The Digital Leaders Series covered an array of topics, from setting the vision through to establishing an experiment-driven culture. The common thread was that of digital maturity and how digital leaders can pull on the levers of Experience, Technology, Data and Operations to transform the business, building maturity and setting the business up for success.  

Much was covered and, as we close out the Digital Leaders series, we’ve brought together 10 principles, spanning mindset and tools, that should be top of mind for every digital leader.  

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#1: Embed the vision

As a digital leader, you are responsible for setting the vision, the articulation of what great looks like, and the objectives that measure your progress towards it.  

It goes without saying that the vision and objectives, must be connected to the wider business, aligning the goals of the digital experience with the business vision and strategy. Collaboration with the business is key, communicating how digital will contribute towards the wider aims and leveraging the connection between transactional and operational objectives to business objectives to create a shared language for measuring success.

That communication also applies to your team. It’s not enough to simply share the vision and objectives with your team. It needs to become part of your communication, from the mapping of objectives to features in a roadmap through to reviews and retrospectives built around the objectives, shifting the focus of conversations into how success will be achieved.  

Model / Tool: Leverage the Objective & KPI Tree framework to help articulate the objectives and demonstrate the connection between digital product-focused objectives and business objectives.  

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#2: Break down the silos

As highlighted within the series, the success of transformations often hinges on whether they are driven by technology or culture. Culture-first transformations are always the more successful. You can have the best tools and techniques in the world but, without the right culture, the foundations are immediately weakened.  

Organisational silos have been around for a long time and pose the biggest obstacle to driving successful, culture-first transformations. These silos must be broken down, embracing a “one team” mentality and enabling cross-functional collaboration.  

At the heart of it, it’s acknowledging that digital is one piece in a larger machine, building clear lines of communication and an environment for collaboration that empowers and encourages teams to work together towards a shared objective.  

Model / Tool: Establish a Strategic Steering Group, bringing together representatives from all teams and disciplines and giving each member a voice. Not only does this align efforts but it brings teams on the journey, helping them understand the bigger picture and contribute towards key decisions. Ultimately, it creates buy-in and breaks down the silos.

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#3: Set the direction, share the responsibility

Like other digital leaders, your time is at a premium. Involving yourself in the detail and understanding every facet of the digital experience is not a constructive use of your time.  

You do not need to be the expert in all things. You do need to bring unity, clarity and direction, assembling a team of experts around you to help achieve the objectives set.  

It’s not about star players. It’s about a team. It’s establishing a shared understanding of the direction of travel across the team and empowering each and every member to take ownership and contribute.  

To do this, everyone must understand the part they play: their role, their responsibilities, their interactions, etc.  

Model / Tool: Create a Digital Operating Model to clearly outline the roles & responsibilities, processes and interdependencies, ensuring everyone understands the part they play, and regularly iterate upon this, refining and enhancing based on continuous feedback.  

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#4: Leave bias at the door

Long-held perceptions and beliefs are the bane of many a digital experience. Assuming that things should be done in a certain way as they always have been or promoting an organisation-centric view can undermine efforts to deliver against objectives.  

You are designing and building digital experiences for end-users. Embracing user-centricity is crucial and focuses thinking, placing the emphasis on what is valuable to these users and, therefore, what is going to drive commercial success as they increase engagement and conversion.  

Taking people on the journey with you increases buy-in, helping them move away from the entrenched beliefs towards a new way of thinking.  

Model / Tool: The Customer Journey Maps are the number one tool here. Taking the top 1-5 journeys, you can map out the current journey and identify the areas for improvement. It’s even possible to forecast what the future journey might be and use this to test your assumptions.  

The Customer Journey Map can be augmented with Value Stream Mapping to further assist your analysis, layering in engagement and conversion metrics to the maps to identify the areas of greatest opportunity.  

And, in addition, a regular cadence of user testing, user surveys, data analysis and benchmarking (e.g., comparative analysis) can help to feed ideas and insight into your journey mapping exercises.  

#5: Tell stories, not quote figures

A study by Stanford professor Chip Heath found that 63% of people could remember stories but only 5% could remember a single statistic. Stories are 22 times more memorable than facts alone.  

That’s not to say that what we presented in the Digital Leaders series is false. You still need to do the groundwork, converting your KPI Tree into metrics that you will measure and identifying those all-important top 5 metrics to indicate the health of your digital strategy.  

It’s going beyond Data and Visualisation to layer in Narrative. The statistics provide the factual foundation, but you then need to construct the unambiguous story around this, enabling you to relay it throughout the business and create a shared understanding of performance and success.  

Model / Tool: Aside from the standard analytics and visualisation tools, you can leverage A.I. assistants such as Microsoft Copilot to help you generate the narrative. You cannot be entirely dependent upon this, but it will help generate the ideas and themes to craft your data story.  

#6: Know your customer

A strong digital experience is an important first step but it’s important to remember that the experience is vanilla: the same for everyone. It will set an impressive tone and start the journey off on the right foot but, to truly elevate engagement and conversion, you need to listen to explicit and implicit signals and use this information, with consent, to create personalised experiences. The goal is to continuously move from One-to-All towards the dream-state of One-to-One, passing through One-to-Many, One-to-Some and One-to-Few along the way.

