Structure your CRO team
Structure your CRO team
1. Consider your company size, main-focus metrics, and maturity in CRO, before choosing a model for your optimization team.
Choose a model that works best with your budget, available data, and available resources. However, most importantly consider how experienced the entire organisation is in CRO.
2. Use the centralized optimization team model in the early days of your CRO work, to ensure consistency and quality.
It is easier to establish best practices in CRO if you have a single centralized team. Use this model when starting to ensure you have a consistent approach, and act as educators and evangelists for CRO best practices across the organization. Assign a test manager responsible for guiding the program’s direction, facilitating the optimization needs of various departments, and serving as a CRO contact point for the rest of the organization. Assign a team of subject matter experts optimization analysts, and data analysts to work under the test manager.
3. Move to a hub and spoke model as the organization matures in its use of CRO.
As the organization matures in its use of CRO, the centralized team may become a bottleneck as demand increases. When this happens, start shifting to a hub and spoke model. Assign the central team to develop tools and processes, and the individual branches or departments to collect data. Establish best practices and offer guidance for their implementation.
4. Once the organization has matured in its use of CRO, shift to a fully decentralized model.
As the need for oversight decreases and the spokes become better at communicating with one another, start devolving more responsibilities away from the central team until it can be disbanded. Familiarity with specific demographics, product needs, or geographical areas can help inform your data collection and customer insight, and give a certain degree of employee freedom in terms of work processes and flows.
5. Tweak models to serve your needs instead of following them to a T.
Focus on the things that matter, like discipline, proving people wrong, constant action, and tackling all issues, instead of just the structure of the team.
6. Document and share accumulated data across all available platforms, to the employees the information is relevant to.
Assign someone as a go-to for questions and problems if you use a centralized model. Assign someone within each group to be responsible for documentation and interaction with the other groups if you use a decentralized model.