Al Collins, Founder and CEO of VShift , a technology, design, and digital strategy firm for corporate brands in regulated industries.
In large organizations, marketing and IT are often mistakenly linked. The reasons are clear: Marketing timelines can take weeks or months, while IT timelines can take years. Marketing seeks flexibility to respond to customer needs and market opportunities, while IT prioritizes stability, service, and security. Both worldviews are correct and necessary. However, the resulting confusion can kill innovation and potentially turn any initiative into interagency trench warfare.
This instinctive fight has real consequences. Today should be the golden age of marketing technology, but it's not. According to a Gartner report published in July, "Business divisions and conflicting priorities often prevent marketing from collaborating effectively with IT and data teams, delaying strategic digital initiatives." In many cases, companies have invested in marketing technology, but the wrong goals got in the way of app development and analytics.
Mismatch is in our corporate DNA
Mismatch can be an inevitable byproduct of a business model in which marketing and IT operate as separate silos. They are suspicious of each other and lack a common understanding of the roles and Even general vocabulary. And to further complicate matters, achieving marketing priorities may depend on IT resources and data processing functions over which marketing has no control.
Off The tendency for IT departments to view marketing as a "soft" discipline that lacks real urgency in their initiatives; As a result, marketing needs are often overlooked. Therefore, each marketing initiative takes more time and costs more. Worse yet, marketing may have incomplete data on customer needs and product performance, leading to poor route coordination and inadequate personalization. And, even more insidious, the confusion can lead to underutilization of an organization's IT investments, making it difficult to demonstrate ROI and win future budget approvals ("You're not using what we gave you last year that you don't have." "). .
The Way Forward: Product Priority
If organizational confusion bothers you, you're not alone. This applies to most of our clients. As a digital agency, my company often finds itself in the middle of IT marketing battles. In our experience, the best way to establish peace and move forward is to adopt a product-based operating model for business.
By "product" we generally mean a commercial website or marketing campaign platform. The product approach prioritizes product needs based on market analysis, competitors, user feedback, and business goals.
It is important that this approach is led by a product manager and product owner who live outside of, and are therefore not limited to, traditional marketing and IT organizational reporting models and structures. It serves to make them Inter-waking outdoors and conventional pushed. They meet the needs of the product in a very real sense rather than a functional organization and have the ability to control the human and budgetary resources needed to complete the required workflow.
This product-focused organization by definition cannot be dismantled as it is solely focused on achieving the product goals set by the product manager and outlined in the product roadmap. Reporting to the product owner (who is most likely accountable to the board of directors), the product manager has authority over all resources, including technology, needed to achieve the roadmap milestones. There are no competing programs or warring factions. The bug has been fixed.
Creating a product-oriented model
Best practices for product management systems include:
• Create a product-oriented organizational structure. In the product stewardship model, the product manager has authority over developers, marketing, and other key resources.
• Ongoing collection of customer and market feedback. The product-centric approach is based on the continuous collection and analysis of data that provides information that is used to develop a product roadmap.
• Prioritization and reprioritization: As changes occur and resources are limited, product systems require constant reassessment and reprioritization. The only thing worse than moving is moving and not moving.
Remember that a bad alignment leads to missed opportunities. Prioritizing products and aligning your team to develop a product roadmap under the guidance of a dedicated product manager is the best way to ensure everyone is on the same page, regardless of feature.
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