I am a Customer Experience strategist and implementation expert. I have helped companies get results from their Web sites, Web/mobile apps, customer service organizations, lead generation systems and phone lines for over 20 years. I was thinking about Customer Experience long before the term existed.
My approach is unique because, although I agree that a vision needs to exist, I strongly believe in the power of Agile and incremental change. Moving to a final state vision NOW may be the desired result, but I have seen time and time again that doing that can be a huge mistake. Spending more than a few months on a project can sometimes miss a market opportunity with the team’s focus on being “perfect” rather than “better than what we have today.” Sometimes, a change will happen by force and you get scope creep. After a few months of that, your project is lagging and you are now behind in the industry. And to catch up, you change scope. And the project NEVER ends. Nothing launches. And you are spending millions for no gain.
And without visualizations in the process – magnify the confusion by five.
To me, products and functionality are living like people. We are influenced by our experiences every day – as projects should be. This is why short sprints for implementations work better.
With customer feedback nothing can stop you. Talk to your customers frequently to find out what they want and incorporate that feedback. Your customers will notice.
How do you know that I know what I’m doing?
- For a number of years I was a project and team manager – specializing in working with virtual teams. I have worked with teams as small as 2-3 people in a room and up to 65 people in 4+ locations worldwide. And they all delivered on-time and within budget.
- I have worked with creatives, technologists, QA experts, other project managers – I have managed people in a number of roles. Except financial types – just not my thing
- I have worked on projects of all sizes for companies of all sizes. I have worked on an incremental page changes, redesigns, vendor selections, technology implementations. No project is too large or small.
- My work has helped companies achieve some amazing results. I need to update my cases studies to illustrate this better, but I have helped many companies achieve their customer goals in short timeframes, using an iterative approach.