New Research: Breaking Down IT and Business Silos, with Darren Silverman, SVP of Digital, Commerce & Media at Petmate, and Marni Edelhart, Director of Marketing at MikMak

Transcript

Our transcripts are generated by AI. Please excuse any typos and if you have any specific questions please email info@digitalshelfinstitute.org.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (00:00):

Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where industry leaders share insights, strategies and stories to help brands win in the ever-changing world of commerce.

Peter Crosby (00:22):

Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from The Digital Shelf Institute. Do you feel as though your IT function and marketing or e-commerce functions are not quite in sync? This is often the case in organizations, but it doesn't have to be. It is time to break down the silos between IT and other business functions and start to think about every function as the business. The Digital Shelf Institute partnered with MikMak to interview CIOs and business leaders from over 15 different brands to understand how they are bridging the gap between these functions. This is an audio rebroadcast of a webinar focused on that research led by Lauren Livak Gilbert and featuring Darren Silverman, SVP of Digital Commerce and Media at Petmate and Marni Edelhart, director of marketing at MikMak.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (01:09):

Hey, my name is Lauren Livak Gilbert. I lead the Digital Shelf Institute. Very excited to have you all here today. This webinar is based off a research report that we recently released in partnership with MikMak around better collaboration between IT and what we like to call the rest of the business. So this is really focused on collaboration and breaking down those silos between different functions in the organization, specifically IT and an e-commerce team or marketing or any other function that works with them. So a couple of housekeeping items. If you have any questions, please throw them in the Q&A section of the webinar. We will try to get to them throughout. If not, we have time at the end. If you have any other questions or comments, please feel free to throw them in the chat. We will be monitoring that throughout the presentation and you will receive a recording of this after we're finished. So don't worry, you don't have to furiously take notes or take screenshots. You will receive a recording afterwards. Alright, so I gave myself a little bit of an intro. Really excited to have everyone here. Thank you for everyone who's a member of the Digital Shelf Institute. Thank you for consuming our content. I'm so excited to be joined by Darren and Marni today and I will pass it to Darren to introduce himself.

Darren Silverman (02:28):

Thanks Lauren. I am Darren Silverman. I'm head of digital here at Petmate. We're a large non-food pet supply company and I lead our digital initiatives for both revenue, commerce and media. Happy to be here, excited to be part of this and I work very closely with it. So this great topic,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (02:49):

Marni.

Marni Edelhart (02:51):

Hi everybody, I'm Marni Edelhart, I'm the director of marketing events and our podcast here at MikMak and I'm so excited to be here with Lauren and Darren and if you're a fan of the Brave Commerce Podcast, I'm behind the scenes on that all the time.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (03:06):

Awesome, thanks Marni. Thanks Darren. In terms of what we are going to cover today, we are going to talk about why collaboration is so important. I'm sure everyone on the call really understands that how it has changed. I think there's been a big shift in the industry around it and how they're incorporated into the business. Cross-functional collaboration, which we know is the key to anything around commerce, prioritization and planning, and then some key factors of success. We interviewed a bunch of leaders from IT and from the rest of the business to get their insight. Darren was one of them, so he'll share his perspective and then like I said, we will get to q and a as well. So in true DSI webinar fashion, I am going to launch a poll here because we would love to get a sense of where everyone is at in terms of different functions. And I'm sorry, for some reason my poll is not launching. Give me one second here and try and figure out why that is happening.

(04:16):

This might be a first in DSI webinar history that I cannot get the poll to launch, which is okay, I'm going to ask everybody in the chat, can you let us know where does E-commerce sit in your organization, marketing, sales, IT center of excellence or somewhere else? We would love to hear from you. Looks like we have sales marketing, center of excellence, sales, any other comments here in terms of where it sits within your organization? And while everybody's typing in the chat, I am just going to try to stop sharing for a second and see if I can get the poll to fix.

(04:56):

Give me one second. All right, got to love technical issues on a webinar. We got this, here we go. Alright, perfect. So it looks like we really have a mix of sales marketing, COE. It spreads across multiple different functions in the organization. I've heard that a lot. So we know that e-commerce can sit in many different places and it can be successful in many different functions, can work in marketing, can work in sales, but regardless, all of these functions need to work together and collaborate to be successful. And that is what we are going to talk about today on the webinar. And thank you for bearing with me as we go through the poll. So one of my favorite quotes from the research, and you heard me say it in the beginning was from John Harding who's the CIO of Conair and he said the focus needs to be on it and the rest of the business, not IT versus the business.

(05:56):

When Marni and went into a lot of interviews for this research, we were saying, do you feel like there's friction between IT and the business? And I loved this clarification and I encourage anyone who is speaking with it, collaborating with it to make sure that you're including them in the business because they are a part of the business, they are a partner. You all need to work together to be successful. So I think it's a vocabulary shift as well as a mindset shift in the fact that we are all working towards the same goal and we should not be against each other or we should be collaborating together. So I mentioned a bit in terms of the shift that has happened with it. So a lot more expanded responsibilities because the pace of technology and the pace of change has just accelerated. We all know, and yes, we're going to say AI in this webinar.

