It seems content management has been dealing with the paradox of opportunity and frustration since the inception of the World Wide Web.
Douglas Adams was right - it is fun for nerds like us. To our credit, we spend a lot of time discussing these problems at length, and actually trying to build products and practices to address them - and in many ways, the underlying technologies and frameworks are vastly more effective to what passed for state of the art only a few years ago.
However, despite these advancements in technologies and methodologies which have made scaling these operations cheaper, faster, and far more capable, it’s clear from the research in the market; over time a similar percentage of organizations still have sub-par customer experience and despite falling prices for tools and services, overall costs for customer experience delivery still remain high.
In this post Mark Demeny from Contentful tries to break these problems down from a wider, strategic view, to a more tactical level.
Read moreThe stories that we tell ourselves drive behavior. The stories help us understand who we are and why we do what we do, but how can you actually get people to change their self story?
In our recent member conference call, Susan Weinschenk joined us from rural Wisconsin for a conversation on the power of self stories to drive behavior. Susan has a Ph.D. in Psychology and in 2013 she published "How To Get People To Do Stuff" where she describes the seven basic drivers of human motivation. Susan focuses on how to use human behavior research to dramatically improve the impact of your products and services.
Read moreData ethics might sound like an esoteric topic, but in our digital world, it’s increasingly something that both individuals and organisations are making a part of their key decisions. Data ethics or perhaps rather lack thereof have already had dramatic impact on the world scene with far reaching implications towards democracy and probably more aspects of our daily lives than we think.
I recently spoke to Copenhagen-based Pernille Tranberg as she talked about data, privacy, digital self defence and what you can actually do as an individual. Pernille is co-founder of the European think-do-tank Dataethics.eu and our expert of the month.
Read moreFast growing technology firm UiPath secured another $225 million investment last week. UiPath is used by several of our members in the automation & robotics peer groups. Many of which have not forgotten that it’s actually less than a year ago, that UiPath was bleeding cash and had a huge layoff wave.
While the investment clearly is exciting to some, it’s also a big gamble that increases expectations. What does it really mean for customers?
Read more4 months with a pandemic truly changed everything. A fast forward both in terms of work habits and technology adoption. We probably haven’t seen the bigger impact just yet.
Having built a community on meeting in person made our past months tricky to say the least.
Here’s our community update for the past strange and surreal months.
Read moreContent strategy has been around for a while as a term, but personally I do think that the pandemic has shown the importance of communications and specifically content.
As Hilary Marsh said in our recent member conference call:
Content is everyone’s work
Read moreA few years ago, it finally dawned on me, that our focus as a community had shifted. From the original roots in bringing together web and intranet professionals, to a much broader scope. Suddenly, it became clear, that the work we were doing, the lessons we learned, had a much bigger impact.
I was reminded of this, when I spoke to Seattle-based Emily Corace and listened to her talk about her work on user-centered design. As she said:
“To create something that is naturally understood we need to focus on the behavior of the user. By designing experiences that are understood intuitively, we can create a positive impact through our work.”
This is clearly about much more than just creating a pretty website!
Emily is an Experience Designer with The Garrigan Lyman Group and our expert of the month.
Read moreIf you want to make sure that your design system doesn’t get left behind, you need to create a community around it, so that many can participate and keep it alive.
This was one of the key messages in a recent member conference call with Torstein Aas-Hansen, who is a design leader at the Norwegian insurance firm Gjensidige.
Based on his experience as Product Owner Gjensidige.Design, Torstein shared his insights on design leadership, Design Ops and how they manage design at the insurance firm.
Read moreFrom the world of Kentico comes a product rebrand. Having been one of the long standing vendors with CMS roots to actually keep CMS in the product name, Kentico CMS is now rebranded as Kentico Xperience.
What does that mean to customers and the market?
Read moreThe effects of physical distancing have created a lot of opportunity to increase loyalty from existing customers, and capture new ones, via your website. There's also the risk of losing customers and brand value if you can't accommodate their shifting expectations.
That all means companies need to do more to support their customers via their websites. And the economic impact of everyone staying indoors means that a lot of companies are cutting budgets and staff. They need to do more, with less, in a complex environment.
Read moreIn my recent conversation with UK-based Andrew Pope, he shared his insights on how the changes brought by the pandemic is impacting work, leading to what he terms the new modern workday.
We’ve quickly gone from a workplace, to working from home. And despite the tools generally being able to support this, it’s not as flexible as it should be. Many are working more and there’s clearly an element of digital overload.
Read moreI’m not one to take selfies. Trust me, I’m saving everyone the grief of looking at my mug. But I wanted to document my state at 6PM as I was about to leave the office last Friday night.
I’ll sound like a broken record if I say it was another long week. But look at that guy. It was indeed another long week.
To bring you up to speed: I’ve been working in 7,500 square feet of loneliness at the Solodev headquarters in Orlando for the last two months, standing guard and collecting mail so our team could shift to a fully remote mode. Our company has always been distributed by design, so we were able to pivot quickly and provide support from the safety of our homes.
Read moreWe are always thinking about what our company needs to do right in the digital space, but what about our personal selves? What do we need to do to have integrity?
If you are looking for a set of digital policy actions to take right now, Kristina Podnar shared her advice on the topic in our recent member conference call.
Read moreLike many other large, global and complex organisations, Rabobank already had Microsoft Teams in place before the advent of the global pandemic.
When everybody suddenly started working from home, usage spiked to new heights. This meant that efforts to ensure adoption became more even important and also that existing challenges became more pressing and a few new ones surfaced.
Read moreThere is an upsweep of interest in sectors and industries that many software product managers historically ignored.
In short, we seem to be moving to a ’Supply Chain Thinking’ environment. The enforced isolation has put a spotlight on the global supply chain, from food through energy to pharmaceuticals and beyond. Their critical role in keeping the world operable, and the sheer scale of these operations is capturing the attention of product managers.
The potential is there, the scale is there, but few know how to even start to build and sell into these markets.
Read more