Executive guide to success with Adobe Experience Manager Sites

Assemble the Team

Assemble the Team

We know it can be challenging to figure out how to build a team around new technologies. Yet, aligning the right people with the right governance framework is essential to driving operational efficiencies, executing on your vision and unlocking the true value of your Adobe Experience Manager investment.

Building the team and having the right framework is needed to:

• Create the foundation for digital transformation – so you can leverage AEM to its full capacity.
• Execute strategic milestones – by having a skilled team align around the strategic imperatives.
• Encourage user engagement and positivity – so users are invested in the effort, invested in the solution and live within a highly functioning operational framework which addresses their needs.

What is the right organizational model for our organization?

Truth be told, each organization will require a different implementation structure and team. Just as organizations vary greatly, an Adobe Experience Manager implementation can vary greatly as well, with a different mix of leading and supporting roles.

Where do you start?

First and foremost, you’ll need a Product Owner.

The Product Owner needs to have expertise and understanding of AEM’s core functionality and how AEM Sites modeling fits your organization’s strategic goals. They need to understand content, feature functionality, and how experiences can be organized (like traditional authoring or an experience fragment framework). Additionally, the product owner must have a deep understanding of dynamic vs. static content and how they affect the author experience. They will balance author experience, technological scale, and user experience (UX), including personalization. The product owner is primarily responsible for the quality, utility, and success of the content on the site. Many successful product owners have years of experience in UX or project management. It can be helpful if they have some development experience as well.

With their excellent communication and organizational skills, the Product Owner will:

• Define scope and objectives. They will manage the plan for updates.
• Own the delivery and maintenance of Adobe Experience Manager Sites. They will work with the engineering team to address problems.
• Work with stakeholders to take full advantage of new features to achieve maximum value and time saving.
• Be well-versed in the latest technology and trends to shepherd conversation across the organization.
• Facilitate work. They own the backlog of features, fixes, and enhancements that will be part of the CMS experience.
• Mediate with teams. They will take competing goals from stakeholders to create a cohesive plan for Adobe Experience Manager Sites.

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ACTION: Assign a product owner to own value realization and drive a scalable roadmap for your Content Management System (CMS).

Once you’ve identified your product owner, you can start building the rest of your team.

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Roles and Role Types

Once you’ve identified and aligned your product owner, your Product Owner can start assembling the team. You can identify a baseline set of roles to fill using the concept of archetypes. Archetypes are specific role ideas that map to specific functions and attributes. By looking at your needs through archetypes, you can create a foundational premise that informs what operational model you need. Using two organizational pillars, here are common role archetypes and their key attributes and functions.

Strategy & Transformation

• Product Owner - collaborates with teams on marrying Technical and Strategic visions; serves as the business owner of the solution; performs other functions such as those noted above.
• Business Architect - creates tasks for user stories and helps the product owner manage technical and business milestones.
• Technical Architect - provides integration knowledge, works with the product owner to map technical milestones and provides deep technical knowledge of AEM Sites.
• Development Team - provides Adobe Experience Manager knowledge and executes new transformative milestones with the Technical Architect.

Run & Operate the Business

• Experience (UX) Designer- establishes a design system which focuses on core components, modularity, accessibility and velocity.
• Front-end / CSS Development - creates experience artifacts though repurposing components with new styles.
• Back-end Development - creates new components or can extend a core component. If done correctly, this role should not have more than one person, unless there is a need for large animation tasks.
• Release Management - oversees code deployment.
• Admin Author(s) - updates the CSS skin and provides guidance to the authors who are updating and applying content. This role works on workflow configurations and creates guidance documentation for the content authors to apply. NOTE: In release 6.5 Adobe recommends using editable templates.
• Content Author(s) - applies content and delivers communication issues and concerns as they arise with components, new styles etc..

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ACTION: Review a more in-depth guide to role archetypes, role responsibilities, sample operating and staffing models and resources for skilling up the team.

Resource: Building your Team for AEM Sites

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Keys to Success

Keys to Success

Now that you’ve set up your team, let’s talk about what you can do to keep them on track as they set up Adobe Experience Manager Sites. In our experience, the most successful teams do these things from the start:

1. Use a design system.

Design systems are critical to delivering a scalable and high-velocity content experience. Their reusable components create consistency across different environments and save teams time and money by solving common problems. Great design systems oftentimes look toward simple web-centric approaches, are aesthetically simple, align to core component usage, and aim toward velocity and brand unity, not toward “pixel-perfect” execution.

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ACTION: Align on a design system and create proper guardrails to enforce standards. Leverage Adobe’s Introduction to Design Systems as a reference where needed.

Resource: Introduction to Design Systems

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2. Create a steering committee.

One of the biggest challenges you will run into is juggling the competing needs of Marketing teams across UX, Technology, and Business.

For example, the Marketing team and UX might align on a strategy that can’t scale technically. Some feature requests might entail unneeded complexity. Rather than negotiate in a tactical, one-off manner, establish oversight to make sure a common design and technical framework guides development. We recommend setting up a steering committee to set organizational best practices for:

• Authoring pages with new components
• Parameters for following the design system
• Aligning on milestones
• Emphasizing long-term interests in volume of updates to achieve sound technical scale

Getting buy-in across the team is critical as it will result in operational efficiencies such as Marketing teams adhering to the new design systems or Developers utilizing a Core Component framework (as opposed to customization).

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ACTION: Set up a monthly steering committee meeting with appropriate leadership from Business, Technology, and UX to align goals and drive stakeholder buy-in.