(06:49):

There's a lot of talk about AI that has increased a lot of things. There's a lot more integration with your MarTech stack, with your data, with how you need to connect all of your tools to be able to be successful. And technology now is a really big growth driver for many brands. So that means that it is involved in that conversation and it's not transactional anymore. It's really strategic and there's a lot of digital initiatives that are taking place that IT and the rest of the business really need to collaborate on. And one interesting piece from our research that we found was there seems to have been a paradox in the past where the IT functions when they're working smoothly, they don't get recognition for their work, but when something goes wrong, that's when it gets all of the attention. But other business units or other leaders in marketing get all the attention for anything going right at all times. So we really want to make that shift here and make sure that it's more of a collaborative conversation. There's transparent conversations around what's important, what technology is needed, how to prioritize specific initiatives that impact the business and also really celebrate wins, not just when technology goes wrong or something doesn't go smoothly and really shift that narrative with the IT team.

(08:12):

I am now going to bring Darren in and I would love to get your perspective, Darren, what has really changed from how you interact with IT today versus in the past?

Darren Silverman (08:22):

For me, I would almost say I matured almost like a little kid matures into an adult. I probably, especially once I was more and more engaged in e-commerce, I would get the shiny object syndrome where I would find the tool, I would find the solution I would want. I would fall in love with it and I would go through all the commercial bureaucracy and presentations and business case setting and working with finance and getting whoever I was reporting to at the time on board, even our CEO often completely on board. And then when everyone was excited about it, then I'd go to it and be, Hey look, we're going to do this now I need your guys' help. And the IT team would be like, yeah, but obviously specs, compatibility, how much development time do we need offshore? And it would derail projects and they would take really long to accomplish and our CTO would be very frustrated.

(09:15):

Obviously. I'd say the difference today is if we get an idea and the idea sparks like hey, this either solves a problem or creates an opportunity, it is actually the first conversation. Now if it's technical discussion to say this is something we're interested in, do you know other solutions we aren't even aware of maybe that the IT team could bring forward, but also are there any technical roadblocks? Try and get them on the front end. I've had actual scoping calls with someone from our IT team and a service provider before even figuring out the financials and the numbers because it's sort of on the front end now let's understand if it's going to work. I have a much greater respect for the workload and the demands across the whole company that the IT team has to support. And I took a little bit of time to kind of evolve and like I said, kind of became a grownup in the collaborative space. So it came to it. I've been there with finance and marketing and all that for a long time. I think it came a little later on.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (10:14):

I love that. And one of the analogies also from the research that another brand shared was you wouldn't expect the pit crew to drive the race car and you wouldn't expect the race car driver to do the pit crew job. So really understanding that it has a level of expertise here and especially as technology gets more complex, as there's more data rules, there's more challenges with AI and how data is being used and integrations, they need to be involved early in the conversation and they need to be looked at as a partner to Darren's point that can help you in this process, not say no and hold you back. So I really encourage any brands on the phone to really sit down with your IT team and figure out what that collaboration is. Like Darren talked about, is it a scoping call, is it initial kickoff? Is it a monthly call where you just talk about what you need and where you're going from here, but really just better integrating it together?

(11:12):

So in terms of collaboration and planning, I think it's really important also to establish what that looks like. Previously in the past I've heard a lot of brands say we plan for the year, we do it once and then we go throughout our year and that's it. But as things come up we can't be agile or we can't change or we can't add projects. The reality of planning one time throughout the year is just not feasible. Now again, I'm going to say pace of change a lot during this webinar especially, excuse me, as things change on the digital shelf with retail media, with new technology, you need to be able to shift. So creating a planning process that impacts that is really important. A couple examples we heard from some of the IT and some of the business leaders that we spoke to, you can go and you can collect the needs of the business and then you can sit together and have a committee that reviews them and then prioritizes them.

(12:13):

Others map out what the renewals look like for the year, the existing tech and then they prioritize based on cross-functional partners. I've seen actually a ranking system where everybody drops in all of their projects and then you look at your KPIs and then you rank what's the most important now what's the most important in the next couple of months in the next couple of years. But it's just really important to revisit that throughout the year. So the standard, no matter what process was put in place that we saw with a lot of these leaders was it happened at least quarterly if not more. So you can say, Hey, we want to add in this project, or hey, we need to look at things and we need to change. And in your planning process, just a couple of things to think about really making sure if it's an e-commerce technology, so if it's something that's a part of your digital tech stack, e-commerce needs to be involved.

(13:08):

Retail media or the search teams need to be involved, marketing, sales, it. You need to have all of the right business partners there to make that decision and you need to make sure that you're building out that process and prioritization and it's clear why you're prioritizing. So communicating that with the rest of the business. Otherwise there's friction because one group might feel like their project isn't prioritized versus another, but that's because there might not be a standardized prioritization framework or understanding of why you're doing it. So one of the big themes you're going to hear myself, Marni Darren talk about throughout this entire webinar is clear communication, being very clear about why you're prioritizing things, why these projects are important, why they're happening, and communicating that more broadly. It removes a lot of friction from the conversation. So Darren, how do you collaborate with the IT team and set priorities? What has your process been?

