Designing an Operating Model for AJO Success

Transcript

Hi everyone, thanks for joining. We’ll get started in a couple of minutes. Just going to give some more attendees time to join.

Thanks for joining today.

In today’s session, we’ll be focused on designing an operating model for AGO as the third session in our AGO value realization series led by senior customers.

And as attendees are joining and settling in, I wanted to share some upcoming webinars that may be of interest on the next slide.

The following November ultimate customer virtual events are open for registration as part of the value realization series. We will share these slides with the embedded registration links after the session today. You can also catch a recap of previous sessions in this series posted on experience league at experience league dot adobe dot com. And then the next slide, I’ll take you to an on demand library on experience league. All of our prior session recordings outside of the value realization series as well are available on experience league and can be accessed on demand. Here are just a handful of past webinars. And with that, I will hand this over to Eve to further introduce himself and share the amazing content he has for you today.

Excellent. Thanks, Sam.

So yes, I’m Eve. I’m a customer success architect. I work for ultimate success. I’ve been with Adobe for 10 years and hopefully I can shed some useful light today for you on resource investment and operating models for AGO.

If you have any questions during the presentation, please post them in the chat. We’ll try and answer them at the end of the Q&A session if we have enough time left. If we don’t have enough time left, we will for sure answer your questions and we will post together with these slides from the presentation.

We’ll put those in the deck and we will share that with you after the presentation.

So we are part of the value realization framework series.

So Adobe interviewed our executives and asked about the most common barriers to value realization. In particular, of course, in the context of Adobe Experience Platform. And this helped to form the foundation of our value realization framework. So each pillar is a critical theme by delivering value.

Our absence of strategic planning within any of these pillars is often the root cause of failure. So each session in this mini-series will highlight one pillar from that framework and share key artifacts to support strategic planning and accelerate value realization within your organization.

So for today’s session, we are focusing on resource investment and in particular on how to get to an operating model for AGO. Now without strategic planning, AGO implementations risk becoming fragmented and leading to suboptimal personalization and compliance gaps and insufficient resource use.

A deliberate approach ensures seamless integration with your MARTIC stack and maximizes platform potential.

Now quickly first, what is an operating model? So an operating model serves as an essential link between an organization’s strategic vision and its everyday operations. So it defines how the business model is executed to deliver value to customers. And by providing a clear blueprint, the operating model ensures that teams understand their role and how their work contributes to overall success. This alignment helps translate high-level strategy into actionable processes and outcomes and enabling consistent and effective delivery of products and services.

A successful operating model should provide a structured framework that supports collaboration across teams and that fosters organizational maturity and growth.

It should be built on clearly defined goals and responsibilities.

And additionally, cross-functional governance is critical to coordinate efforts across departments and enabling seamless decision-making and alignment with strategic goals. And together these elements create a robust foundation for operational challenges.

Now I thought I’d share some of the challenges that we see with customers and I think this may sound familiar to you as well.

For instance, when it comes to roles and responsibility, it might be that you’ve got unclear role definitions maybe overlapping ownership of tasks like missing or ambiguous accountability. And of course the risk there is bottlenecks, duplicated work, missed tasks, approval delays.

With prioritization and volume management, maybe you’ve got many campaigns, maybe you work on 50 or 20 campaigns per week. Maybe you have a lack of formal prioritization methods. Maybe you have a JIRA board that’s not easy to use and people are late with late requests.

Overlaid overloads, missed deadlines, reduced impact.

KPI framework and evaluation, maybe you’ve got inconsistent definition and tracking of campaign KPIs, maybe evaluation is often skipped.

And the risk there is then you can’t measure success or improve or you’re unable to report to leadership.

I won’t go through all of these, but I think if you read through them, so maybe if I take another one like leadership engagement and visibility, maybe C-level focus is only on campaign KPIs and not on team and process, maybe limited dashboarding or reporting, maybe successes are not communicated. And then the risks there would be that leadership, you could have leadership disengagement.

And for improvements or maybe the other recognition of efforts. So to overcome challenges like this, you need clarity, clarity in roles and responsibilities. You need good governance and you need a clear cross-functional operating model.

