A Useful Checklist for Reviewing an Inherited Marketing Cloud Account

Inheriting an account is mostly archaeology. The people who made the decisions are gone; the decisions are still running every night at 2am. The goal of the first week is not to fix anything. It is to be able to say what would break.

Day one: what is running

• List every automation and its schedule. Note which ones have failed in the last month and stayed failed.
• List every running journey and its version.
• List every triggered send definition that is still active.

Day two: the contact model

Find the subscriber key definition and then test whether it is actually true. Two sendable extensions using different keys is the single most consequential thing you can discover early.

Day three: data in and data out

Every file drop, every API user, every installed package. For each one: what creates it, what consumes it, and what happens if it stops. Most accounts have at least one integration nobody can explain, still writing rows every morning.

Day four: consent and suppression

Where does an unsubscribe land, and does every send respect it? If preferences are stored in a custom data extension, confirm that the exclusion is applied at send time and not only at segmentation time — those two produce different results the moment anyone changes their mind mid-campaign.

Day five: write it down

A single page: what runs, what it depends on, what is fragile, and the three things you would fix first. That page is the deliverable. Everything after it is easier because it exists.

Resist the urge to tidy folder structures in week one. It feels productive and tells you nothing.