Darren Silverman (14:05):

So I would say this is actually one of the most complicated parts of the collaboration. The reality is the planning, everything you just mentioned is such a financial and resources based exercise. In most companies it is almost the CFO is gathering all the departmental costs and expenses and investments and either there's a baseline, some companies work zero base where you just start from scratch some work like you mentioned in there establishing a baseline. And the challenge with that is it becomes such a financial exercise. Sometimes you don't get into what you're trying to accomplish from the business and commercial side. So we definitely do a process that's a blend of the bullets you had on the previous slide capturing what's go forward, what are we comping, what's already baked in the plan because it's an automatic renewal or a multi-year contract. But then there's kind of a little bit of wishlist, but a little bit of the, here's a few other problems we want to solve for, we want to be able to add some new tools to capture these pieces.

(15:12):

Different examples are out there, but this year I think one of our big projects was adding a review monitoring tool just because we didn't have one that was really great. And what I realized is a number of departments had a value for such a tool. So trying to get different teams to collaborate together and say, hey, this is a business need across e-commerce, quality assurance and product development and bringing that together and making that case and getting it added to the so-called wishlist and trying to make that business case. And then once everything's on that it wishlist, they have a prioritization process like you mentioned is I think is a pretty disciplined approach to the business need. How critical is it that it's done sooner than later? Obviously there's only so many projects that could run in parallel and kind of our CTO is basically a scoring system.

(16:02):

You can influence the scoring system, but you have to play nice and be fair across all the different departments. But this is really the most complicated part. Once you get past this, things get a lot easier. And we do, I will say one benefit we've done lately is we will put in place holders, we'll kind of put in some time and resource placeholder to say, Hey, no, we know there's going to be some new things we want, we're just not sure which one we're going to prioritize right now. And we've got some flexibility here for that as well.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (16:33):

And I think the other really important piece about this prioritization exercise, it also gives it visibility to your needs and they might already have another tool from another region or another function that maybe could work for your needs. And so when they have that visibility, they can be a partner to you and provide that information to you where maybe you can't do a whole new system or add something new, but you can have this need satisfied based on something that already exists. There is something to say about scale when it comes to especially a global organization, you want to make sure that you're using the tech that you already have so that there isn't a ton of tech debt. So again, this visibility exercise is important for everyone and someone in one of the leaders in the report said it's job is not to say no. Their job is to say yes, but

Darren Silverman (17:24):

That's finance's job. Sorry Jeff, ready? The CFOs on the call.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (17:30):

We actually have a conversation coming up with the CFO because I think IT and finance are great example early and often they need to be involved early and often because they're helping to make these decisions and it's so critical that they understand the context. So for any brands that are going through this process of figuring out what collaboration looks like with it, this is where you spend your time. To Darren's point, it is hard, but if you get it right, it makes it so much easier to move forward because it's clear why you're making the decisions that you're making. So just setting up that prioritization is super important. And Darren, did you want to add something?

Darren Silverman (18:11):

Yeah, I do want to add something because one part of that process, and you mentioned something, what you just said triggered this getting in front of that process before the planning begins. And to your point, maybe there's a tool out there. I've probably learned more about our IT capabilities because of this collaboration. There's something maybe related to APIs and things like that that we were hoping we could accomplish and it's like, oh no, we have a completely tool in place for that. You just got to tell us what you want to connect to and connect us with the people. But I had no idea we even added that capability. I've been here quite a while and I remember years ago talking about that and our old CTO was like, oh, we were so far away from doing APIs with anybody, but obviously things move fast, especially in technology. So you do learn a lot when you go through the process and it just makes us all better at what we do in our planning process. I

Lauren Livak Gilbert (19:01):

Agree. I love that example. That's it specialty, right? They're here to consult and to help and to share that information. I'm going to pass it to Marni.

Marni Edelhart (19:12):

Thank you Lauren. And I think that question really set us up for this section of the conversation. We've got to think about how do we communicate effectively with IT about our priorities and make sure that we're coming to them in a way that gets buy-in. So if you're from the marketing team, you're from the commerce team and you want to suggest a new product, a new solution, a new technical implementation, we've created this rubric that kind of helps you go to them more effectively. So you look, we've got in the top right, high technical fit, high functional fit, this is the section that's going to get you a win. This is a section where you go to it and you say, Hey, this tool that we're bringing to you, it fits in with our tech stack really easily, seamlessly, and it answers the need of our teams where we want it.

(20:05):

The only way you can go to your IT team and say that is if you already understand your tech stack and have those relationships. If you don't have that relationship and rapport where you have a sense of what the IT processes are or what their priorities are, you're going to have trouble coming and making this effective argument. So when we're looking at this rubric, you want to look at your ask if you're a commerce or marketing team person or if you want to reverse it and look at it from the IT perspective, if you're going to go back to them and talk to your commerce or marketing teams about why something will or will not be a good fit, you want to say, okay, I understand our tech stack, I understand where we're coming from. I found a solution that fits right into it and it's really addressing the needs of our customers or it's really addressing the needs of our teams.