Now to start, I want to focus first on what’s important to get AGO itself running because that’s obviously a big part of the equation here.

And this is a big part in how your core team operates. So let’s have a look first at responsibility and then I will touch on AGO itself before then moving on to the cross-functional view.

So the team structure recommendations here, they’re just high level. So these can be positioned as suggested roles, depending on your org size, not all roles may be required. And always keep in mind that some individuals obviously could operate in multiple roles. But in general, so when it comes to platform technical roles, you have a platform admin you might have an enterprise architect, a data architect, a data engineer, project manager and scrum master. And when it comes to marketing and marketing technology roles, you have a marketing manager, product owner, the AGO SMEs, for instance, journey builder, people dealing with segmentation, data SMEs, analytics SMEs, of course, you need to measure and report QA leads, and then IT roles like project manager and scrum master. And then you have the business roles, like customer experience director, product manager and sales director.

I want to highlight the primary AGO roles here.

If you’re running, for instance, Adobe Campaign already, you might have some of these roles in place or you will certainly have some of these roles in place already. So we have the product owner, the journey manager, the data architects and the AGO subject matter experts. Each role has distinct responsibilities, obviously, and these roles will align with specific programs and capabilities. And as mentioned, individual may fulfill multiple roles depending on their skills. I’ll actually go into a bit more detail in the next slides on these roles.

So the first one is the AGO product owner plays a pivotal role in bridging marketing technology and business lead.

The AGO product owner leads the AGO roadmap and team alignment, define KPIs and measure journey success. They ensure data readiness and governance.

They own stakeholder relationships and strategic priorities, and they evaluate use cases for value and support organizational readiness.

I’ve also added role involvement involvement here at the bottom. So they will be involved in identifying priority areas and strategy and translating that strategy into use cases and KPIs.

And then towards the end of the workflow quantifies their value and ongoing use cases to scale results.

And the next one is the journey manager who designs and also owns the AGO journeys, alignment of business goals, segments, triggers and channels.

They monitor KPIs, run experiments and iterate journeys for measurable impact. And they govern journey eligibility, calendar and access.

They also coordinate with product owners and data channel teams.

Again, the involvement, it will be to activate AGO use cases, analyze results, also quantify and share our value and alignment with ongoing use cases and scaling of measurement of results.

And then last one I want to highlight here, data architect. Data architect is responsible for managing the technical backbone of AGO. So including data schemas, data sets, identities, governance policies, and that sort of thing. They define and manage data schemas, data sets, as I mentioned.

They oversee data ingestion, like streaming, ingestion and event creation.

They translate business requirements into data model designs and validate data types and ensure that, you know, the data readiness for AGO.

Their role involvement is mostly around identified data needed for execution and benchmarks. And then, of course, activating use cases.

Now, apart from these core roles, which I’ve highlighted again here in blue, you will have other roles around this.

So that could be sort of the picture of all the roles. So that will be broader, like product admin and data management roles. Those roles might span across multiple program products in your organization, especially if you also run apps like RTCDP and CGA. They will share, of course, roles and responsibilities there. So that would be the administrator responsible for configuring and managing the platform, ensuring user roles and permissions are appropriately set up, you know, monitor data sources and so on.

The integration specialists, so managing technical integrations with AGO, ensuring data flows run smoothly from various sources.

Addressing technical issues and doing troubleshooting.

Then the tech data stewards, they’re responsible to deal with like usage policies, the labeling of data following the, you know, the dual system and access to features in platform.

They also deal with access and delete requests and consent management, and they are like the connection with the legal team.

And then you also have the compliance and the data privacy officers, who of course ensures that all customer data and communications comply with relevant regulations and data privacy laws, and they monitor data security and content and consent management, sorry.

I want to touch on operational governance. So again, this is for AGO itself.

On a high level, when you look at the best practice campaign orchestration workflow, these would probably broadly be the main steps.

You will see there. So marketer requests in your campaign and submits, request gets converted into a project, request is then validated and synced, request is reviewed and prioritized by operations, and the campaign is built, Q8 and so on, and of course executed.

