Producing a seamless, consistent customer experience isn’t always straightforward.
In this episode, I interview Ashley Estilette, CMO at Mitratech, about developing a Scrum Team to raise the bar on go-to-market collaboration.
Having discovered a “passion for making sure that everybody was on the same page, and had a lot of visibility into what everyone else was working on” early in her career, Estilette advocates for cross-collaborative Go-to-Market strategy and strong company culture and communication as building blocks for a superior product and customer experience
Let’s dive in!
Scrum teams
Estilette believes that the key to tackling a large initiative is building a small, cross-collaborative team hyper focused on a few goals and priorities.
Scrum teams are designed to rapidly and incrementally work together toward one goal to produce the best product they can.
So how do you build a successful scrum team?
- Select influencers/champions of each department
- Establish a common goal
- Set up a process that enables rapid reiteration
- Encourage members to evangelize the project internally
This last point is a pivotal aspect of the scrum team and essential to building a supportive culture around a single vision.
Recruiting the most magnetic, vocal leaders of each department will help sell the new project internally and generate the backing needed to propel the innovation forward fast.
The point is to develop and strengthen a vision the “whole company’s marching toward,” Ashley said.
Get the culture right
Getting an entire company behind a single vision is integral to the success of a fledgling product.
This can often be a slow process with the push and pull of agreement and disagreement stalling any advancement. Estilette has seen for herself how distrust can bog down the execution process and stunt potential growth.
In the technology space, no company has the luxury to stand still considering the pace of growth in the industry.
Like Jeff Bezos famously said, “disagree and commit” to move a company forward in the lack of consensus.
Creating a culture that accepts that people aren’t going to agree all the time, but that trust exists between each other and the leadership team is paramount to maintaining momentum.
A common obstacle to creating a unified company culture is communication. Communication is key to transparency and trust-building and without it, there can’t be collaboration or a cohesive brand narrative.
Disseminating company-wide information
The last building block of the Go-to-market strategy is communication.
Communication is so important when getting the entire company on the same page about a product and the Covid-19 pandemic has made this process far more difficult than it used to be.
Without the ease of catching someone at their desk or engaging in good old water-cooler talk, spreading knowledge about important vision strategy or company changes is reliant on digital technologies.
Different methods work for different companies, but here’s what they’re doing at Mitratech:
- Creating calendars that share leadership projects and timelines
- Leveraging internal podcasts to distribute meeting information to every employee
- Hosting a monthly strategy call where executives discuss latest changes and visions
The point is to get every employee, no matter which department they belong to, on the same page and behind a common vision.
Ashley’s top takeaways
Creating a successful customer experience requires building trust and cross-collaborative environments. Here are Estilette’s ultimate takeaways on how companies can foster a culture that nurtures rapid innovation and growth:
- Create a strong, concise Go-to-Market strategy
- Build an agile, collaborative product team
- Adopt mentality of disagreeing but committing anyway once an organization gets to a certain size
- Support and trust your leadership
Get in touch with Ashley Estilette about this topic on LinkedIn.
For more engaging sales conversations, subscribe to The Sales Engagement Podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on our website.
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