In April 2024, I published an article titled “Why did Databricks choose ZIP – no, really, why?” The piece questioned what lay beneath the surface of yet another “success story” press release in the procurement technology space.
My skepticism wasn’t about ZIP’s technology or Databricks’ capabilities. Rather, it focused on a fundamental truth I’ve observed over 18 years of writing this blog: procurement technology success is people-dependent, not technology-dependent.
I wrote then: “The processes the Databricks CPO is talking about are not dependent on technology but the experience and expertise of the CPO himself – which is the true definition of orchestration.”
Less than one year later, that observation has been validated in the most telling way possible.
Ryan Meonske, the Head of Strategic Procurement at Databricks who championed the ZIP initiative and served as the human face of their success story, has left Databricks to become VP of Strategic Sourcing at Freshworks—a ProcureTech solution provider.
This isn’t just a personnel move. It’s a case study in why 80% of procurement technology initiatives fail.
THE PATTERN WE KEEP IGNORING
When I wrote about Databricks and ZIP in April 2024, what caught my attention wasn’t Ryan Meonske’s enthusiastic endorsement of ZIP’s platform. After all, solution providers have been collecting glowing testimonials since the dawn of e-procurement in the late 1990s.
What made me pause was the WHO behind the endorsement.
Databricks isn’t just another company implementing procurement software. They’re a data and AI platform company valued at $38-43 billion, with ambitions to reach $100 billion. They understand technology. They understand data. They understand what makes platforms succeed or fail.
So when their Head of Strategic Procurement said, “No company has helped to solve these kinds of issues until Zip. Zip has basically taken it to the next level,” I wanted to understand the real story behind those words.
I concluded my April 2024 article with this observation from a 2008 post:
“It is my position that a true centralization of procurement objectives requires a decentralized architecture based on the real-world operating attributes of all transactional stakeholders, starting at the local or regional level. In other words, your organization gains control of its spend environment by relinquishing centralized functional control in favor of operational efficiencies originating on the front lines. This framework is the cornerstone of agent-based modeling.”
In other words: Ryan Meonske’s success at Databricks wasn’t about ZIP’s features and functions. It was about his ability to orchestrate people, processes, and technology across a complex organizational ecosystem.
Now that orchestrator is gone.
THE THREE-DIMENSIONAL IMPACT OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTURE
When the champion of a major procurement technology initiative leaves, the impact ripples across three dimensions. Let me walk you through what this means for Databricks, for ZIP, and for our industry.
1. IMPACT ON DATABRICKS: THE FRAGILITY OF SUCCESS
Databricks now faces several critical challenges:
Loss of Institutional Knowledge
Ryan Meonske didn’t just implement software. He understood:
- How to navigate Databricks’ organizational politics
- Which stakeholders needed what level of engagement
- How to bridge the gap between procurement and the broader enterprise
- Where resistance would emerge and how to address it
That knowledge doesn’t transfer with a handoff memo.
Continuity Risk
I wrote in 2007—and it remains true today—that “the success of any program starts with an organization’s leadership… these bastions of success have very little to do with the technology, and more to do with the individuals involved in the selection and implementation process.”
When that individual leaves, continuity doesn’t happen automatically. User adoption can plateau. Internal champions lose their advocate. The initiative that was “strategic” becomes just another system to maintain.
The Champion Vacuum
Research consistently shows that successful technology initiatives require a “change champion” who can win hearts and minds across the organization. When that champion departs, someone must step into that vacuum—and often, no one does.
The result? The initiative continues on autopilot until it encounters its first major obstacle. Without the champion to navigate that obstacle, momentum stalls.
2. IMPACT ON ZIP: THE REFERENCE ACCOUNT DILEMMA
For ZIP, Ryan Meonske’s departure creates a more subtle but equally significant challenge.
Databricks was clearly a flagship reference account for ZIP. Ryan was featured prominently in their marketing materials, case studies, and website. His testimonial carried weight precisely because of his credibility and Databricks’ stature.
But what does it signal when the human face of your success story leaves less than a year after the implementation?
To prospective clients evaluating ZIP, the question becomes: Was the success about ZIP’s platform, or was it about Ryan Meonske’s expertise?