If you dig into this a bit deeper, so go into in-depth and look at the walls that are involved, and actually all the steps in this sort of end-to-end journey, you will see at least nine steps here. So when it comes to the start of the strategic inputs, you get to obviously identify priority areas and strategies and customer-centric ideations, and that’s done by marketing, translate these strategies into use cases and user stories, prioritization and roadmap.

Sorry, sip of water. Again, that’s marketing and the journey product owners.

And then you move into data sources and elements. So that’s identifying data and content needed for the execution and to define KPOs. And again, that’s for marketing, data architects and data scientists, and then the journey owners, product owners.

Apologies.

Then you move into audiences and segments.

So leverage ingested data to manage segments and audiences.

Involved there is a campaign manager, the journey SMEs and the segmentation manager. Then you move into the journey build itself. So leverage the content templates and ensure the right content placement. That’s for the content manager.

Then you move into content and assets, creating and edit and publishing journeys, obviously. That’s for the journey SMEs and the journey approvers. Then you move into insights. So you leverage actionable insights to inform on data connections. So that’s for the analytics people and the journey SMEs.

Deployments. So conduct testing and ensure accuracy. That’s for the QA team. And then reporting and analytics. So analyze your use case performance results. That’s for the marketing manager, product owners and the SMEs.

And then at the end of it, run and operate. So document your learnings, quantify value. And then, of course, recommend ongoing use cases to scale results.

And what’s really important is when it comes to all the tasks, I won’t go into detail in this one. It’s just to highlight that it’s important to map the tasks to the roles using the RACI framework.

This is a really important task.

And this is typically something that the strategist in Ultimate Successful Instance can help you with. So if you need help on that, we can most certainly help with mapping this out.

It’s also very important to establish a governance meeting cadence.

To quickly go through this slide as well. So you have your annual customer journey, strategy meetings and workshops.

That is, of course, to be able to continuously identify value drivers.

Align on your KPOs and KPIs, strategic roadmap, thought leadership.

Then on a quarterly basis, but with an annual kickoff and usually end of year wrap up as well.

You’ll have your look back and your look forward.

Review of the roadmap and refinement and enterprise enablement.

And then on a monthly basis, you’ve got your monthly leadership check-ins. Obviously with leadership and business units.

So you look at initiative and workstream updates.

Just look at the progress of your KPOs and KPIs and look at any escalations.

And then weekly discussions, workstream, progress updates, next steps and look at blockers, issues and risks.

And review prioritization as well. And then of course you have your day to day, HEO, working team activities and meetings. Of course, this is like an idealized setup.

This is one of the sites we will share with you as well, which you can use as inspiration for your own governance and like meeting cadence.

To look a little bit at team model evolution. So in general, we see three stages. So incubate, scale and imbalance. And it depends, of course, where you are in your journey.

To start with, you might have two or three people.

Their scope will be quite broad. So probably organizational wide, like floating, agile team members.

Maybe the personalization you do is like marketing based on maybe two journeys. Using standard TGO features. You have limited scalability there. And the resources might be a bit stretched in this stage of the team. So then the next logical evolution is the scaling. So you might scale to five to ten people.

Maybe the scope of influence is more aligned to key business initiatives.

And more like dedicated agile team support. So personalization might be marketing based journeys and traveler triggers. Trigger based journeys. Maybe channels. And probably more than two channels. You might be using more advanced AGO features there. On the channel capabilities.

Scalability is growing here. It might still be moderate. And the resource allocation might be more balanced.

And the training, I didn’t mention it earlier. This might be more structured programs. Whereas previously it might just be on the job learning.

And then, of course, the sort of end point, the embedded team. That might be 15 to 20 people. More specialized by function or units. Dedicated agile team members. Here, marketing and traveler initiated journeys. Hyper personalized content.

Custom channels. A whole lot. Advanced features. Even experimentation features.

And the scalability there should be high, of course. And resource allocation more specialized. And training will be more comprehensive and ongoing.

Now, so what we just covered is AGO operating, modeling, governance. That’s just for the tool. This is all very critical for being successful in AGO.

This is just to get the tool set up. But as you know, AGO is part of a larger like omni-channel cross channel strategy. And so in order to maximize true value. So if you’re doing omni-channel, you should consider how these AGO teammates. How they fit into the larger cross functional environment. So cross functional in your business units.