(20:52):

You might also find occasionally something in the bottom right hand corner, high functional fit, low technical fit. I'm not going to tell you that this will never work. Sometimes the functional fit is so good. You've got a tool that answers the need of the business so well, that's where you have to go and hope that you've made those best friends on your IT team and you've built those relationships and you say, Hey, I understand and I'm going to come to you and say, I understand this isn't the best technical fit, but here's why. And again, aligning to those KPIs, we talked about sharing priorities come in and don't just say, this solves me Marni's needs, but this is how this drives the business forward along with our business priorities, with our mission as a business and why it's worth doing the extra effort for a low technical fit.

(21:41):

One factor that's not included on this rubric that I think we're all kind of have in the back of our minds is the financial fit, right? Lauren said it, we're talking about the IT and business relationships here and we don't have a CFO on this panel. If they were here, they would definitely say, okay, where does the dollar sign fit in that top right hand corner? And I think if we had a more broken down rubric, you might see something where there's a high functional fit, high technical fit in the top, top right, but maybe just below that there's a high technical fit, pretty good functional fit, little bit less expensive that sometimes be set out. And so if you're coming from the IT team, you might be thinking a little bit more along with the C ffo about the dollar signs because often, and we'll get to this later, IT teams are owning more of the budget right now, if you're coming from the marketing or commerce team, again, you've got to make the argument why those extra dollar signs are worth it, how that's going to pay off in the end. And it often does, but you've just got to be ready to align it again with the KPIs.

(22:48):

Alright, we talked about collaborative prioritization. We talked about having to share priorities. There are a bunch of frameworks by which you can do this, and we're just going to go through a few and help you think about what's the right format or approach for my organization. Maybe you're already implementing one of these frameworks and you are looking at these and being like, oh, this one would actually work better for us. So we've got a goal oriented framework. This is where you might set up a series of goals for each project and you might be thinking about driving incremental revenue or how can we save time? How can we save labor? How can we improve security or compliance? It's likely that these priorities won't always overlap. If I'm trying to drive revenue, it might not align as well with improving security. So we're going to break out those projects and work with the IT team to meet a series of goals for each project.

(23:43):

Another framework could look at is a committee framework where you have a group who's designated as your steering committee to help prioritize projects. And they're the people who say, okay, we have perspectives from all different departments and we can come together and show you which project is going to get done first and why. The next framework could be a project charter framework. This way you sort of outline the use cases, the benefits of each project. You might call it a project brief, but you get buy-in from the team, from the charter and you work from there. And then finally we've got a functional fit framework. You've got to ensure, and this goes back to the rubric we did just a second ago, ensure you've got that functional fit, ensure you've got that technical fit, and go back to the team and say, listen, I've got the solution that fits in that top right hand corner and it's also got the dollar sign fit that we're looking for. And you move forward based on that.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (24:40):

And one quick plug, if you want any more details about this, we're covering the highlights of the report, but I put the link in the chat to download the full report. We'll have the link at the end, so if you want to dive deep into any of these, you can check it out in the full report.

Marni Edelhart (24:54):

Yep.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (24:55):

All right. I think I got the poll working here. So let me try this. Alright, here we go. So I would love to hear from the audience, do you have a structure around prioritizing your digital technology projects? So you should see a poll pop up on your screen. We would love to see your responses and they're coming in now. Alright, I am going to give everyone a couple of more seconds. You have? Yes. No, we are building one or I don't know. Alright, I'm going to close the poll. Here we go. Alright, so we have, wow, a large tie here, 29% for yes, no, I don't know. And then 12% are building. That is a very mixed bag. I would say for those that say, I don't know, make sure you go find your IT partner and make sure you ask that question. And if you don't, you are the best person to start that process off. It really is a mixed bag. I see that when I talk to brands. Either there's a clear prioritization or there's not, or it's a little bit of confusion. I think moving forward in the world that we live in, if you do not have a process for this, it's just going to get harder. So I would encourage everyone who voted no or I don't know to put that as a priority for 2025 really building out a process. Darren Marni, any other thoughts on the results?

Marni Edelhart (26:25):

Yeah, I think it's just interesting how this can get missed. You'd think that it would be sort of standard built in, but it's becoming more and more necessary and hopefully the people who said no or I don't know are getting excited to put one in place.

Darren Silverman (26:42):

I would think the, and I don't knows, maybe the company has one, but it's really just owned by the IT team. So everybody on this call more functions like mine. They're submitting projects, submitting requests. They may not even know how it's going on behind the curtain over there with CTO and their different functions. But my guess is there is one in place in most companies. It may be a bit of a black box to us on the commercial side and it is to your point, really high value to know what that process is so you can provide the right inputs for it.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (27:17):

And that's a great call out that it needs to market their process and that's one of the feedback pieces we have at the end. So we will definitely continue talking about that. Back to you Marni.

Marni Edelhart (27:28):

Yeah. So Darren, as we get into our next section, I'm interested to hear from you, how are you setting shared KPIs so that IT and the rest of the business share priorities?