This isn’t a hypothetical concern. I’ve tracked this pattern for nearly two decades:
- When the practitioner champion leaves, the vendor loses their most credible spokesperson
- The case study remains on the website, but it loses its emotional resonance
- Prospective clients start asking harder questions about sustainability
More fundamentally, it reveals the uncomfortable truth that ZIP’s marketing team would prefer to ignore: their success at Databricks was heavily dependent on the client-side champion’s capabilities, not just the platform’s features.
3. IMPACT ON THE INDUSTRY: WHY WE KEEP MAKING THE SAME MISTAKES
This brings us to the strategic question that should concern everyone in procurement: Why do top executives leave so soon after major initiatives begin?
Based on my archives from 2007 to 2025 and conversations with dozens of senior practitioners, I see five primary patterns:
Pattern #1: The “Mission Accomplished” Mindset
Senior procurement executives often view major technology implementations as career milestones. Once achieved, they look for the next mountain to climb. The exciting phase is selection, implementation, and initial wins. The mundane phase is ongoing optimization and maintenance.
High-performers get bored with “business as usual.”
Pattern #2: The Vendor-Side Attraction
Moving from practitioner (Databricks) to provider (Freshworks) allows executives like Ryan to:
- Scale their impact across multiple clients rather than one organization
- Monetize their expertise in procurement technology
- Leverage their success story as market credibility
It’s a well-worn path, and it’s often more lucrative.
Pattern #3: The Post-Implementation Reality
As one procurement transformation expert told me recently: “A procurement transformation project doesn’t stop at go-live. It’s only the start.”
But for many executives, go-live feels like the finish line. The recognition comes during the implementation. The awards are given for the transformation. The LinkedIn endorsements pour in during the success phase.
The years of grinding optimization work that follow? That’s someone else’s problem.
Pattern #4: Organizational Politics
If an executive is brought in specifically to lead a procurement transformation, once complete, their role may become politically vulnerable. Other C-suite leaders may view procurement technology as “done” and question the need for such senior leadership in what they perceive as an operational function.
I documented this pattern in 2014: “the majority of C-suite executives believed that the best person to run a purchasing department is someone who doesn’t have a purchasing background.”
That bias hasn’t disappeared. It just goes underground once the technology is implemented.
Pattern #5: Economic Reality
At a $40+ billion company like Databricks, procurement leadership doesn’t command the same equity upside as product or engineering roles. A VP of Strategic Sourcing at a publicly-traded SaaS provider like Freshworks may offer:
- Better equity compensation
- More direct impact on company margins
- Higher visibility in the procurement technology market
Sometimes executives leave because the math makes sense.
WHY THIS MATTERS: THE 80% FAILURE RATE EXPLAINED
Here’s what the procurement technology industry doesn’t want to acknowledge: Most initiatives fail not because the technology is inadequate, but because success is too dependent on specific individuals.
Research from Gartner, Kearney, and numerous other sources consistently shows that 70-80% of procurement technology initiatives fail to meet their objectives. We’ve been seeing these statistics for over a decade, yet the failure rate hasn’t improved.
Why?
Because we keep pretending that technology is the answer when orchestration is the requirement.
Let me be explicit about what I mean by orchestration:
Technology provides the platform.
Process provides the framework.
But people provide the orchestration that makes it all work.
Orchestration means:
- Understanding organizational dynamics and navigating politics
- Bridging functional silos between procurement, finance, IT, and business units
- Managing stakeholder expectations and building coalitions
- Adapting processes to fit real-world operational constraints
- Maintaining momentum through the inevitable obstacles
When Ryan Meonske said ZIP “basically taken it to the next level,” what he was really describing was his own ability to orchestrate all of these elements. ZIP provided good technology. But Ryan provided the expertise that made the technology deliver value.
Now he’s gone.
The question isn’t whether ZIP’s platform still works at Databricks. Of course it does. The software didn’t suddenly stop functioning.
The question is: Without the orchestrator, can the initiative sustain the momentum and continue delivering value?
History suggests the answer is often “no.”
30
BONUS COVERAGE: THE DATA BEHIND THE PATTERN
If you’ve stayed with me this far, you deserve to see the empirical foundation beneath the pattern I’ve been describing.
