5 Traits of Best-in-Class Optimization Teams
What are your best customers doing? That is the #1 question I hear from customers on a day-to-day basis.
How do others companies do optimization and testing? It’s a great question.
Based on thousands of interactions with Optimizely customers and four years of enterprise enablement, I can confidently point to five traits that all best-in-class optimization teams possess:
- They’ve established a habit of optimization.
- There is a clear “owner” of the optimization program.
- The C-suite cares about optimization (and acts on it).
- Optimization goals are aligned with key company metrics.
- They make it fun.
1. They’ve established a habit of optimization.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
—Aristotle
Today, Aristotle’s adage above still rings true. It also highlights a cornerstones of all successful optimization programs: HABIT.
In Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit we learn that habits are a three-step loop: cue, routine, reward. The cue is what triggers the routine. Thankfully, when Google launched Google Calendar in April of 2006 humans obtained an easy way to design their own cues. Enter: the “repeating” meeting for the win.
Sounds trivial, but all of our best customers embrace some form of the recurring meeting format. It is the forcing function that furthers their optimization endeavor.
Do you have a repeating meeting on your calendar to create your company’s optimization habit?
A few other examples of habit-forming meetings:
- Weekly optimization standup (Forbes)—technical review of pre-launch experiments
- Weekly results review (HomeAway.com)—identify learnings from completed tests
- Quarterly KPI evaluation (Crate & Barrel)—goal alignment, deliverables for the quarter
- Weekly prioritization meeting (TicketMaster)—stack rank based on effort vs. impact quadrants
2. There is a clear “owner” of the optimization program.
When it comes to execution, a world-class optimization program relies on people. Humans who work to design, manage, and ultimately execute against a plan.
Whether your team is an army-of-one or 50+ people, the linchpin is most certainly the program manager, e.g. the optimization “owner”.
Ask yourself: Who wakes up in the morning and thinks about optimization at my company? If there isn’t an owner, assign one or hire one. Otherwise your optimization program will likely flatline.
Here is what this role typically looks like on LinkedIn:
This critical role takes the time to:
- Crowd-source testing ideas from the org
