Making Money On-line: How to Build a Web Optimization Dream Team: Who Are Your Key Players?

Where to start

Are you thinking about building out a team to foster continuous optimization in your organization? If so, you might know the basics to testing and optimization, but you might need help in knowing where to start and what the right resources are to drive your optimization program. As you know, optimization is vital in providing unique, tailored personalized experiences to users across all digital touchpoints. But behind every successful testing and personalization program is a dream team of resources innovating, collaborating, and spearheading the optimization journey for their businesses. Once you understand the importance of optimization and are ready to start on your optimization journey, you can begin to think about how to build out the team that will make continuous optimization a reality.

When starting to build out your optimization team, it’s important to understand the lifecycle of a campaign from infancy to completion. By utilizing your campaign lifecycle as a preliminary guideline, you’re able to outline all phases of a test and identify the resources needed to successfully complete each phase.

Identifying a digital optimization lead

To start, identify a resource who will lead and coordinate all optimization initiatives (and down the line you may find yourself needing more than one!). This person will be the lead for all things optimization – a project manager of sorts – to be the internal testing expert and go-to for optimization related tasks. This person is responsible for hypothesis creation after collaborating with other team members to ensure that the hypothesis is well-written. Once you have your internal testing expert, who I’ll for now call the digital optimization lead, he/she can start to collaborate with other required optimization team members, such as the product owner, the designer, the developer, the quality controller, and the analyst.

The role of the product owner

When it comes to optimization, the product owner plays a vital role. As someone who’s a product expert, knows all the ins and outs of the user experience, and owns the roadmap, the product owner brings a great deal of value to a testing and optimization program. Often, the product owner is already in place, and it’s simply a matter of being brought into the optimization team by the digital optimization lead. The product owner is responsible for being the ultimate go-to resource for the page(s) and journeys being tested. This person can provide insight into test strategy for:

The product
Key performance metrics (KPIs)
Page traffic
Potential experiences and user journeys
Current pain points and areas of opportunity

This person, along with the digital optimization lead, should come together to outline valid hypotheses, as well as prioritize tests based on impact and likelihood to implement. Once the digital optimization lead and product owner have fleshed out the details of a campaign, it’s time to start looping in the remainder of the team.

The role of the designer

The role of the designer involves maintaining brand consistency and creates pages from a user experience perspective are:

Responsive
Seamless
Appealing to the eye

The designer, along with the digital optimization lead and product owner, can put together different versions of experiences based on the information already available regarding personas, user behavior, and engagement on the page(s) of interest.

The role of the developer

The role of the developer, is of course, to develop the tests! In other words, this person handles all the coding and configuration necessary within the campaign. The developer should familiarize himself/herself with the pages or products being tested, as well as be familiar with the Oracle Maxymiser platform. The developer is responsible for coding not only the campaign-specific experiences, but also the metrics tied to the campaign so that in-depth analytics can be performed accurately and efficiently. Ideally, the developer in this position will feel comfortable providing feedback around test concepts and metric tracking.

The role of the quality controller

While the developer is responsible for coding the experiences and metrics, the quality controller is responsible for verifying that everything is working as expected. This person is briefed on the test requirements and metrics, and dedicates their time to walking through each experience to ensure everything renders properly on the device types included in the campaign, and that all metrics are being tracked properly for analytics. This person works hand in hand with the developer throughout the testing phase, raising issues as needed for the developer to implement fixes for. Once all testing has been completed, the quality controller can sign off the campaign as ready for go-live!

The role of the analyst

The analyst holds one of the most important roles on the optimization team. Without proper analysis, it’s impossible to determine which experiences can be considered successful. Analysts help tell the story behind campaigns – they help identify behavior and engagement and inform whether or not specific KPIs have been met or exceeded. Dedicating a resource to analyze test performance allows for consistent monitoring and benchmarking to be done to help make analytics clean and actionable. In the early stages of testing, however, the digital optimization lead often takes on this responsibility until the program grows large enough to warrant a dedicated analyst. You can also use Oracle Maxymiser to help you with test analysis as you begin to ramp up your program.

In conclusion

Building out an optimization team takes time, training, and a lot of resources. By beginning to identify all your key players, you can begin to determine how many resources you need and any gaps you may need to fill. Before you know it, you’ll be a self-operating optimization team ready to crush your goals!

Want to learn more about how the Oracle Maxymiser Consulting team can take your optimization program to new heights? The Oracle Maxymiser Consulting team is made up of passionate strategists, designers, developers, quality assurance professionals, trainers, analysts, and platform experts. We’re excited to understand your business needs and work with you to drive ROI.