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Summer Interview Series #1 - A Recipe for Marketing and IT Harmony From Peter Kretzman

It's summer, and I wish that I could say I'm doing interviews instead of solitary blog posts because I'm on vacation.  But actually, I'm doing them because I'm really busy, and because I know some terrific talents in the e-commerce space that I always enjoy talking to.

One of them is Peter Kretzman.  Peter and I worked together when he was CIO at Classmates Online.  He has over 25 years of leadership success across a wide variety of industries and platforms, including wireless, social networking and enterprise software.   I always learn from him, both as a technology leader and as a seasoned executive.  You can check out Peter's blog at http://www.peterkretzman.com

Getting marketing and IT teams to see eye to eye is a challenge in a lot of  organizations.  Why is that?

It can be a challenge.  Here are the factors that I tend to see again and again:

• Business expectations are always sky-high,  not to mention market pressures in an increasingly competitive world.
• Trade-offs (functionality needed vs. time alloted, or project vs. project) are not well understood, or simply not accepted.  Most organizations regularly bite off  far more than they can chew. 
• Communication (from IT) on "what it will take to deliver" is usually deficient.  Communication on what's needed to "keep the lights on" and "support the last project that we launched"  is usually deficient.

What is it like when it's working well?  What kinds of processes and communication disciplines are in place?

I'll step on one of my favorite soapboxes here: it's absolutely critical that projects be viewed as a portfolio rather than one by one in terms of the level of effort and time line required.  That requires a systematic examination, at regular intervals, of all projects in the immediate pipeline, and a slating of what will get worked on and what won't.  When this works well, (usually via a major quarterly planning session, along with a high-profile weekly recap), everyone understands that project success is a team effort and the mutual trust starts to build:  IT understands that everyone is pushing hard for launch, that the intentions or success criteria aren't going to change underneath them, and that we'll all  deal with issues and roadblocks jointly as they come up.  Equally, marketing folks understand that there's a wealth of complex detail, trade-offs and that their contributions are as critical to delivery as anyone else's.

The "portfolio planning" concept is hard for business people to accept, as it appears it will slow them down - but it can actually help things get done more efficiently, right?

A portfolio planning approach doesn't just "help", but is actually essential to get things done efficiently and with some degree of predictability.  Projects can't be dealt with  serially, one at a time.  We all need to work on multiple things at once in today's complex business environments.  So: if we're not working on projects in a serial fashion, and we want to meet delivery commitments, then we all need to understand the whole of what we are working on, and we need to have this mix stay fairly constant for a time period (in my experience, a quarter is a good time envelope here).  Every shift of this plan causes ripple effects that can end up derailing just about everything.  As the saying goes: plan the work, then work the plan.

So, for marketing and e-commerce leaders  who want a better relationship with their IT teams, what are some of the things they should start doing differently?

• Include the senior IT leader as much as possible as a colleague in all business planning.  She leads a service organization for the rest of the business, but she's not just an order taker.
• Don't question the estimates you're hearing just because you want it faster.  Instead, ensure that all terms and objectives are clearly and jointly understood, and then probe about alternative approaches that could be taken to change the game.  Get the IT people to embrace one of my favorite adages:  Don't tell them no.  Tell them what it'll take to say "yes".
• Adhere to your own commitments and deadlines on the project (i.e. the things that you need to deliver to IT before launch).  They're on the "critical path", which means if they slip, the whole project is likely to slip.
• Never suggest that simply adding resources will solve delivery time line problems.  It won't, because of interdependencies and communication issues.  Read The Mythical Man Month by Frederick P. Brooks.
• Don't try to get everything into a first release.  For follow-on releases, it's your responsibility to follow up and prioritize the subsequent functions to be built rather than assume this will happen automatically.  Recognize that the upcoming quarterly planning process will need to prioritize it against all the other wishlist items you have in mind.
• Recognize that there's a high cost to switching the game plan (e.g. abandoning or deferring a project in progress so that you can shift to something which now seems more compelling).

Peter and I welcome any thoughts on other "best practices" out there - let us know what works for you.

Ecommerce Merchandising 3.0 - Editing The Wisdom Of Crowds

If web 2.0 is all about the adoption of social applications, surely web 3.o is the result of what happens when ecommerce companies start reinventing their business models based on all of that customer interaction.

A short article in the New York Times Magazine recently appeared highlighting Threadless.com  - a company whose customers are both the designers and merchants for the t-shirts it sells.  Designers submit designs, customers vote on them, and the top scoring items get produced (in small quantities) and sold.  The winning designers get a cash prize, and Threadless gets the benefit of producing merchandise that is as close to a guaranteed sell out as a retailer will ever see.  Smart designers can look through the site to see what's selling and read customer comments, thus tailoring their submissions to consumer taste. Threadless.com has been around since 2000, so this is probably not the first time you've heard of them.   