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3. Avoid over customization of AEM Sites.

Too much customization will:

• Prevent you from taking advantage of future AEM Sites features. The more your organization customizes, the greater the chance you won’t be able to take advantage of new features.
• Create a bad UX experience. Customization might solve short-term problems but in the long-term it leads to nesting of components and an inflexible experience across the platform.
• Create performance issues. Layers of custom code create load-time, site performance, and author experience problems.

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ACTION: Follow the 80/20 rule when executing a migration to Adobe Experience Manager. 80% should be out-of-the-box. Manage it so that 20% or less of the functionality is custom.

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4. Lean on Core Components, Style Systems, and Editable Templates.

These components provide simple, atomic, and reusable experiences. Using these out-of-the-box components will reduce customization and increase scale. They are maintained by the Adobe product team which will reduce the maintenance costs of your content framework.

• Core Components: When working on new experiences, we recommend you follow the 80/20 rule regarding Core Component features.
• Style Systems: Reduce costs and increase efficiencies with Style Systems, which remove the need for custom back-end engineering and lean only on CSS development.
• Editable Templates: Editable templates unlock greater flexibility as they allow users to configure layouts directly within AEM, bypassing the traditional development process.

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ACTION: Utilize Core Components and Style Systems when putting together your foundational content. It pays to do this in the beginning. If your team is not familiar with the concepts, look to training.

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5. Build a long-term strategy:

To mature and expand your AEM Sites implementation, you need to keep scale in mind. This ensures your AEM Sites platform moves from early deployment to integration, and into every aspect of your content creation lifecycle. Create a strategy that includes:

• Foundation: Create a scalable architectural framework and design system that allows forward-looking componentized experiences.
• Flexibility: Create a scalable architectural framework and design system that allows forward-looking componentized experiences.
• Operations: Execute operating model and roles/responsibilities between designers, power users, and developers in a content ecosystem.

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ACTION: Create a long-term roadmap. Drive continual alignment with stakeholders through various channels, including Steering Committee meetings.

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Measure What Matters

Measure What Matters

Now that you know about organizational and technical foundations, let’s focus on measuring your success. Before you begin your Adobe Experience Manager effort, everyone who has a stake in the project should know what your top KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are, and why they matter to your organization.

Identifying the right KPIs will help you get more value from Adobe Experience Manager

In a 2018 study, IDC analyzed the business value several large companies saw when using Adobe Experience Manager Sites. On average, the organizations using Experience Manager Sites had

• improved the productivity for digital experience teams by 23%
• decreased the time required to make minor editorial changes by 64%
• increased site visits per month by 10%

Start with your goals and business objectives

To realize impactful business value, it is imperative to set clear goals for your Adobe Experience Manager program. Those goals then inform the desired business objectives and impacts. From there, translating the goals and desired impact to measurable KPIs helps ensure everyone involved in your effort stays focused on those goals. Here are just a few sample goals, desired business impacts and KPIs for Adobe Experience Manager Sites.

Goals

• Increase the discoverability, traffic and conversion of your site
• Eliminate bottlenecks in your digital content creation and delivery
• Accelerate web and app development with flexible developer tools

Business objectives and impact

• Improved load times and responsiveness, boosting search rankings, traffic, and conversion
• Empower more of your team to create pages, with governance in place, to streamline content creation
• Shorten development cycles by allowing authoring, design, and coding in parallel

Sample KPIs

• % increase in customer spend due to personalization
• % improvement in page load time
• # times faster time to market with new sites
• % reduction in page build time
• # times faster webpage creation

6 Steps to Identifying your KPIs

1. Based on your objectives, determine your goals. Your goals are the specific outcomes you hope to achieve by adopting Experience Manager as your content management platform. Each goal should have a baseline number, like your current conversion rate for a specific category of pages.

2. For each goal, identify performance indicators. If you started with 2-3 business objectives and 3-5 goals, you might have a list of 15-20 performance indicators.

3. Choose the key indicators that matter most for your business. These are your KPIs. They might align with a few business objectives — each championed by a different C-level executive — or they all might support the same objective, depending on what matters most to your stakeholders.

4. Collaborate with stakeholders for your KPIs.  Identify the group of stakeholders who care most about each KPI and work with each group to confirm the KPI, identify the baselines, refine the methodology. and get buy-in around the outcomes. Ensure that each KPI:

   • specifically relates back to the solution (Adobe Experience Manager)
   • is closely tied to a goal that the executive team deems critically important
   • supports a business objective championed by at least one C-level executive
   • tracks something that can feasibly be measured at regular intervals and that you have the baseline data needed to compare the current situation to compare with the results you will measure after your Experience Manager launch.

5. Create a repeatable methodology for measuring and reporting.  Consider capturing all these elements for each performance indicator: goal, business impact, solution capability, what needs to be known, how it is measured, stakeholders.

6. Optimize early, often, and always. Right after your initial launch, start reporting on your KPIs. If you are falling short on a particular KPI, consider all the things you could do to impact it and then experiment to see what works. If you are over-achieving on a KPI, set the bar a little higher. Your top KPIs will evolve over time, based on evolving business goals, feedback from your executive team, and other factors. Every time you identify a new feature for your roadmap, also identify performance indicators for it. As you build out any new features, decide if an indicator for a new feature deserves to be one of your KPIs.

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ACTION: Work with your stakeholders to identify your business goals, desired business outcomes and the KPIs for tracking impact and value realization. Communicate your KPIs broadly.

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