Your AGO team is usually going to be part of that, obviously. And then you’re also going to have the people from IT. You’re going to have people from legal. Probably people from brand marketing, et cetera. And there is also going to be people who will never get into AGO. But AGO is a critical part of the omni-channel campaign.

Now, as part of that, we often have multiple business units where they are self-serving. Or they’re self-service, but there you have to scale in one team. So that’s where a center of excellence comes in. We’re not going to go too heavy on this. It’s a vast topic. We have on-demand content about this that goes into a lot more detail. And one of those is actually in the first slide that Sam showed you in the same slide.

So one of those is cultivating an agile marketing organization. So for more detailed info on that, I advise you to look at that enablement. What we will get into now is, so first of all, depending on the stage that your company is in, different models might apply. And this maturity scale helps to visualize that a bit. So in the initial decentralized phase, personalization responsibility lies with individuals or departments like marketing, IT or digital. But this leads to isolated, like siloed efforts.

And these limited initiatives restrict the overall scope and effectiveness of personalization strategies across the organization. In the centralized phase, organizations unify efforts for a more structured approach. And they then use the center of capabilities or center of excellence to improve maturity. So, as I mentioned, I’m going to focus on center of excellence here going forward.

In the center of excellence, the organizations centralize resources and investments in the core foundations required to scale personalization. So that’s in talent, in data, in tools and in processes.

So what is a center of excellence? If you don’t know, a center of excellence, it’s a strategic organizational framework. It focuses on building and scaling digital capabilities across a business. It ensures that people, processes and technology work in harmony to meet companies objectives.

The center of excellence plays a critical role in establishing governance and planning and change management practices.

And that enables smooth technology adoption and effective customer engagement. Whether operating within a single enterprise or across distributed environments, a center of excellence helps standardize best practices and drive consistent results.

And that makes it a vital component for digital transformation and operational excellence.

Here we highlight the strategic benefits of establishing a center of excellence within your organization.

It focuses on four main pillars of leadership, organizational framework, governance and communities of practice.

Center of excellence drives firm-wide alignments on digital strategy, ensuring everyone is working towards common goals. It accelerates time to value by streamlining processes and reducing inefficiencies.

Then clear KPIs and governance structure help maintain accountability and measure success effectively. Additionally, fostering communities of practice empower teams to share knowledge and innovate collaboratively.

Overall, the center of excellence plays a crucial role in reducing costs, enhancing operational efficiency, creating a proactive culture that anticipates and transmits more effectively.

So centralized and decentralized organizational approaches differ in flexibility and focus, of course, autonomy and standardization. So standard centralized systems emphasize enterprise-wide standardization and strategic focus, but they may lack flexibility. And decentralized systems, they offer greater autonomy and adaptability at the business unit level, but they can suffer from inconsistent standards. So the COE, usually with agile bots, they represent like a hybrid model balancing these tradeoffs to optimize both standardization and flexibility.

So as you can see, they sort of sit in the middle.

So centralized versus decentralized.

So again, for centralized, you’ve got better standardization, a focus on trading policies and best practices, evangelizes initiatives across organizations, enterprise and strategic perspective. But the disadvantages of the centralized view is that it can be slow and bureaucratic, so you can have bottlenecks, can be disconnected from the business sometimes, more reporting focused, maybe less effective for business units. And then on the decentralized side, the advantages can be having more, being more connected to each business unit, can provide deeper insight at business unit level, as I mentioned, more autonomy and flexibility and maybe faster moving. But with the disadvantages that maybe you have more or less standards or coordination, more or less training, maybe more shared best practices, maybe no or less enterprise perspective, can be inefficient, technical use of resources and maybe limited growth opportunity as well for team members.

So again, the COA sits in the middle there and tries to do the best of both. But there are still some disadvantages. So the advantages of the center of excellence is more standardization, more training emphasis and best practice sharing, faster moving with agile bots and more growth opportunities. But you still have some disadvantages. You need strong executive sponsorship, which we’ll touch on in a minute as well. It requires buying across the organization and it needs more communication and coordination, of course.