The procurement industry has known for years that we have a talent problem. A 2018 Deloitte survey found that 50% of CPOs lacked confidence in their team’s ability to deliver strategic objectives—the same year that research showed 50% of executive hires fail within 18 months.
By 2019, another Deloitte survey revealed that the majority of CPOs were dissatisfied with their digital transformation results. Yet mysteriously, no one connected these three data points.
Here’s the connection: When executive champions leave procurement technology initiatives—which half of them do within 18 months—those initiatives lose the orchestration that made them successful.
This isn’t speculation. It’s pattern recognition based on nearly two decades of observation, validated by data I’ve been tracking since 2018.
Ryan Meonske led Databricks’ ZIP implementation successfully. He was the orchestrator who made the technology deliver value. Less than a year after I questioned whether the success was about ZIP’s platform or Ryan’s expertise, he left Databricks for Freshworks.
History suggests the Databricks/ZIP initiative is now at risk. Not because ZIP’s platform stopped working, but because the person who made it work is gone.
And we know what happens next: According to the same research, when you try to replace that departed executive, you have a 50% chance of getting it wrong. Meanwhile, 72% of procurement organizations invest less than 2% of their operating budgets on training—meaning even if you get the hire right, you’re not developing the capability to sustain success.
This is why 80% of procurement technology initiatives fail. Not because the technology is inadequate. Because success is people-dependent, and people leave.
THE THREE INTERCONNECTED DATA POINTS
Interactive visualization showing the relationship between executive departure rates, CPO confidence crisis, and training underinvestment
THE SEVEN-YEAR ARC: FROM WARNING TO REALITY
Timeline showing how 2018-2020 data predicted the 2025 Ryan Meonske departure pattern
These aren’t new problems. They’re documented patterns that the procurement industry has been ignoring since at least 2018—possibly longer.
The data was there. The warnings were issued. The surveys revealed the crisis.
Yet we continued celebrating technology implementations while cutting training budgets. We continued hiring executives to champion initiatives while knowing that 50% of them would fail within 18 months. We continued expressing disappointment with digital transformation results while refusing to acknowledge the people-dependency that undermines every initiative.
Ryan Meonske’s departure from Databricks isn’t just a personnel move.
It’s the validation of everything the data has been telling us for seven years.
And unless we finally start listening, we’ll see the same pattern repeat in 2026, 2027, and beyond—one “success story” after another, quietly failing when the champion walks out the door.
Tomorrow in Part 2: I’ll explain the agent-based model that everyone ignores—and why understanding it is the difference between initiatives that survive executive departures and those that quietly fade into the 80% failure statistics.
Procurement Insights
Why Did Ryan Meonske Leave Databricks Less Than A Year After Their ZIP Success Story? The Answer Reveals Why 80% Of ProcureTech Implementations Fail
Posted on October 29, 2025
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In April 2024, I published an article titled “Why did Databricks choose ZIP – no, really, why?” The piece questioned what lay beneath the surface of yet another “success story” press release in the procurement technology space.
My skepticism wasn’t about ZIP’s technology or Databricks’ capabilities. Rather, it focused on a fundamental truth I’ve observed over 18 years of writing this blog: procurement technology success is people-dependent, not technology-dependent.
I wrote then: “The processes the Databricks CPO is talking about are not dependent on technology but the experience and expertise of the CPO himself – which is the true definition of orchestration.”
Less than one year later, that observation has been validated in the most telling way possible.
Ryan Meonske, the Head of Strategic Procurement at Databricks who championed the ZIP initiative and served as the human face of their success story, has left Databricks to become VP of Strategic Sourcing at Freshworks—a ProcureTech solution provider.
This isn’t just a personnel move. It’s a case study in why 80% of procurement technology initiatives fail.
THE PATTERN WE KEEP IGNORING
When I wrote about Databricks and ZIP in April 2024, what caught my attention wasn’t Ryan Meonske’s enthusiastic endorsement of ZIP’s platform. After all, solution providers have been collecting glowing testimonials since the dawn of e-procurement in the late 1990s.
What made me pause was the WHO behind the endorsement.
Databricks isn’t just another company implementing procurement software. They’re a data and AI platform company valued at $38-43 billion, with ambitions to reach $100 billion. They understand technology. They understand data. They understand what makes platforms succeed or fail.
