company's product strategy.
Across retail, finance, automotive, and telecom, Bala has built a reputation as a subject-matter expert who bridges deep technical execution with client-facing strategy; from delivering an enterprise-wide BI benchmarking tool used by 400 users across Asia Pacific, to building predictive analytics and text-mining solutions for major automotive and utility clients.
Today, he channels his extensive expertise into LiftLab's product architecture, especially focused on the trade-offs between model stability and speed that marketers need for daily decisions and long-term brand effects. Bala writes extensively about product decisions, with less abstract roadmap theory and more "what actually breaks when a client depends on a particular system every day" and delivers crucial insights around the MMM and incrementality testing space.
Expertise
- Product Architecture
- Long-Term Brand Effects
- Time-Varying Modeling
- Full-Funnel Measurement Systems
- Marketing Mix Modeling
- Client Success & Retention
- M&A Product Integration
- Incrementality Testing
- Omnichannel Retail
- Go-to-Market Strategy
Bala Writes About
Why MMMs undervalue long-term brand impact, time-varying coefficients and what they reveal about compounding brand investment, product design trade-offs between model stability and real-time responsiveness, product architecture roadmap and lessons from integrating various product systems across client ecosystems.