Now, when it comes to the maturity path, I want to highlight or I divided it in like five main steps going from the beginning, just the readiness going to, you know, where a position where you can scale.

So at that first step, it’s the readiness.

You need to complete current state assessments into all that. So all that your current martech ecosystem and sort of complete competency mapping and skill assessments.

So you can start defining enablement needs.

Then you can move to define your initial center of excellence. So you establish an organizational foundation, definition of roles, process, governance and tech implementation. You can start looking at building cross-functional teams in the center of excellence structure and design of enablement paths as well. And of course, prepare, change management plan and team aborting.

Again, these are things that our scientists can definitely help with all these steps, actually. Then when it comes to launch and operate, establishing customer journey view and pilots or establish customer centric marketing operation approach by building customer journey centric bots. Pilots agile delivery methodology with cross-functional teams for activation.

And then, of course, test, learn and iterate on those first journey bots.

Then in the roll out, you roll out your customer journey bots and iterate.

So implement selected customer journey bots and deliver campaigns by cross-functional teams. Test, learn and iterate and then implement agile marketing delivery methods.

And then when you get to scaling, you can manage to complete customer journey, manage now the entire customer journey and individual journey bots with cross-functional marketing delivery and iterative cycle. And you can establish an organization wide data driven mindset now.

This is a bit of an overwhelming slide, but I’m not going to go into detail. Again, this is one that I can share afterwards.

When it comes to considerations, like in three broad categories of people, process and tech. So for people, you have accountability, skills and collaboration structure. So like who is responsible for success? Who is needed to make things work? What are the accountabilities? How are we measuring that? And how is this allocated? When it comes to skill, you know, what capabilities we require, how are we going to achieve this? How do these capabilities fall into roles? How do we manage onboarding of these capabilities and overtime as well? And then when it comes to collaboration, you know, how business units do we need input from? You know, how do we collaborate and coordinate with business units? And in the process area, you’ve got quality and compliance. You’ve got the requirement, lifecycle management and standardization. Just take out a few things here. What are the risks we most need to be aware of? You know, what are our obligations in delivery when it comes to legal and compliance? And how do we ensure that this is managed over time? Also, then in the lifecycle management, how are we identifying new requirements? You know, how are they resourced and delivered? Things like that. And then, of course, with standardization, what are the features that we need for standardization? How do we communicate and validate this and, you know, make sure these are due to? And then on the tech side, you know, it’s knowledge, enablement and delivery.

Like which system captures knowledge, you know, from reference enablement? How do teams collaborate? You know, what one learning systems are required for enablement? How do we track and validate the skills? What are the outputs that we need to support our stakeholders? And what are the formats and reporting cadence best suited to the outputs? Now, when it comes to roadmap for transitioning to a center of excellence, I’m going to quickly show all of them. So first of all, who will own the governance of the transformation? So that’s in the strategy parts. You could hire external resources that help shape strategy.

You might be looking for a partner that knows the best path to save your time.

Every brand builds a clear charter and measure of success. So you can identify high value use cases. Again, our ultimate success team spends a great deal with customers to help them map their use cases and capabilities. So that’s definitely something we can help with.

And you’ll bring out the best use cases that bring the biggest return on investments.

Brands often slow down in this process. If you are going to do less than that, at least make sure that you focus on the right use cases.

Of course, benchmark your current personalization maturity. And again, this is something that ultimate success provides resources for and that we can help you with today.

And when it comes to technology, assess what you have in place for technology. What are the gaps that would inhibit you from being able to personalize at scale in real time? Get data right, the profiles, data access.

Brands who make this transition set it up so they democratize the data. And by doing so, they enable the organization to move faster.

You can in this phase upgrade or buy new tools.

I think 80 percent of our brands will develop their technology during this transition.

It could be that you hire tech partners for implementation and to reduce risk.

Then when it comes to talent, so quantify skills and resource gaps. Create training plans based on new skills and resources needed.

Upskill, reskill employees on new tools and program management.

Hire maybe external for new roles to infuse more expertise. And of course, training will be always ongoing. So plan for this and ensure that skills are always kept current.

And then in the process, change management.

Conduct a change impact assessment. Look at all your business processes.

