Establishing DX Governance to Align Product and Revenue
Kat Noreen
A mature digital experience (DX) program requires a highly orchestrated level of cross-functional alignment to have maximum impact on your annual business goals. But how do you make that happen in a highly matrixed organization? In our recent Digital Experience Roundtable: Aligning Product & Revenue Teams, Leaders from across the industry helped answer this question.
Welcome to Beyond The Click by Balboa Solutions. Today, we give a quick recap of the big themes that surfaced in this discussion.
Let's dive in.
Ground the program in shared CX goals 🌐
As Ryan Smith, co-founder of Qualtrics, put it, "The modern departmental structure of most companies is a disaster for the customer experience."
Teams are wrestling with which functional team should be accountable for the digital experience strategy, and ensuring the performance of it has a measurable business impact. While there's a consensus that alignment is necessary to achieve program maturity, the methodology used on how to achieve that alignment differs. Some companies place accountability of the digital experience within the Product org, where ownership of capability development sits. Others in Marketing, since they own messaging and engagement with the target audience. But at the end of the day, Revenue and CX teams are accountable for driving revenue retention and growth goals. And mature DX programs ultimately need to align to those goals to have the necessary business impact.
The strongest programs intentionally establish a Governance program inclusive of Product, CX, Revenue, Marketing, and Data in order to have all necessary teams driving towards a shared goal.
Evolve governance as the program matures 🌱
“Don’t try to take Pendo away from Product. Earn trust. Prove value. Figure out how to extend the center of excellence to include Revenue and CX Ops groups.”
Across the industry, we see early-stage DX programs that are operating in a silo within Product, therefore not driving full impact of their efforts in alignment with specific revenue goals. But as the program grows, formal governance becomes unavoidable. We heard several models for building this:
- Monthly steering committee councils that include cross-functional teams
- Aligning product roadmap & strategy to specific business segment goals
- Incorporate DX planning into your quarterly planning cadence to align to specific revenue retention and growth goals
These methods can work for your org as long as you are intentional about keeping the right representatives from key areas of your business involved in your DX program, with the right metrics at-hand to ensure the experience is performing as intended.
Make quarterly planning the anchor ⚓
“If it’s not in the quarterly plan, it’s not getting built.”
Quarterly planning came up repeatedly as the moment where alignment actually sticks. When teams agree on the goals for the quarter, the process to then align on the right DX priorities becomes tighter. Reducing instances of individual teams operating in silos, with competing priorities.
Correlate metrics to revenue-driving outcomes 📈
“Before you can measure impact, everyone has to believe the metric matters to the outcome you want.”
Over and over again we see teams operating with gaps in data. Or worse, with a sheer volume of data that isn't correlated to business impact. The better path is to identify one to three metrics that correlate to specific customer cohorts where it is imperative to secure revenue retention or growth. That includes defining metrics that correlate to meaningful engagement and points of value within your digital experience.
Treat telemetry and outcomes differently 🔍
“Usage and outcomes are correlated, but not causal. Don’t confuse motion with progress.”
As teams make progress on instrumenting analytics within their experiences and establishing initial performance dashboards, the next step in program maturity is establishing metrics that correlate to impact. Linking usage data to actual business outcomes. Many called out the gap between usage and value. We see this across the industry, and it is where our team can help establish a telemetry strategy correlated to customer value.
Match governance to scale and complexity 🏆
Large or decentralized companies may need governance at the product line or portfolio level. Smaller teams may succeed with a simple monthly meeting. There is no one template, only patterns that get reused across teams.
What’s next ⏩
We’ll follow up with the date and topic for the December session. This series will continue monthly, and we want to make each one more useful than the last. If you have feedback on the format, new topics you want us to cover, or challenges you’re trying to solve, please reply directly. We’d love to hear it. Thanks again for the wonderful conversation.
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