Darren Silverman (27:39):

I will answer this, but I did want to call out something in the rubric slide. I love the rubric by the way back a few pages because I feel like a lot of us live in between the upper left and the lower right and is where obviously that's where all the conflict that I think is in the title of the deck a webinar happens, right? Because there's no conflict on the lower left and there's very low conflict on the upper right. So it really is finding that middle ground. Our IT team will often bring us solutions to things we're looking at that are just completely off the mark from a commercial need, but they integrate seamlessly with our ERP or some other tools we have. So there is a lot of compromise and that's where that compromise happens. And I think a lot of times you end up somewhere in the middle of the rubric where it maybe requires a little bit of work for that functional fit or technical fit and sometimes you may give up a little functional fit. I try never to give up the function. I'd rather wait and wait until the next solution comes along that's more compatible, which often becomes the outcome is we're just going to pass on it this year, we're going to wait until someone develops something that plugged better into our Shopify or something like that. So it's just this rubric's really spot on.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (29:00):

And Darren, one comment I wanted Sorry, go ahead Lauren. No, no, go ahead.

Marni Edelhart (29:03):

Well I'm so glad you mentioned it because I think that's a really important point to bring in is if you have the lack of communication, the IT team is bringing all high technical fit to the table and the commerce marketing teams are bringing all high functional fit to the table. And if they're not communicating or understanding integrating with each other at all though the other side, they just don't even consider it potentially as they bring a solution up. And so you're right, you get those opposite corners kind of constantly bashing into each other

Darren Silverman (29:31):

And it probably really is more of a nine box where you incorporate some cost, right? Because I was always thinking too is our CTO is really commercially minded but also very budget conscious owns, he does truly own the investments we make over there and he'll offer up cheaper solutions all the time that functionally and cost effectively fit, but they don't, or sorry, technically and cost effectively fit, but functionally it's like, well this is why it's cheaper. It doesn't do what we want it to do. So it's interesting dialogue, which you've got to have that open communication and collaboration with that team to be able to get that far to understand all that.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (30:09):

And the other thing I was going to mention is I feel like there is a desire, especially in commerce to have one solution that does everything. And I don't know if we live in a world where that is or will be a reality. And so it's so important to understand how things integrate together and that is it's role to understand holistically how all of these tools are playing together and playing with each other. I remember in my brand days, I would have my leaders say, can't we just buy one? And I was like, no. And I don't think we're ever going to be able to have one technology because honestly, would it suffice for all of our needs? Probably not. But that is a mindset shift, especially for leaders who might not have as much digital expertise. The landscape of in-store, especially around planogramming and forecasting and customer data. There used to be one platform, one system, and that's what you used and everything was housed there. That's not the world of digital that we live in. There's so many niche pieces of it that there's expertise in this technology that integrates with this technology and that more kind of composable kind of atmosphere is what we're moving towards. But it is a mindset shift for leaders. So that's also something really good to call out as you're going through these conversations.

Darren Silverman (31:30):

If anyone on here, it's part of their role. Like mine also has a Shopify store that you're responsible for. The number of apps, they're cheap, they're not expensive, but the line items on a budget of all these different tools overwhelms the non-digital, the IT team gets it and the digital team gets it, but everyone else in the organization sees that list. It's like why are we spending so much really not, these are small expenses, but each one of these does a different thing within our store and my line list of spends is very, very, very, very long even though maybe the dollars aren't that high.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (32:08):

The staples easy button does not exist for commerce is what I like to say

Darren Silverman (32:11):

Does not exist. Not if you want to be effective and efficient and optimized. No, no. So back to your question for us, we've done a nice job here of putting in for literally our annual objectives that we do meet cross-functionally and try and make sure our objectives play into each other. And I would say more recently, different members of the IT team even connecting with our team to make sure at least say if they have eight objectives, at least one or two of those objectives ties directly to something we're trying to accomplish. Like this year, probably our biggest overlap is related to data science. We want more analytical capability. We want to be able to cross-reference data sets more broadly as an organization and end from a commerce perspective. We want to be able to do that. The IT team needs to sort of build the data warehouse.

(33:03):

They need to figure out, back to my API comment earlier, how do we get more of our data in a place that could be harmonized? And then we can see correlating, does our retail media on Amazon drive any kind of lift if we ramp up in a brick and mortar channel or something like that. So those are just questions we'd like to be able to answer over time. And I think we have the data, it's just they're all in different places. So it's really through our objective setting process and basically we all either achieve that objective together or we don't. So it's been a very collaborative process and it's actually forced even more collaboration between departments here.

Marni Edelhart (33:42):

I can almost hear your IT team saying, well we can only give you that data warehouse if you guys have the good data inputs that we need and that they're clean and that there's some consistency in how they're collected. So I know that that's a constant negotiation we'll get into a little bit later too,

Darren Silverman (33:59):

Right? Yeah. Funny. I think the deck leads to something about a data governance, doesn't it? Marni?

Marni Edelhart (34:05):

We might speak about that in a minute.

(34:07):

First, we're going to talk about what it wishes the rest of the business do. And we've already touched on this a little bit. I'm a marketer, you heard me say that at the beginning. I think creating this report has given me a lot more empathy for our IT teams. But first we need to align strategically it IT has these strategic priorities and the rest of the business has these strategic priorities and really has to come from the top down. What are our organizational priorities and how can we align strategically with all teams so we're working towards the same goal, we can problem solve together. So I think that my brother's in legal and he feels often like a barrier at his organization. Legal is the blocker. I think it sometimes gets that too, where you go to them and they're telling you all the reasons why the solution you found that seems perfect to you would be hard to implement or expensive to implement.

