How to Involve Your Entire Organization When Designing a Digital Product Measurement Strategy

The leaders in your insurance organization may understand why a product measurement strategy is critical to maximizing the impact of your digital investments. However, without collaboration among stakeholder teams, an effective, durable strategy will be nearly impossible to design.

In the following post, we explain why collaboration is a critical ingredient to any digital product measurement strategy and share a roadmap for involving groups across your organization to develop an effective strategy.

 

Why Collaboration is Key

An effective digital product management strategy involves mapping business objectives and targets to technical, organizational, and analytical data. As a result, leaders from Business, IT, and other support functions such as HR must come together to formulate a strategy that accounts for the contributions of every relevant organizational department or team.

It’s not uncommon for business leaders to focus on financial targets without outlining departmental objectives for the full enterprise. And on the IT side, operational analytics are often the measuring stick for success: app uptime, development velocity, and bug-fix SLAs rule the roost. But what if – as good as their performance against those KPIs are – they do not actually contribute to the revenue goals or business strategy of the organization? Similarly, if an HR leader prioritizes a departmental target like improving recruiting’s average position time-to-close while leaving all leadership vacancies critical to IT and business priorities unfilled, they end up celebrating vanity metrics while the ship sinks around them.

A durable digital product measurement strategy should involve all such stakeholders so that everyone is moving in sync towards a common goal.

As an example, let’s imagine how a lack of collaboration might impact an insurance organization that is planning to launch a digital product in 15 markets – with a projected expansion to seven other markets in the following year.

• IT leaders want to build the product with the full 22 markets in mind – this will help them think more holistically and reduce total development time, while also ensuring feedback from the initial markets is integrated into all later markets holistically.
• Business leaders are focused on annual profit margins and so are hesitant to invest in the extra development needed to build for more than their priority markets. They want to offset the extra development costs to the following year’s budget.
• HR leaders are unaware that IT needs to fill two obscure technical roles in order to complete the initial priorities on time. They are instead focused on filling easy to place roles to keep their average time-to-close low.

Without collaboration and a proper digital product management strategy, the organization risks interdepartmental arm-wrestling that could lead to poor decisions, turnover, and a delayed, disappointing, or unnecessarily complex product rollout.

 

Collaborating on a Digital Product Measurement Strategy

If an organization is able to bring departmental stakeholders together with the purpose of designing a digital product measurement strategy, here – at a high level – is how the collaboration should play out:

1. Senior leadership should articulate the organization’s vision and mission in such a way that each department knows how to contribute – including what strength or skill they bring to the project and where they need to focus effort and attention.
2. Department leads then take that vision cast by leadership and set clear goals and objectives to help their group/department plan and strategize. The action plan should communicate to their teams how they align with the organization’s vision, and when looked at across the organization, the various departments should feel aligned in their focuses.
3. Problem solvers within each department then brainstorm ideas and approaches that might contribute positively towards the department’s success. Engineering team leads, product leads, and other employees critical to the department’s success will develop value-hypotheses for each product feature, business team contributors may ideate on process or incentive changes with their own value-hypotheses, and HR may ideate on human resource priorities that would best enable the desired outcomes with their own hypotheses. As a common enterprise, these hypotheses can be shared and vetted to ensure the organization feel confident that their investments are being funneled into the most promising areas.
4. Finally, department leaders and problem solvers across the organization will agree to implement ideas and approaches that are hypothesized to be most critical to the digital product’s success. Departments will also agree on ways to test their hypotheses and measure impact using data from a variety of sources, including analytics, call center logs, and usability tests. They operationalize this situational awareness, regularly inspecting and adapting with agility as they learn new things, continually investing in the most promising areas across each domain.

The beauty of a proper, durable, explicit digital product measurement strategy is that it enables stakeholders to see how their work will be measured and allows them to more precisely respond when problems arise. A digital product measurement strategy also allows organizations to move with greater cohesiveness towards the organization’s keys objectives as defined by leadership.

 

Is your organization looking for a partner to help develop a digital product measurement strategy? Connect with us today.