Map change impacts to different interventions that will help teams. So like training, communication plans and value critical business processes to your high value business processes to understand any change that may occur.

It could be that you hire external partners again to help with both the tech roll out and communication plans. And again, at any of these stage, this is typically what the people here in Ultimate Success help with.

OK, so we talked about the Centre of Excellence and before that, how that is a way to serve your AGO needs across the rest of the business. But I want to talk a little bit now how you mature your use cases. So in order to do that, you should evaluate cross functional models.

So this is where it’s not just simple business units getting together, but like rather different functional roles that all have a part in the use case planning. So all have a part in the campaign planning. And of course, AGO plays a critical role in that.

Again, we’re not going to go too heavy on this. These are the typical topics that Adobe can help you with. So for instance, again, through Ultimate Success.

First thing I want to highlight is sponsorship. So as I mentioned earlier, Centre of Excellence needs really strong sponsorship and support.

So you’ve got your executive sponsors.

This is cross functional. They guide personalization and use journey strategy, they ensure alignment with strategic goal and they secure capital investments and allocate funding across initiatives. Typically, they meet quarterly.

Then you have your steering committee.

The roles and responsibilities is cross functional leadership. So that’s from business and IT.

Ensure alignment to strategic goals.

And of course, approval of key decisions.

Help prioritize and drive alignments across York. Resolve risk and remove obstacles. And that’s usually monthly meetings there.

Then you’ve got the core team. So the program leadership and the business and IT cross functional teams.

So the program leadership. So these are your business leads and IT leads. Obviously, they’re responsible for day to day leadership and program coordination, accountability of a total program success and on time delivery of the long term roadmap. Manage and track progress benefits and this on a program level. And then, of course, recommend decisions for leadership approval. This is usually a team or these roles are like 50 to 100% dedicated. It depends on the size of your organization when it comes to the cross functional team. So these are your cross functional teams. The roles there and responsibilities to coordinate enterprise level impacts. Assess project risks and recommend mitigating strategies. And of course, manage and track project progress.

Again, here the time dedicated for these roles. It’s usually between 30 and 100%. Again, it depends on the size and how many people you have in the team.

Then you have the part time cross divisional or cross functional representation.

So these are cross functional subject matter experts. They provide domain expertise and input on an as is basis. So they get leveraged when needed. Maybe that’s usually about 10 or 20% of that time dedicated.

I want to focus a little bit on that core team.

So an important aspect is the program leadership.

A strong leadership, a program leadership requires expertise in three areas. So first is digital strategy, which involves translating the enterprise roadmap into actual use cases and journeys.

Second is capabilities strategy. So this involves owning and implementing the technology required to power those use cases and resolving blockers as required.

Third is program management. So this involves a day to day management and oversight, measurement of progress and return on investment on the program level.

Now, the project leadership can optimize speeds and efficiency by delivering these objectives through a combination of agile teams and core capabilities.

Now, an agile cross functional team that drives to a specific measurable and distinct objectives like launching use cases. They are typically oriented to customer journey phases like acquisition, customer segments. And they are typically composed of six or seven cross functional, fully dedicated, full time employees.

And this helps break down traditional silos.

The actual composition of functions will depend on the initiative, of course.

Capabilities teams. They own the digital capabilities and products required to power buying group engagements, for instance, data and content management, including implementation, blocker resolution and maintenance. And these resources might be dedicated to buying group engagement or shared, depending on business needs.

Again, it’s important to note that these bubbles here in the capabilities and in the program leadership areas here on the slides, they’re not indicative of individuals, but rather functions to be represented. So some individuals might serve multiple functions, some functions might require multiple individuals.

The actual headcounts, again, of course, will depend on your organization and the size of the program you’re dealing with.

Now, referring back to those challenges, the slides from the beginning, I can start presenting some best practices for operating models. So when it comes to campaign governance and ownership, key practices, you know, introduce a center of excellence. So dedicated teams for process improvements, you know, hold office hours like weekly, for instance, for Q&A and iteration. And this could be through standing meetings, you know, campaign, center of excellence, open channels.