(35:01):

And that's sort of in the heads of the business teams. But if you go to IT with your challenge and you say, here's what we're trying to solve for, they can help problem solve with you. And they're not there to be a blocker, they're there to be a solution provider. They're there to support you towards your goals. We need to slow down to speed up. This really comes in with the data part we talked about a minute ago, but with everything, if you want a process to roll out smoothly, you can't rush it. You've got to put the pieces in place and do the QA to make sure those processes are right where they need to be. Slow down, get them right and then you'll accelerate your business moving forward. And finally it wants to know they're acting for the business. They're not there in their IT corner being like we want to be the IT gold medal winners only and we don't care about what the business does or how the business succeeds.

(35:55):

They're there to drive the business forward. And so remember that because their only goal, and then this one I'm a little more familiar with being on the marketing side, what the rest of the business wishes it knew. And one is that we need to work together. It's got to be a partnership. I think we've sort of hammered home on this a lot, so I won't dig into that. The one that I like to talk about a lot is we need to center the customer experience. So the marketers, the commerce team, they're always thinking from that customer perspective, how is a customer going to interact with this end experience? And if you think about if you've ever helped someone from another generation find something on their iPhone or computer and you're like, this is so simple grandma, and they're like, I don't know what to do.

(36:39):

That's kind of how the IT team might look at the rest of their organization. They're like, I don't know why this user experience isn't perfect. It's really clear and easy to me. And so it is important to communicate with them and say, here's why this customer experience might not be smooth, it might not be streamlined. I mean we all know we've got to make it as easy as possible for a customer to get from discovering our business to making a purchase and make that seamless. And so we've got to help educate the IT team on what that looks like. Because when you're really good at something like tech, you might not see where the hurdles are that you're putting in place. We need simple and straightforward user experiences. Kind of ties to the other one. How can we make them as simple and clean as possible? And then we need to understand the business benefits. If we're going to proceed with the new technological solution, how is that going to pay off for the business? How is that going to drive revenue, which is usually our goal or increase security or make the business run more smoothly.

(37:42):

Alright, Darren, another one for you. How are you encouraging more collaboration with it?

Darren Silverman (37:49):

I think again, just like I did before, going back a couple slides, but the buzz end, I think you all remember this probably from our conversation, the slowing down to speed up resonates so much. Even when we talk about my evolution and the first question you asked me, it was slowing down, understanding the hurdles, understanding some of the resources. If there's one bit of advice from the last few slides, take that one. It makes a huge difference in a lot of your collaboration internally. From the encouragement piece, I think it's actually, it's interesting. I probably focus first on making sure my team is not discouraged. Because again, as a digital team and the commerce team, they're just full steam ahead. They want everything yesterday and they don't like hearing no or not yet or that's going to take three months or six months. We think we can do everything so fast.

(38:44):

And that's really some of the effort is keeping them from being discouraged. Understanding it doesn't mean what you want isn't important, it's just there is a list of priorities and we're a manufacturer. We have massive distribution facilities. All those run on technology if there's projects there that have to get done, all this other stuff doesn't matter. If I can't make a dog kennel effectively every day to ship, there's no point in us having another Amazon bolt on technology or something like that. They all have to work. So really helping the team understand the bigger picture and then challenging them to frame out the why behind some of their asks and everything. And that's just an evolution I think you make as an organization, as a team, as personalities change along the way, but it is really more about that, Hey, don't be discouraged. You're not getting what you want right now. There's a reason for it and it's not a no, it's just a not now usually. And that seems to kind of work or at least they fake it with me and that it works.

Marni Edelhart (39:45):

All right. When we were writing this report, we ended it with 12 key tenets of success. So when you get to the report, you'll see there's a lot more than here, but we're going to go over just a few of them. The first one, and this one I'm really passionate about, I said, Lauren, I want to talk about this one. It's market your IT successes. As we said at the beginning, there's usually no award for a week with no tickets if you go and nothing breaks, no one notices. Whereas if you close a big deal on the sales team or if I as the event person run an amazing event, there's all sorts of praise and cheers. And so we've got one as the non-IT team. Make sure we're recognizing those weeks without tickets, make sure we're recognizing when things move smoothly and that we're acknowledging that.

(40:33):

And then two is the IT team, especially if you're an IT team leader manager, make sure you're calling out your team for those things. Make sure you're letting the organization know what you've rolled out, what you've put in place. IT teams are not necessarily natural marketers or else they might be on the marketing team. So you've got to sort of put yourself in that marketing role of here's all the cool things we're doing, let's promote it internally so everyone knows. And if I as someone on the marketing commerce sales team hear about that, I might say, Hey, that actually connects to something else I'm doing. Let me work with you on how to put that in place maybe in a new geography as we spoke of before or for a new solution. Second, we've talked about this so much, so I won't hammer it too much.