Data is at the heart of this. The more you can know about your customers, the more you can build effective digital engagement and drive higher rates of conversion.  

You need a plan, thinking through what your future state is going to be, e.g., what data could you capture and how, where and how you can engage. It’s thinking beyond the confines of channels and looking at the experience holistically.  

While the plan is important, it’s also important to never take the “big bang” approach. You know what the future state is so now you can plan out an iterative approach to building your digital engagement and personalisation. Think of the Start, Grow and Scale model.  

Model / Tool: The key thing here is your Customer Data Model. It’s a sub-set of your wider data strategy. You’re focused on what you want to know about customers as part of the Single View and how you are going to use this information, e.g., through marketing automation, personalisation. The Customer Data Model is the starting point and, from here, you can build logically-sequenced roadmaps, focused on delivering value quickly and iteratively.

#7: Be more ecommerce

For ecommerce businesses, there is little margin for error. The digital platforms (e.g., website, app, social, conversational) are their livelihood. Taking their eye off the ball for one second can be detrimental. These businesses leave no stone unturned, investing into user experience, experimentation and CRO, first-party data, marketing automation, personalisation and omni-channel. For them, the importance of digital is unparalleled.  

For other businesses, there is never the same level of importance attached to digital but, as a digital leader, this is your opportunity to change that. Recognise that digital is an important part of the marketing and sales mix, even if your sales are handled and completed offline. Your customers’ experiences are omnichannel and the time has come for you to place the same rigour that offline channels receive onto digital channels.  

Model / Tool: There’s no specific tools or models to use here but take the time to immerse yourself in the best practices of ecommerce, including their approaches to experimentation and CRO, digital engagement and personalisation.  

#8: Continuously enhance, not regularly rebuild

Traditional approaches saw organisations rebuild and re-architect their digital experiences every 5-7 years, often to purge the technical debt that had accrued over time and start with a fresh slate.  

With more platforms heading to the cloud as Software-as-a-Service offerings and architectural design embracing the tenets of flexibility and scalability, the topic of rebuild has come into sharp focus. A rebuild may be required to establish the strong foundations for the digital experience but, following that, the mindset must shift towards continuous improvement and enhancement: experimentation programmes to continuously refine the user experience for greater outcomes, ongoing user validation and refinement to feed into continuous development and experimentation and continual technical validation, adding, removing and replacing technology to meet the current need.  

Model / Tool: In parallel to the introduction of Strategic Steering Groups, establish regular cadences to review the ongoing roadmap, viewing it from Experience Technology, Data and Operations perspectives to identify enhancements and evolutions over rebuilds.  

#9: Experience is not just for customers

A lot of emphasis is placed onto the customer experience, ensuring that the efficacy of that experience is optimised to drive greater engagement and conversion. But this is only part of the picture.  

The experience that your teams have in managing the customer experience is just as important. If you are to achieve the vision and objectives that you set, the employee experience must be a well-oiled machine.  

This goes beyond simply providing them with access to a Content Management System or Digital Experience Platform and stepping back to consider what they need to do to enable the customer experience. This can run from the creation and planning of content and campaigns through to the delivery of personalisation.  

Building on the clarity established through your Digital Operating Model, you can identify the processes, tools and technology required to enable each team’s roles and responsibilities. And, from there, understand how these processes, tools and technology are united to create a seamless and intuitive employee experience.  

Model / Tool: Consider adding process or employee experience lanes to your Customer Journey Map. Think about what the team needs to do to enable each touchpoint in your journey, whether that be creating content, acting on submitted form information or interacting with engaged customers through channels such as email. As you understand the requirements at each step, you can quickly identify the tools you need in place to support the teams (e.g., Content Operations / Marketing Platforms, Digital Asset Management, Marketing Automation, Multichannel Marketing Hubs) and you can begin to design how these systems should come together.  

#10: Measure your maturity

Measuring progress against your vision and objectives is essential, validating investment into digital and informing future investment. However, achieving objectives and driving success is not just the result of a superior digital experience. Improvements across Experience, Technology, Data and Operations all contribute towards this success and it’s important for you, as a Digital Leader, to take stock of how you are changing as a business.  

In parallel to your performance analysis, you should regularly assess your digital maturity, considering criteria across the four pillars of Experience, Technology, Data and Operations. This in turn will highlight other areas for exploration and investment that can unlock additional growth for the business.  

Model / Tool: Implement a regular cadence of Digital Maturity Assessments to measure progress against the four pillars. There are different models out there and UNRVLD can provide support on implementation of our own model to give you a head start in running this activity.  

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These key principles embody the recommendations and guidance from the Digital Leaders series. By adopting these principles, digital leaders can supercharge their operations, driving towards greater outcomes.

For more information on any of the topics covered in this article or in the wider Digital Leader series, get in contact with us at UNRVLD to see how we can help.

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