When it comes to structured briefing and documentation, so standardized briefs, including objectives, KPIs, audiences, evaluation, briefs should be submitted with structured data and requirements.

And the how, the tools and execution here, we can aim brief templates in SharePoint or JIRA, maintain living documents for segment logic, shared across marketing, data and product teams.

When it comes to end-to-end campaign steps, you know, map your campaign steps, the brief, the KPIs, the content and segment creation, approval, execution, evaluation.

So this can be a campaign workflow in JIRA, dashboards for post campaign review. And when it comes to feedback and learning, iterative review and retrospective, after which campaign communicates and celebrates wins, which I think is important and success.

And then how, so lessons learned, meetings, internal communications.

Then when it comes to leadership engagements, it’s important to do dashboarding, obviously your KPI, error rates, reports and build business narratives from campaign results.

So you can do this maybe quarterly, executive dashboards, impact stories, you know, things like that. And when it comes to training and scale, scaling, do regular training on data, on templates, on the JIRA itself, of course, focus on small actionable, continuous improvement tasks. This can be through workshops, onboarding documentation and as previously as well, maybe frequent office hours.

Now, again, this is a key slide that you should compile. And this is a typical artifact that the success team can help you with and the key part of the VRA pillar here.

So you’ll see. So this is an example of an operating model.

We’ve got agile teams, which are great for execution due to their like, re-nature, great for driving speed markets of outcomes under the oversight of program leadership.

And when you operate agile teams, multiple agile teams at once, it’s key to ensure that KPI, the APIs that are driving towards are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.

So in this example, got two main teams. So the team on the left could be focused on activating specific experiences, use cases related to acquisition. Maybe the team is led by a use case owner with dedicated representation across MarTech, digital channel activation, data application and testing functions. In other words, all the core functions required to launch the use case that fall within this. But then the team on the right, they might be focused on like the broader business outcomes, for instance, increasing mobile app CSAT, something.

This team includes digital leads, creative leads, app program manager and product owners.

So rather than having dedicated technical resources, the team leverages shared resources as required. So in the middle, so like a data engineer, software engineer and solution architect. So depending on business priorities and constraints, either team structure can be used and the actual composition of roles that can vary, of course. But what’s key here is that the squad, the teams, they operate on the direction of the program leadership. They have the necessary cross-functional representation to execute their goals and measure benefits at the individual project level.

To put it all together, so this is like an example case study.

In this case, you know, this company initially had fragmented marketing efforts, various departments owning aspects of the process. And despite this decentralized approach, they still recognize the value of personalization. So their solution was to unify their efforts.

This company established a dedicated center of excellence and is focused on customer centric use cases, you know, activation strategies, data readiness, martech enablement.

Then the organizational structure, it comprised of an executive sponsor, of course, steering committee, a program team with a leader and then, of course, a core team with representatives from data strategy, channel strategy and activation and analytics. And then the operating model, so the steering committee sets customer journey priorities based on business goals. And the center of excellence core teams create a pipeline for use cases based on technical feasibility.

The channel strategy teams, they own and launch the journeys and results are then analyzed and reported back to the steering committee which uses this information to prioritize new customer experience efforts.

Key takeaway here is, you know, it’s a feedback loop in this model, which is crucial to ensure continuous optimization and alignment with business goals.

As we wrap up, I want to emphasize that having a plan is only the beginning.

So consistent follow through is essential to success. So as next steps, very broadly, I recommend, obviously, build your teams, assign your roles, executive sponsors, your cross functional leadership and core team, design your operating model and very important, contact your Adobe accounting for support. We have strategists who can help you through every step of this process.

And with that, I’m going to hand over to Sam who, because of unlimited amount of time, has already shared some of the poll questions with you.

Yes, that’s right. There was a two question poll that just launched. If we could get your feedback to help shape future sessions, that would be wonderful. And I’m looking in the chat and the Q&A. I’m not seeing anything posted as of right now. But if anyone would like to post their questions in there, we can certainly follow up via email with this deck in addition to answers to your questions.

Excellent.

All right. And as we, yes, with that, thank you. Thank you all for taking the time to join the session today. We hope to have your company again on future webinars. And thanks again and have a great day.

Looks like there was one.