Change your organization’s optimization thinking
Change your organization’s optimization thinking
1. Create a safe environment where everyone can brainstorm ideas.
Discuss feasible outcomes within the brainstorming circle and push your people to think about the best possible options.
2. Create a small idea-generating focus group with people from the same department in your company.
Encourage them to talk about the outcomes of their ideas rather than the implementation. Shift their focus towards why their ideas can be plausible and what they expect to get from their optimization process.
3. Gather a group of people from more departments and ask them how they can better optimize one aspect of the website.
Catalog up to 50 ideas into a document.
4. Start a conversation in the same group and get general feedback from everyone involved in the discussion.
5. Ask your team to set an end goal for their optimization that can be measured with a performance metric.
The key is to focus on a business goal, not sub goals, and to not test specific goals. It doesn’t matter if they click on your new button or section; did it drive more revenue overall? Keep the conversation around that one goal/metric.
6. Celebrate being wrong and construct tests to prove people wrong. If everyone thinks you should go left, then make sure you test right as well.
Talk about how there is no wrong or right answer, but rather which combination of inputs performed best. Implement a group effort thinking where everyone’s efforts are celebrated and not solely on a single person’s action.
7. Shift the work around, creating an optimization roadmap from specific tests to specific site locations, like product pages or shopping cart and checkout pages.
Enable the development of larger tests series to optimize those locations.
8. Update future tests and roadmaps based on results. It's a fluid map, not a set in stone action plan.
9. Create a list of what your team thinks needs optimization starting with the landing page and funnel steps.
Start a conversation about how optimizing at the micro-level will generate changes in conversions or the bottom line.