So when their Head of Strategic Procurement said, “No company has helped to solve these kinds of issues until Zip. Zip has basically taken it to the next level,” I wanted to understand the real story behind those words.
I concluded my April 2024 article with this observation from a 2008 post:
In other words: Ryan Meonske’s success at Databricks wasn’t about ZIP’s features and functions. It was about his ability to orchestrate people, processes, and technology across a complex organizational ecosystem.
Now that orchestrator is gone.
THE THREE-DIMENSIONAL IMPACT OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTURE
When the champion of a major procurement technology initiative leaves, the impact ripples across three dimensions. Let me walk you through what this means for Databricks, for ZIP, and for our industry.
1. IMPACT ON DATABRICKS: THE FRAGILITY OF SUCCESS
Databricks now faces several critical challenges:
Loss of Institutional Knowledge
Ryan Meonske didn’t just implement software. He understood:
That knowledge doesn’t transfer with a handoff memo.
Continuity Risk
I wrote in 2007—and it remains true today—that “the success of any program starts with an organization’s leadership… these bastions of success have very little to do with the technology, and more to do with the individuals involved in the selection and implementation process.”
When that individual leaves, continuity doesn’t happen automatically. User adoption can plateau. Internal champions lose their advocate. The initiative that was “strategic” becomes just another system to maintain.
The Champion Vacuum
Research consistently shows that successful technology initiatives require a “change champion” who can win hearts and minds across the organization. When that champion departs, someone must step into that vacuum—and often, no one does.
The result? The initiative continues on autopilot until it encounters its first major obstacle. Without the champion to navigate that obstacle, momentum stalls.
2. IMPACT ON ZIP: THE REFERENCE ACCOUNT DILEMMA
For ZIP, Ryan Meonske’s departure creates a more subtle but equally significant challenge.
Databricks was clearly a flagship reference account for ZIP. Ryan was featured prominently in their marketing materials, case studies, and website. His testimonial carried weight precisely because of his credibility and Databricks’ stature.
But what does it signal when the human face of your success story leaves less than a year after the implementation?
To prospective clients evaluating ZIP, the question becomes: Was the success about ZIP’s platform, or was it about Ryan Meonske’s expertise?
This isn’t a hypothetical concern. I’ve tracked this pattern for nearly two decades:
More fundamentally, it reveals the uncomfortable truth that ZIP’s marketing team would prefer to ignore: their success at Databricks was heavily dependent on the client-side champion’s capabilities, not just the platform’s features.
3. IMPACT ON THE INDUSTRY: WHY WE KEEP MAKING THE SAME MISTAKES
This brings us to the strategic question that should concern everyone in procurement: Why do top executives leave so soon after major initiatives begin?
Based on my archives from 2007 to 2025 and conversations with dozens of senior practitioners, I see five primary patterns:
Pattern #1: The “Mission Accomplished” Mindset
Senior procurement executives often view major technology implementations as career milestones. Once achieved, they look for the next mountain to climb. The exciting phase is selection, implementation, and initial wins. The mundane phase is ongoing optimization and maintenance.
High-performers get bored with “business as usual.”
Pattern #2: The Vendor-Side Attraction
Moving from practitioner (Databricks) to provider (Freshworks) allows executives like Ryan to:
It’s a well-worn path, and it’s often more lucrative.
Pattern #3: The Post-Implementation Reality
As one procurement transformation expert told me recently: “A procurement transformation project doesn’t stop at go-live. It’s only the start.”
But for many executives, go-live feels like the finish line. The recognition comes during the implementation. The awards are given for the transformation. The LinkedIn endorsements pour in during the success phase.
The years of grinding optimization work that follow? That’s someone else’s problem.
Pattern #4: Organizational Politics
If an executive is brought in specifically to lead a procurement transformation, once complete, their role may become politically vulnerable. Other C-suite leaders may view procurement technology as “done” and question the need for such senior leadership in what they perceive as an operational function.
I documented this pattern in 2014: “the majority of C-suite executives believed that the best person to run a purchasing department is someone who doesn’t have a purchasing background.”
That bias hasn’t disappeared. It just goes underground once the technology is implemented.