Now, if you're a merchant, you're probably wondering  just how all of this works in real life and if you might be out of a job anytime soon.

Despite all of the obvious benefits of community and the wisdom of crowds,  good merchants still play a vital role in the retail equation. They are editors. And while the shape of that editorial role is changing, it's as important as ever.

On Threadless.com, just like in more traditional retail, merchants make order out of the chaos.  Not every design that gets submitted makes it on to the site. Someone has to weed out duplications, obscenities, trademark violations and, yes, in some cases, ugliness.  Customers rule, but there's a check and balance.  Designs that are highly controversial are given a chance, even if the voting score averages on the low side.  Top designers get to play in the editorial sandbox too, selecting a few of their favorites to be produced regardless of the score.

Retailers in the web 3.0 world will need to figure out how to open some of their business decisions to consumers while still maintaining enough expert editorial control to add value, maintain identity and keep the store interesting. Otherwise, all stores become an EBay experience (no knocks to EBay, but there are as many reasons I don't shop there as there are reasons I do, depending on the circumstances).

Do I really want "the masses" designing my clothes and do I trust them to keep raising the bar on quality?  Maybe, as long as there's a good merchant in the mix.

The Wisdom of The Bulletin Board: Innovating With Discipline

For years, I've had a small magazine clipping pinned on my bulletin board.  It's a picture of Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay, with the following quote:  "...strategy is as much the art of exclusion as inclusion. What are you NOT going to do?" 

The clipping is sun faded and dog eared, and it's only about 3 or 4 inches in size. But I have carried it with me from company to company.  It's had a place on the wall next to a few of my other favorites: a newspaper article about a woman who found a message from God in the veins of a tomato (no, I am not kidding), a credit card offer for a limited edition Elvis Visa card (unfortunately, I'm not kidding about that one either - you can even choose between the "young" or "old" Elvis on the card) and a quote from Seth Godin that appeared in Fast Company magazine:  "There is no correlation at all between success and hours worked."   I am still trying to decide whether or not I agree with Seth. But I know for sure that I agree with Meg.

Recently, I read an article in the WSJ that reminded me of how important it is to define the few things that are important and and do them well - and that means resisting the temptation to do more. The article, "How Innovation Can Be Too Much of a Good Thing" tells the story of how Avery Dennison Corp.  pared back its number of new product releases and as a result was able to get more good products to market successfully than in the old world of jamming endless ideas into the pipeline.

Every time I speak to my colleagues and clients in e-commerce, I hear the same thing.  "We have such a bottleneck in IT.  We just can't get new site features out fast enough. Our list just keeps growing and we don't have enough resources to get it all done."  Sound familiar?  Of course it does.

But it's not just an IT resource problem.  IT just happens to be where the ideas start to back up at the door.  If by some miracle your IT partners were actually able to do all of the things you want them to, it's unlikely that the marketing teams would be able to successfully launch all of those products or that your designers and copywriters would be able to turn out all of the front end pages.   Not to mention the need to stabilize and refine those new features once they went live.

If you have this problem (and you probably do), there are a few things you should do quickly to avoid the never ending logjam and cycle of poor execution:

• Always have a complete list of all ideas and potential projects, both in work and in the queue.  If the list feels like a hodgepodge of randomness, revisit your strategy: is it focused and clear to everyone on the team?  What are the big things you need to accomplish to deliver on the strategy?  Is there a well understood road map?
• Understand your capacity for new projects vs. keeping the business running.  If  it takes 50% of your IT department's time to maintain your existing site,  you are going to jeopardize your business by pulling resources to work on new things.  Chances are, other departments (marketing, site operations, creative, etc) have similar limitations.
• Develop a straightforward, consistent process for evaluating and prioritizing new projects, and be relentless in following it- no projects "sneak on" to the list, no bribes.  Be sure it's clear who the final decision maker is.
• Constantly monitor where you have bottlenecks (design, coding, testing, etc.) and use that to drive hiring decisions and resource allocations.
• Resist the temptation to overload the team - build in time to fix bugs, refine features and analyze results.
• Find a copy of an old book "The Goal", by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox. It reads like a story (not the greatest one, by the way) but provides an easy to understand illustration of how the disciplines of identifying bottlenecks and managing throughput drive successful business results.

Be constantly aware that many companies tend to value innovation over execution.   How much time  do you spend in meetings brainstorming and generating new ideas vs.  discussing which of those ideas are the most important and how you are going to be sure you have the time to execute them well?  And, as Meg Whitman would ask, when you come out of those meetings, what have you decided NOT to do?

I guess if you've eliminated enough things, you can go home early, which would prove Seth Godin right.