By Janus Boye
Leadership has always been about making decisions, but when it comes to digital, you tend to be dealing with many unknowns in a fast-moving and innovative marketplace.
Coupled with adapting to unpredictable market conditions, even following the best recipe have been tricky, to say the least, and the need for learning from the best and networking with peers has been higher than ever.
Together with Kontent by Kentico, we recently organised two breakfast briefings in Amsterdam and London. Both events looked at what lies around the corner when it comes to digital leadership, but our world-class speakers also shared some of the key decisions they have made.
Below I’ve shared a few key takeaways from the sessions divided across 4 key themes. Let’s start with scaling your projects and maximising the value of your digital products.
How to maximise the return on investment in digital portfolio delivery
Unfortunately, digital investment is not used well in many organisations. This was the key topic in the opening talk at our London event, where Ian Greentree, Head of Consulting at MMT Digital shared how global companies maximise the value of their digital products and significantly improve speed to market.
Ian Greentree from MMT DIgital talking about a shared understanding of value.
With input from over 250 IT leaders, MMT Digital recently released an Agile Transformation 2021 report, designed to help organisations understand where the opportunities and risks in digital transformation at scale sit and how to set themselves up for success.
Using report findings and case studies, Ian talked about their agile maturity index, and delivering big and business-critical digital projects using the Scaled Agile Framework.
In particular, I found his honest insights on reducing waste and how waste can really eat up your return on investment really interesting. A part of it was related to recognising complex organisations structures and identifying poor organisational behaviours. In other words: Your analogue leadership determines your digital success.
How can you deliver and maintain a good user experience?
Terence from Reversed Digital on stage sharing how to build a good user experience
At the Amsterdam event, Terence Huijgen, Co-founder at Reversed Digital told the interesting story of the GASSAN Diamonds implementation and used it to provide insights on how to deliver a good user experience in big projects.
Effortless was one of the keywords in my notebook after the talk.
Terence answered key questions including:
How can we make sure development really delivers on what is designed and delivers on delight?
How can we increase the perceived speed of our products on the front- and backend?
How can we make sure content writers have enough freedom but can't break the overall user experience?
His three takeaways on how to build a good UX were:
Good collaboration between design and development
Choosing the proper workflow and tech stack
Create a balance for content flexibility and restraints
Sharing examples like the Airbnb design system, working with Figma as a kind of multiplayer design tool, Kontent for fixed and freeform content and finally Storybook for frontend development, he generously also provided a refreshing under-the-hoods look at how it is actually done as we approach 2022.
Redesigning the digital content journey
Another very interesting case study in our breakfast briefing in the Netherlands was delivered by Robbert van der Pas, Tech Lead at University Medical Center (UMC) Utrecht.
The idea is simple: Providing the right, relevant and same information across channels and throughout the customer journey. Still, it is far from easy.
A single source of truth was one of the five critical success factors that Robbert from UMC shared
When you then consider that the customer is a patient, you add more anxiety and insecurity. To tackle feelings across channels, Robbert emphasised their work on totally redesigning the digital content journey.
In the past, UMC also had a website, email, print and a patient portal, but they were somewhat disparate and he used the illustration of four different islands to illustrate it on a slide.
During the talk, he shared their early decisions, which laid the foundation for their five critical success factors:
Focus on the user experience
Continous experimentation
Single source of truth (re-using content for websites, print, email, chatbots and more)
Automating everything (regression testing, backups, operations)
Mobile-first content editing
Interestingly, UMC had also moved away from anonymous phone numbers when calling patients. So that if you missed the call, you could look up the number and it would identify as the right department at UMC for you to easily return the call.
The editing content nightmare
The key case study at our London event was delivered by D’Arcy Heath, Head of Digital Marketing and Automation at insurance firm Unum.
D’Arcy Heath from Unum on stage on how the game has totally changed
In his own words, he talked about how they have smartened up when it comes to content. Both in terms of creating and delivering content, but also when it comes to day-to-day editing and working with content.
To zoom out, D’Arcy is focused on driving omnichannel digital marketing and content clearly played a big role.
Unum recently implemented Kontent and joining us from Kontent, Product Manager Martin Malenovsky also gave a talk at both events on how you don’t have to give up visual editing when going headless.
Similarly to Robbert from UMC Utrecht, Martin also had a slide with islands and emphasised the need to integrate your tech stack and create a seamless editor experience.
Asking good questions, and being open to new answers is a key part of digital leadership and Martin’s questions really brought it home:
Why is there still a gap between technical and business users?
Why is preview seemingly neglected as a part of composing the digital experience?
What do you actually need to support the business in achieving its digital goals?
Martin from Kontent asked whether you really have to give up visual content editing if you go headless? Spoiler: You don’t!
You would think that for these things, the textbook is long written, but as the excellent talks made it clear, there’s plenty of good experience to learn from out there, but you still need to make key decisions...
Learn more about digital leadership
If you want to read more about digital leadership trends at the moment, these related posts are a good place to start:
At the upcoming Boye Aarhus 22 conference in November, you’ll find a dedicated digital leadership conference track.
Yu can also join our digital leadership peer group which meets regularly in Copenhagen and is opening new local chapters around Europe.