Pattern #5: Economic Reality
At a $40+ billion company like Databricks, procurement leadership doesn’t command the same equity upside as product or engineering roles. A VP of Strategic Sourcing at a publicly-traded SaaS provider like Freshworks may offer:
Sometimes executives leave because the math makes sense.
WHY THIS MATTERS: THE 80% FAILURE RATE EXPLAINED
Here’s what the procurement technology industry doesn’t want to acknowledge: Most initiatives fail not because the technology is inadequate, but because success is too dependent on specific individuals.
Research from Gartner, Kearney, and numerous other sources consistently shows that 70-80% of procurement technology initiatives fail to meet their objectives. We’ve been seeing these statistics for over a decade, yet the failure rate hasn’t improved.
Why?
Because we keep pretending that technology is the answer when orchestration is the requirement.
Let me be explicit about what I mean by orchestration:
Technology provides the platform.
Process provides the framework.
But people provide the orchestration that makes it all work.
Orchestration means:
When Ryan Meonske said ZIP “basically taken it to the next level,” what he was really describing was his own ability to orchestrate all of these elements. ZIP provided good technology. But Ryan provided the expertise that made the technology deliver value.
Now he’s gone.
The question isn’t whether ZIP’s platform still works at Databricks. Of course it does. The software didn’t suddenly stop functioning.
The question is: Without the orchestrator, can the initiative sustain the momentum and continue delivering value?
History suggests the answer is often “no.”
30
BONUS COVERAGE: THE DATA BEHIND THE PATTERN
If you’ve stayed with me this far, you deserve to see the empirical foundation beneath the pattern I’ve been describing.
The procurement industry has known for years that we have a talent problem. A 2018 Deloitte survey found that 50% of CPOs lacked confidence in their team’s ability to deliver strategic objectives—the same year that research showed 50% of executive hires fail within 18 months.
By 2019, another Deloitte survey revealed that the majority of CPOs were dissatisfied with their digital transformation results. Yet mysteriously, no one connected these three data points.
Here’s the connection: When executive champions leave procurement technology initiatives—which half of them do within 18 months—those initiatives lose the orchestration that made them successful.
This isn’t speculation. It’s pattern recognition based on nearly two decades of observation, validated by data I’ve been tracking since 2018.
Ryan Meonske led Databricks’ ZIP implementation successfully. He was the orchestrator who made the technology deliver value. Less than a year after I questioned whether the success was about ZIP’s platform or Ryan’s expertise, he left Databricks for Freshworks.
History suggests the Databricks/ZIP initiative is now at risk. Not because ZIP’s platform stopped working, but because the person who made it work is gone.
And we know what happens next: According to the same research, when you try to replace that departed executive, you have a 50% chance of getting it wrong. Meanwhile, 72% of procurement organizations invest less than 2% of their operating budgets on training—meaning even if you get the hire right, you’re not developing the capability to sustain success.
This is why 80% of procurement technology initiatives fail. Not because the technology is inadequate. Because success is people-dependent, and people leave.
THE THREE INTERCONNECTED DATA POINTS
Interactive visualization showing the relationship between executive departure rates, CPO confidence crisis, and training underinvestment
THE SEVEN-YEAR ARC: FROM WARNING TO REALITY
Timeline showing how 2018-2020 data predicted the 2025 Ryan Meonske departure pattern
These aren’t new problems. They’re documented patterns that the procurement industry has been ignoring since at least 2018—possibly longer.
The data was there. The warnings were issued. The surveys revealed the crisis.
Yet we continued celebrating technology implementations while cutting training budgets. We continued hiring executives to champion initiatives while knowing that 50% of them would fail within 18 months. We continued expressing disappointment with digital transformation results while refusing to acknowledge the people-dependency that undermines every initiative.
Ryan Meonske’s departure from Databricks isn’t just a personnel move.
It’s the validation of everything the data has been telling us for seven years.
And unless we finally start listening, we’ll see the same pattern repeat in 2026, 2027, and beyond—one “success story” after another, quietly failing when the champion walks out the door.
Tomorrow in Part 2: I’ll explain the agent-based model that everyone ignores—and why understanding it is the difference between initiatives that survive executive departures and those that quietly fade into the 80% failure statistics.
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