Posted on by mina
ActionIQ gathered a powerful community of leaders across marketing, data, and product to provide insights and strategies for success. Here are some key takeaways from the day.
- Be obsessive about customer centricity.
Customer-centric organizations focus on understanding their clients expectations, then overdelivering on that expectation. Julie Fleischer, SVP of Customer Intelligence at Weight Watchers, described the WW process as overdelivering on a brand promise. They start with a simple question – Where do you want to go, and how can we help you get there.
Everything from customer service, the mobile app, the UX writing, the community groups…all have to overdeliver on their brand promise to keep the relationship strong between the customer and the business. - Abandon the idea of the perfect product. You don’t have to fix everything before you execute.
Jason John, CMO at Publishers Clearing House, warned not to get into “analysis paralysis” when launching a product. His message was clear – you’ll never have a perfect product, get mostly there…learn what’s working and what’s not working…then correct it. Always have the goal in mind to create, study the data, then refine. - Failure is the key to success.
It was a recurring theme at the summit that failure leads to success. There’s always fear of failure, fear of the unknown. How will this affect my job? If I make a mistake, will it affect my compensation? It’s important to foster an environment where employees want to try something new, analyze the results, and refine. Even large organizations can establish a culture of entrepreneurial spirit where employees foster creative thinking, have pride in their success, and learn from failure. There’s also the concept of distributed decision making – which leads to group ownership, pride, and excitement that’s shared across a team…not just one person. - Have a clear idea of where you want to go, but always course-correct after you learn.
Nicholas Butterworth, CTO at Refinery29 discussed the importance of always referring to the product roadmap as you’re building new features and functions. But more importantly, don’t feel like the roadmap is set in stone. Understand what the goals of your product is long term, then as you’re learning, building, analyzing…you should course correct. The roadmap should always be fluid and reflect the most recent customer data, analysis, feature strategy. - Over-invest in building your team, then cultivate it.
Elisabeth Kozack, VP Product for Marcus: by Goldman Sachs emphasized “hire for the person, not the role”. Understand how they think, are they empathetic, do they appear to be a team player…those are key criteria. The rest can be learned/trained. Another key concept is to allow for flexibility in the role they’re hired to do…give employees an opportunity to focus on something slightly different that what they were hired to do. For example, try the 80/20 rule…80% focus on the job function then give 20% exploratory time.
If you’re interested in checking out an ActionIQ conference, here are some upcoming dates.
- Oct. 8 – Co-hosted Webinar with Merkle
- Oct. 24 – Women in Retail’s OTR Conference (NYC)
- Oct. 28-30 – GDS Group Omnichannel Summit (Scottsdale)
- Nov. 5-6 – Forrester’s Data Strategy & Insights Forum (Austin)
- Nov. 7 – Women in Retail’s OTR Conference (SF)