(41:15):

Create shared goals. If you're working towards different goals, then you're never going to be able to align effectively. You've got to have those top down goals in place, make sure you're aligned on them so that you have a motivation to work in partnership. And then third, we said this was coming focus on data governance. Every team in your organization needs clean data for one purpose or another, and they might need different data points, but they're going to need that clean data. So it's got to be a priority for everyone in the organization. If your sales team is entering data into Salesforce incorrectly, then you can't act on it. Well, if you have technology that's pulling in data points that are just sort of clogging up the works, nobody can work with that. So we need a good data governance program that everyone has bought into and that will fuel all business priorities more effectively.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (42:09):

And then educating it on the broader commerce landscape is a really important one too, because if you are working on the digital shelf or you are in commerce, the acronyms and we all know there's a lot of acronyms and we also understand how Amazon works and what they ask for and how quickly things change. It might not have that context. So when you come to them and say, oh my gosh, my API's broken, I need to fix tomorrow, they're going to be like, well, why I don't understand. So educating them, making sure they understand the importance of your asks, the broader commerce landscape. Continuous education here is just really, really important. And side note, finance and legal need the same education. So I would just do a broader education program and include all of your cross-functional partners in that. And then we talked about this as well, defining the why behind the project.

(42:57):

What is the business value? What are the goals that you're driving inside your organization? Not just, Hey, I need this technology because there's so many competing priorities and you need to make sure that it's actually driving the business forward. So as a part of that prioritization exercise, a lot of brands have created templates where they answer a series of questions before they submit that during the prioritization planning process. And one of those questions is, why are we doing this? Or what is the value that it's driving? So just making sure you have it a bit more operationalized is super helpful for the IT team and for your collaboration overall. And then I said this in the beginning, we can't go through any presentation about technology without talking about AI and emerging technologies. We all acknowledge that AI is going to change the way we work, the way consumers shop.

(43:48):

There's all kinds of data and statistics about that. I think the thing that we really talked about here is that it's not just something that you can bolt on. It's something that you need to understand what is it driving for the business? And you need to understand the value that it's going to drive. Don't just do AI to do ai. And AI is not a strategy, it's an enabler. So how can it help enable you to do something faster at scale, more efficiently, more globally, just gives you back time identifying again that problem that it's trying to solve and getting your IT team, your legal team, your finance team, again, all involved in the conversation because there's data concerns with ai. So the IT team will know that there's legal concerns with AI and who's sharing that information, they'll know that. But also really being comfortable testing and learning. We're all figuring this out. This is all changing every day, but it is changing the way we work and it's definitely changing the way consumers shop. So it needs to be thought of, but just carefully and with the right functions.

Marni Edelhart (44:59):

Yeah, I wanted to chime in on here and just say this is one area where I think top down can be problematic. You often have a senior leader coming to their team being like, we need an ai. And ai, like you said, it's not a strategy. So this is a great chance for all teams to be informed, should understand the potential of AI and where it can help solve problems. And then when you come to the table with a goal with an objective, then you plug in and say, where could AI potentially be a solution here? Where could AI support our other solutions here as opposed to just saying we need AI as if IT in of itself is an end.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (45:38):

Completely agree. And Darren, last but not least, how do you see your team working with IT on data governance moving forward?

Darren Silverman (45:45):

Yeah, this is obviously really topical because it fuels so much of what you all have presented up to this point. We are working very closely with the IT team right now. One of the areas for our side of the commercial side is all the attributes and data needs. You need to expand in the omnichannel space across many of the different retailers, more and more retailers going old school items setup form doesn't exist anymore. It is a really robust set of attributes that are required and the ability to organize that. We have many items that have overlapping many item numbers, but it's really the same item. There's just variations and how to get those pieces across all those different items. So what we're doing right now is really working with the IT team on what's the maximum scope of attribution we think we need and how do we get back to basics and build out the item master to accomplish that, to then kick off the next project of how do we get all that information and make sure it's correct across all of the items and start even harmonizing across product numbers and everything.

(46:53):

So we're working actually very closely if the product team's very involved in that as well, obviously. But that is really, really close project around governance that has to be done. And then it also flows back to what we spoke about earlier is been able to run more analytics out of our data warehouse. You need to kind of get this governance piece cleaned up at some level. So we may get a cleaned up at a little bit of a higher level or a tier two level so we can at least run some data, but really you need it at that item level to be effective

Lauren Livak Gilbert (47:24):

And bad data in is bad data out exactly. If you want to use AI and you don't have the right data, AI is not going to help you with that. It's just going to spit out bad data. So this is the fundamental building block of anything, any project, any function, anything, you have to have the right data. So for those that answer that they don't know what the prioritization process is and that they need to work with their IT team. I would also make sure you're asking them about do we have a clear picture of where our data lives? Do we have a central source of truth? Do I know how to get my data to where it needs to go? That is a big, big question. And if you have an analytics team in your organization, they are also critical in this because Darren mentioned this before, you want to understand that is a retail media ad affecting these sales? Is this campaign I'm running affecting it? Am I getting more foot traffic in store? And the only way to look at that is to have your analytics and your data to be able to support the answers to those questions. So data, data, if there's anything that you can take out of this conversation, that's a really big important one.

