When your company’s products and services create frustrating, inconsistent and all too unhelpful experiences for customers, it’s a BIG sign that you’ve designed your solutions around internal politics, systems and structures instead of customer needs.
Chances are you’ve shipped your org chart — a situation where complex solutions become shaped like the organizational structure they were designed in.
This situation is less likely in organizations that are truly functioning and structured in an agile way.
The thing that I like most about agile ways of working, regardless of framework, is the focus on customer needs first. As a marketer, that naturally appeals to me.
After all, what is marketing? It’s finding customers who have a problem that your product or service can solve. It’s making sure your offer stands out compared to others. This requires focusing relentlessly on the customer needs above all else.
People outside of your company don’t care how your teams are structured. They don’t know about department X and department Y. To them, you’re just company ABC, meaning the entirety of their experience should be consistent regardless of which department designed it or is responsible for it or manages it.
I like this advice from Gliffy: “What you ship, and everything else you do as a company, is a by-product of your org’s structure. Get your structure right, and what you offer will align perfectly with customers. Get your structure wrong, and you’ll offer something that highlights the problems of your organization more than it shows value and understanding for your users.”
Structure plays a big role in customer experience. Agile organizations know this and organize themselves around functions that serve customer needs.
Want to learn more about agile marketing? Follow these 5 tips for building agile marketing teams.