(48:38):

All right, so please do download the report. Please scan the QR code here or you can click on the link in the chat. We would love to hear your thoughts and for you to dive even deeper into some of the other topics. We only covered a bit of the highlights here, but now we're going to open it up to questions. Does anyone have any questions? Feel free to throw them in the chat or in the q and a. And while people are thinking of all those questions, I will also bring up here if you would like to get in touch with Mick Mac, they will be at shoptalk. You can also download a bunch of their great research that they do connect with Marni on LinkedIn or here is their email address as well. For those who are not DSI members, I really encourage you to become a member so that you can join our other future webinars. All right. Let me just pull up the q and a and the chat and see if we have any questions here. Darren, question for you. When there are any projects that you're working on, like say you have a new project that's coming out, are there any examples of things that didn't go right or examples of roadblocks that you hit that maybe would be helpful for anyone to hear about navigating?

Darren Silverman (49:56):

Yeah, I mean for sure we've had our roadblocks probably are bigger issues have been more on our internal, like our DTC side of the business where we wanted to either connect more marketplaces, we wanted to add some other features through different shopping channels and ran into connectivity through just some limitations in our maybe our ERP that we need to come up with another app. So trying to find those pieces has slowed some projects down. So there's definitely some things we didn't accomplish that we would've liked to accomplish maybe in the last year or two years that we're continuing to work through. It does happen. I mean, some launches just don't go well. And that's just the reality. The hope is you get to a point, we haven't spent a lot of time and resources before realizing that. And I think we've been fortunate we haven't done that. We haven't gone too far down a road before we realized we needed to pause on something. And then just being really honest about it and not being again discouraged where things start falling apart when something doesn't come to fruition and just shelving that for the next time.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (51:06):

Got another question. Okay, we have issues with how to define product ownership. Where does ownership of the products in the MarTech stack live it, the business or the COE? And Darren, feel free to answer that and then I can add some color from examples I've heard.

Darren Silverman (51:21):

That's a great question and I would tell you that is when I answered the question about the data governance, we are in the whoever that was, we are right there with you trying to solve it for our company. It's always been definitely been a product team, product management owned function. And I think that's a little bit of why it's, the governance hasn't been as solid as it should be, where I think in it there would be more rigid rules-based approach to it. And even though they're not the product, they don't have to really know what the widgets are. They would enforce all the rules to make sure everything's done a certain way. So I'm lobbying that it takes ownership of that, just my own opinion.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (52:00):

But I think that's an interesting point, Darren, and it's the evolution that I've also seen. I feel like previously it was very business owned because they just went out to one of Darren's stories in the beginning, found the fit and was like, Hey, we're using this technology. But that was when there wasn't as much complexity. Scale wasn't necessarily needed because of the world we live in, the economy's really challenging. We need to find efficiencies, there needs to be more scale. There's a lot more global companies that are launching at a global level. There's just more of a need for it to centralize these things and to own them from a product standpoint. So I think you see the evolution of maturity of the business where it might start on the business side and then move to it, those that are more mature, definitely having it own it from a product perspective, but it's also really important that that communication happens between the IT team and the business team. And I also think it's different by region. So if anyone is in emea, it becomes a bit more challenging because there's more countries and there's a lot more specifications based on wherever you are in Europe. So there is more of a level of complexity there than I would say in North America. But that's the shift that I've really kind of seen

Darren Silverman (53:20):

Adding in the next level of compliance data and everything else that required globally adds a whole nother layer of complexity that you've got to be on top of and you guys got to prepare for it. It's going to be more and more countries are going to follow that model over time.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (53:35):

And I think you made a really good point, Darren, about being comfortable with something not working that test and learn mindset. Just try it and see if it works. But that is a mentality and a organizational shift that takes time. It takes a leadership buy-in to say, Hey, we're comfortable with this failure. We learned from it, let's move on. But the more you can get used to that muscle, the better it will be. Because like I said, we're all really trying to figure this out right now, so there isn't necessarily a right answer.

Darren Silverman (54:09):

Yeah, I think it's important even within your organization to lobby for a little bit of capacity for test and learn, just a tolerance for it shouldn't be a huge part of your budget where your time, but there's got to be a willingness to allocate some resource toward something that we have no clue if it's going to work, but it's compelling and we want to try it. I think we're trying AI in a lot of ways like that right now. Very small doses versus mass rollouts of AI usage, which we're just not quite ready for that.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (54:39):

And in three months there's probably going to be a new model or a new way of thinking about it. So it doesn't make sense to do that. So this is just the right approach in the time that we are currently at. Alright, well thank you everyone so much for all of your questions. Thank you for attending. Darren, thank you so much for participating, for answering all these questions and sharing your stories. And Marni, thank you for being a great collaborator on this report. I'm going to flash up the QR code one more time. We really encourage you to download this report and read it all the way through with all of its great nuggets. Thank you for attending and everyone have a great day.

Peter Crosby (55:15):

Thanks to Darren and Marni for allowing us to share this content with our audience. The report can be found under the resources section at digitalshelfinstitute.org. Become a member while you're there. Thanks for being part of our community.